Internet connections

In many rural areas, people who want high-speed Internet access have only one option: relatively slow and expensive satellite dishes. Now parts of rural Vermont could get a new choice.

Phone company FairPoint Communications Inc. intends to beam Internet connections over radio waves to homes and business in the state, in what appears to be the largest planned U.S. deployment of "fixed wireless" technology as a substitute for wired Internet service.

Some of the most vicious Internet predators are hackers who infect thousands of PCs with special viruses and lash the machines together into "botnets" to pump out spam or attack other computers.

Now security researchers say cell phones, and not just PCs, are the next likely conscripts into the automated armies.

The mobile phone as zombie computer is one possibility envisioned by security researchers from Georgia Tech in a new report coming out Wednesday.

Wi-Fi nomads are a sorry bunch, wandering with laptops open, hoping their modern-day divining rods can locate a free Internet connection.

Here's a tip: check your pocket.

The cell phone there makes it possible to bypass the laptop cards and dongles that turn cell signals into Internet connections. New technologies are making it possible to bypass the wireless phone companies' old approaches as well as the steep monthly fees that accompany them.

Search engine use is on the rise, according to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The percentage of Internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of just under one-half (49 percent).

"With this increase, the number of those using a search engine on a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 60 percent of Internet users who use e-mail, arguably the Internet's all-time killer app, on a typical day," wrote Deborah Fallows, a Pew senior research fellow.

For the first time, more people around the world are signing up for fiber-optic broadband service than for cable Internet service, according to a British research firm.

Fiber providers added 4.2 million customers in the first quarter, while 2.5 million customers signed up for cable modems, according to a report released Wednesday by Point Topic.

The bulk of the new fiber subscribers are in China, where 2.5 million signed up, for a total of 16.7 million. The U.S. is in fourth place after Japan and Korea. Point Topic counted 303,000 new U.S. fiber customers, for a total of 2.6 million.

The lack of high-speed Internet access in some areas of the U.S. has been hotly debated, even as that digital divide has narrowed. But a new, wider gap is being created by technology that will make today's broadband feel as slow as a dial-up connection.

Much like broadband enabled downloads of music, video and work files that weren't practical over dial-up, the next generation of Internet connections will allow for vivid, lifelike video conferencing and new kinds of interactive games.