Networking

Editors' note: This post is part of an ongoing series. For the other parts, check out the related stories.

Wi-Fi and Internet are two very different things.

With the popularity of wireless networking, the term Wi-Fi is often synonymous with access to the Internet. In fact, our seasoned editor Scott Stein compared how fast the new iPhone 5's 4G LTE Internet speed was with his "home Wi-Fi," which is a skewed comparison at best. To be fair, most of us use "Wi-Fi" as a shortcut to mean our home broadband Internet connection, and Scott just … Read more

Power users now have another option for their home Wi-Fi networks.

Trendnet announced today the availability of the AC1750 Dual Band Wireless Router (model TEW-812DRU). This router was first showcased at CES 2013 and is the first from Trendnet to support the new 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard.

The TEW-812DRU router is a true dual-band router that offers a maximum wireless speed of up to 450Mbps on the 2.4GHz frequency band, while at the same time offering up to 1,300Mbps speed on the 5GHz band. To take advantage of the new and much faster speed, the wireless clients also … Read more

Dish Network is a believer in advertising its Dish Hopper DVR, which allows users to automatically skip ads on recorded programs. The AutoHop feature, as well as the capability to watch programming over the Internet and on mobile devices, are the subject of multiple lawsuits brought by the TV broadcast networks.

To get around the ban by the TV networks on advertising the Hopper product on their airwaves, Dish has become the sponsor for the No. 95 car driven by Scott Speed in Sunday's Daytona 500, which will be on the Fox Broadcasting network.

"Everybody skips commercials, and … Read more

The battle between Fox Broadcasting and Dish Network continues with an amended filing asking Judge Dolly Gee of the U.S. District Court for California's Central District to once again issue a preliminary injunction to block sales of Dish Network's Hopper DVR. The amended lawsuit involves technology introduced with the updated Dish Hopper with Sling, which began shipping to customers on February 11.

In November 2012, Gee rejected Fox's request for a preliminary injunction to disable the Dish Hopper AutoHop technology, which was first introduced last year. Fox appealed that ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit … Read more

Memolane, a social-media aggregator that promised trips down memory lane, announced today that it is shutting down immediately and will delete users' account content tomorrow.

Launched in 2010, the Web app extracted each moment users shared on popular social-networking services such as Facebook, Last.fm, Twitter, Foursquare, and others and combined them into one visual timeline. Posts, comments, tweets, and so on were organized by their respective dates and posted as memos under each date.

The San Francisco-based company had raised $2.5 million in venture capital but announced today in a company blog post that it is joining another … Read more

Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin isn't convinced that the social network's fast-growth strategy is a good one.

Speaking at a conference in Singapore today, Saverin said that while growth is a "huge asset," it can lead to a very real problem that shouldn't be overlooked.

"The biggest risk is growing too fast," he said, according to Bloomberg, who had a reporter at the event. "When you grow too fast, it's hard to iterate, educate."

Facebook is making no secret that it wants to grow as quickly as possible. Last month, CEO … Read more

In Windows 8, Microsoft quietly removed a useful networking feature: ad-hoc networks.

In Windows 7 (and previous OSes), the tool could turn your PC into a Wi-Fi hot spot, allowing it to share its Ethernet or other Internet connection with other devices by broadcasting its own network.

So, if you paid for Internet access at a cafe, or you're at work, and want to share your PC's Internet with your phone or tablet, this feature would let you do that.

It is very possible to do this in Windows 8, but the built-in method requires fiddling with the … Read more

Sprint has quietly flipped the switch on its 4G LTE network in some areas of San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C., suggesting an official launch may be close at hand.

While confirming a report that first appeared in The Verge, a company spokesperson did not specify which sections of the cities would have access to the speedier network.

"During a pre-launch phase, customers with 4G LTE-capable devices may begin to see 4G LTE coverage in these areas and are welcome to use the network even before it officially launches," Sprint representative Roni Singleton told CNET today, … Read more

Being the person in charge of the Networking category, I've received many e-mails asking what my current personal router is, and how often I change it.

Even though I've worked with many routers -- in fact, I have reviewed most of the existing Wi-Fi routers on the U.S. market -- I don't change my home router very often. This is mostly because programing a router can be a tedious task, and I use a lot of different applications and services with many clients, all of which require different settings in the router's firmware.

That said, since the Wireless-N (802.11n) standard was introduced in 2007, I've used just about five Wi-Fi routers. Most of them them have served me very well over the years and I still have them all, except for one that was broken during a move.

The following is the list of those routers and how they've worked out for me.… Read more