uk: universal access 2mbps for everyone in 2012, brown promises and "makes it happen" by levying taxes on fixed lines. | bbc

around one third of british population don't have access to the network today - or just a shitty one | sfgate

usa: verizon keeps 18 states out from high-speed fiber-optic broadband internet (FIOS) and there are not so many possibilities left there anyhow.

Verizon is unloading land lines in eighteen states because they don't want to keep building FIOS there. | david isenberg

well, dick lynch, verizon, risks a look into the crystal ball instead:

10gbps down and 2.5gbps up-stream might enable a multi-gigabit feed to each and every customer| ftthcouncil

if you are living in the right state, one might add ...

tomorrow ecoc09 starts and the program includes kind of everything: from access to core networks, data centers to what will be next after Pon, BPon, Epon, GePon ... and 100tbit/s.

maybe there is a lesson to learn simply by considering wording and taking into account its sound:

there was GOSIP - well that has been a name given by the people from the usa for their program to go along with osi. the typo gossip somehow was/still is common, if one looks through the papers.

there have been applications, that should support osi, which bear strange names: DIN-A-MIT, a distributed mail and information system developed at the hahn-meitner institute:

a system on the basic modules User-Agent, Post-Station, User-Record-Base and Message-Base

and well, there was GILT:

The aim of the GILT-project was 'Interconnection of Computer Based Message Systems and Conference Systems' within the framework of ISO - Open Systems Interconnection and in a 'perfect' fully interconnected environment, where each system is able to connect directly to all other ones.

europe truly faced/faces a chameleon dilemma, as a lot of european tech. efforts are tagged 'perfect' once upon and onward.

malamud has a lot of figures and numbers collected at his trip through europa: exploring the internet, a technical travelogue, 1991, 1992.

There were several other information exchange projects proudly trumpeted in the COSINE literature, but my favorite was ROSE, Research Open Systems for Europe. The project started in 1983 and ran for 60 months, involving five European vendors such as Bull, ICL, and Olivetti. ROSE had the novel goal to promote OSI and "reinforce standardization work by implementing the standards and demonstrating them." At a gala demonstration at the Esprit 88 conference, the vendors all demonstrated OSI prototypes that included FTAM, X.400, and the X.28/X.29 PAD services.

the official lines to the project.