From get-rich-quick schemes to outright fraud to malware to child porn solicitations, the Net is drowning in spam. More than 90 percent of email is spam, according to a new report from Symantec and the report claims that it increased five percent between April and May.

So much for the famous 2004 prediction at the World Economic Forum that spam would soon be ìa thing of the past.î

To the extent that thereís any good news out of this, itís this: Go take a look at all the email youíve received recently and calculate what percent is spam. Chances are that itís nowhere near 90 percent. Or even half that.

Chances are also that your spam has been directed to a special file and marked with a notice in caps: ìSPAMî or ìVIRUS.î

Credit the steadily increasing efforts of ISPs, websites, carriers and a small army of technology companies keeping a lid on this steadily growing problem. The technology that ensures todayís Internet can handle the spiraling growth of online video and other entertainment also flags email spreading viruses, Trojan horses, and other malware.

Symantec’s report is yet more evidence that the trillions of megabytes sent across the web each week are definitely not created equal.

As the Obama Administration works toward improving our nation’s healthcare system, it is essential that we address the healthcare professional access disparity between urban and rural communities. The Hill recently published an op-ed entitled, “Telemedicine’s promise and potential” which highlights the many challenges facing the adoption of a new, more affordable healthcare system – specifically in rural communities. “According to a study by the National Advisory on Rural Health and Human Services, more than a third of rural Americans live in “health shortage areas” and nearly 82 percent of rural counties are classified as medically under-served.” Additionally, the article points out that those medical professionals who do practice in rural areas are aging. Because of these challenges, it is imperative for rural providers to adopt more efficient and effective technologies to help bridge the gap between patients and providers. However, without access to high-speed Internet, the use of innovative technologies is limited. As a national broadband strategy is developed, it is obvious that telemedicine has the opportunity and potential to drastically increase healthcare access in rural America and beyond.

The Obama Administration has allocated substantial funds for hospitals who agree to make the transition to electronic health records; however the funds are contingent on a term called “meaningful use.” In a recent New York Times article, Dr. William F. Bria, president of the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems defines the term as “graduated steps in a many-year plan.” The key, Dr. Bria said, “is to put American medicine on a path toward better health outcomes.” Healthcare reform is essential to the future success of our society. By implementing electronic health records and other forms of broadband technology, general access to quality care will increase in urban and rural communities across the nation.

The dark day that net neutrality activists feared has finally arrived. Access to free online video content is intentionally being blocked to tens of millions of broadband users, while millions more users might soon see their video streams intentionally degraded.

Essential egalitarian principles, such as unfettered content access, are being trampled upon, only to save bandwidth and money. And who are the nefarious characters orchestrating this online axis of evil? Cable operators? No. Telcos? No. Alas, it is the purveyors of Internet video content themselves.

Click here to read the full article

If you haven’t heard Susan Boyle impress Simon Cowell, you really need to. Click here.

Now, courtesy of tech columnist Robert Cringely (real name: Mark Stephens) we have a guess on the technology required to accommodate Susan Boyle’s dream:

“The video file as presented on YouTube is just over seven minutes and 26 megabytes long. Twenty million (and counting!) times 26 megabytes is 520 terabytes or approximately half the size of the Internet Archive. That’s 520,000 gigabytes or the equivalent of maxing-out in a single week the monthly bandwidth allotment of 260 co-lo servers at Rackspace.com. Running at top speed for a week would require 1040 such servers to do the job and we haven’t even made it to a week yet.”

Since Cringely’s blog went up (a whooping 2 days ago), YouTube ALONE has clocked more than 50 million streams. The Boyle phenomenon may be the Net’s first global moment but it won’t be the last. That’s why a few comments are in order about how ridiculous the U.S. net neutrality argument is given the inevitability of more (and more often) Boyle moments.

First, even with scalable networks, there is no way to affordably build the infrastructure necessary to handle future user requirements without considerable data management. That means the companies running the Internet’s backbone need to make decisions about data that have to arrive quickly (paid video) and data that don’t (email).

Even the Japanese with their firehose pipes into the home have recognized the expensive futility of just deploying “dumb pipe” connections. (For more about broadband management, check out George Ou’s excellent report, Managing Broadband Networks: A Policymakers’ Guide.

Second, the Internet has never operated with “all data is equal” protocols. Thankfully. Dedicated high-speed lines have been available since the early days and the revenue these generated helped finance the national broadband build-out that’s benefiting everyone.

This is a key point because net neutrality would rob Internet providers of the flexibility necessary to handle crushes of data like the Boyle video. It would also curb their ability to reach funding agreements to help underwrite the huge cost of expanding affordable access choices.

Choose the result:

(a) Worse service
(b) Less affordable high-speed access
(c) An impact on job growth
(d) All of the above

Here’s some good news about the continued growth of fiber-to-the-home: Click here

The number of homes in North America with fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) connections is continuing to grow at approximately 1.5mn annually and now stands at over 4.4mn, according to new figures from the Fiber-to-the-Home Council.

The report also indicates a “substantial” increase in the number of North American homes passed by fibre networks, rising from 13.8mn in March 2008 to 15.2mn in March 2009, and adds that FTTH networks are now available to more than 13% of households in the region, with end-to-end fibre connections now being used by nearly 4% of the residential telecoms market.

A few comments:

First, the fact that this build-out has continued at such a strong clip even during the past year’s overall economic downturn is remarkable. Fiber deployment over the last-mile is an expensive CapEx proposition (one estimate: $817 per household) so the fact that this investment is holding up is welcome news.

Second, with so many policymakers discussing ways to spur broadband deployment, this news is a timely reminder that massive deployment is already taking place! Any new federal policies should at a minimum continue to emphasize the policies and incentives that are already working. As Hippocrates First Law of Medicine puts it, Above all, do no harm.

Compared with Japan, South Korea and the Scandanavian countries, the U.S. is still behind in its fiber optic deployment. But it’s equally important to recognize that we’re ahead of many other industrialized countries. More important, this progress in deploying the advanced lines necessary to handle the demands of tomorrow’s Internet remains strong.

New York Times “Bits” blogger Saul Hansell is trying to sort fact from fiction [Link] on the state of U.S. broadband this week.  Give him credit for trying – international comparisons are notoriously difficult, as Hansell is the first to note.

What comes through from at least this first installment is that the state of U.S. broadband clearly isn’t at the level of Japan or Sweden.  But neither is it as bad as some doomsayers maintain:

“As of the end of 2008, 4.1 million homes in the United States had fiber service, which puts the United States right behind Japan, which has brought fiber directly to 8.2 million homes, according to the Fiber to the Home Council. Much of what is called fiber broadband in Korea, Sweden and until recently Japan, only brings the fiber to the basement of apartment buildings or street-corner switch boxes.”

In a nod to this recent fiber optic investment, Hansell notes that average U.S. broadband speeds are increasing and are roughly equal to the EU average.

What Hansell’s blog didn’t note (in fairness, it wasn’t really relevant) is that even in this current downturn, Europe is ratcheting up its broadband investment.

In France, the Industry Ministry set a goal last summer of having four million homes wired with fiber optic connections by 2012. Likely cost: about €4 billion.  Last fall, Finland announced a €200 million fiber optic deployment and this year, British Telecom announced it would wire every home prior to the London Olympics.

For America, as Hansell notes, the good news is that there is still plenty of innovation and deployment of new technologies.  But one look at other nations’ investments should be a reminder that we will not continue improving if the government starts to regulate tomorrow’s technologies.

Click here to read the full article.