Get rich instantly with one simple, amazing, secret trick! Thousands of people are already reaping the benefits of this miracle breakthrough that the big companies don’t want you to know about. Sign up now with your social security number and credit card for your risk-free monthly access to our 100% guaranteed insider expert advice… et cetera.   Yes, some scams are easy to spot. However, there are plenty of very clever scammers who have mastered the art of appearing far more professional than they really are. In fact, some of the toughest scams to spot will actually lift the design and content from known and trusted sites (the Facebook brand is a popular choice for scammers, for example). So how can you tell if what you’re looking at is too good to be true?  

How did you get there in the first place?

If you say “I clicked on a link in an email,” then shame on you. You know better than that. If you clicked on an ad that appeared on a search results page or a trusted website, you might think you’re on safer ground. But far too many legitimate websites subscribe to dynamically generated third-party advertising services, so your trust can’t be inherited. There’s also no real law against designing ads that look like content, so take a close look before clicking on that serious-looking news anchorwoman who wants to give you the inside story on a breakthrough in herbal supplements.  

The better the deal, the more likely the scam.

You can find many, many legitimate deal sites on the ‘net. Sometimes they’ll even have legitimately impressive savings. But when someone tries to sell you a brand new iPad for $100, you have to question it. When someone asks you to sign up for a subscription first to get ‘this and other amazing deals’, question it even harder. Research the product in question, and turn a magnifying glass on any site that undercuts the average price by a considerable margin.  

Take a good look at the URL.

If it’s a subdomain, navigate up to the main page (in other words, you should be seeing a URL without any “/” forward slashes). Check to see if the URL contains a word or phrase that is close but not quite the same as the displayed name (such as a page that looks like Facebook with a URL like “yourfacebook.com”). To make absolutely sure, run the URL through a “whois” to see when the domain was registered and by whom. If it’s only six months old, it’s almost certainly not Facebook.  

Google it.

Or Bing it, whatever. Just do a search for the website name (don’t just cut and paste the address into your Awesome Bar, use quotes). It’s not a foolproof method; after all, the best scammers tend to be pretty good at black-hat SEO, too. But if you can’t find any good information about the website or company on the first page of search results, that should set some alarm bells ringing.  

Contact info should be detailed, relatively easy to find, and verifiable.

Granted, some perfectly legitimate sites make it difficult to track down a phone number or email address, but most should have a dedicated contact page. If there’s a phone number, call it. If there’s an email address, send an email. If you’re not able to get some actual feedback, don’t risk your info or your money. If all you can find is a P.O. box and “Webmaster@” email address (or even worse, nothing but a Gmail or Yahoo! email address), be very very careful.  

Payment Restrictions.

Personally, I avoid any site that wants my money, but I grudgingly admit that there are plenty of legitimate online merchants and services worth paying for. You have a right to be cautious of any site that asks for your payment info, but scam sites will often reveal themselves by being unable to take common forms of payment. This is particularly true for online gambling sites, which have been “cut off” by all major credit cards and PayPal. But remember, the opposite is not true — just because someone DOES take these methods doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not a scam.  

WP Profiling.

WordPress is a mainstay of bloggers and web developers, and countless legitimate sites are built on its framework. However, an even greater number of dubious and fly-by-night operations take advantage of the quick setup and deployment of WordPress sites. If you recognize the format, it’s worth a little extra vigilance, so keep an extra eye out for some of the other signs on this list. Badges and testimonials mean nothing.   We live in a world where you need to be skeptical about reviews on Amazon, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. So why would you believe a random endorsement posted on an unknown website? If there’s a bunch of awards or ‘seals of approval’, check out the organizations behind them. It’s not hard to copy a graphic and paste it on top of your site design. Anybody can say that they’re the official Viagra supplier of the NFL, and that they won the “Best Site Ever” award for three years running.  

Security is as security does.

Likewise, just because a site advertises that they use SSL, VeriSign, or any other security and encryption method doesn’t mean they actually do. Check the security through your browser’s right-click menu, look for the http:// to change to https://, and definitely raise a red flag when a “security certificate” warning pops up.  

Pop-ups, update notifications, and automatic downloads.

I shouldn’t still have to warn anyone about these things, but people just keep falling for them. If a website tells you that you need a newer version of Flash, make sure that you go to Adobe’s site to get it. If a pop-up says that it has detected a virus on your PC, close the browser immediately and go to a reputable virus checker (that kind of pop-up is actually trying to install malware). My least favorite kind of pop-up is the one that you can’t get away from. Whether you press “yes”, “no”, or x out of the box, you’re going to be taken somewhere you don’t want to go. It’s a minor annoyance if you can simply shut down your browser, but it can be a real pain if you have multiple tabs open.  

Be a grammar nazi.

Sure, even The New Yorker and WSJ have bad editing days (spellcheck can only do so much, folks), but you should be suspicious of any site that is chock full of misspellings, punctuation issues, poor sentence structure, and generally seems to be written by someone with only a passing acquaintance with the language.   Scams come in many shapes and sizes; some will simply take your money and run, some will infect you with malware and spy on you, and some will actually provide you with some semblance of goods or services that turn out to be a worthless waste of your time and money. Caveat emptor may be a harsh mistress, but armed with a critical eye and some common sense, you can increase your chances of spotting the scams before any damage is done.

What really goes on behind the scenes when you Google? There are three ways to answer that question.   The simplest, which is suitable for very small children or the average CEO, is that Google looks through every website in the world and finds the ones that Google thinks you’re looking for. This is very wrong, of course, but just try explaining why the sky is blue to the average CEO.   A more reasonable answer is that Google takes a quick snapshot of every website in the world, paying special attention to the important words and phrases. When you type in one of those special words and phrases, Google looks through the snapshots and gives you the closest matches, whose rank is calculated based on a Secret Google Algorithm known only to a select group of Ascended Page Rank disciples at the Google Temple in Mountain View, California.   Okay, minus the psuedo-religious / Illuminatus undertones, this is actually a good enough explanation to satisfy many professionals whose jobs depend on understanding how Google works. But it’s still alarmingly oversimplified.

Step One: Release the Robot Spiders.

Google deploys a Googlebot, which is Google’s term for an automated web crawler or “spider” that is tasked with scouring the web for pages and links. The spiderweb analogy is fairly appropriate, as the spider crawls from site to site, building a web of links from one page to another, and collecting keyword info and other relevant data about the page in question.   The first dash of Google’s Secret Sauce goes into the Googlebot’s programming. An algorithm determines which sites the spider visits, how often, and how “deep” the spider dives into the site (i.e., how many pages the bot will look at from the site before moving on). The more pages your site has, the deeper the Googlebot needs to burrow — and the less often the spider will bother to try. Big sites may get a spider visit once a month; smaller sites may be infested once every day, or even more often.   Another key element is change. If your site doesn’t appear to have updated in some time, the Googlebot will lose interest and not bother to visit again. But “fresh crawls” tend to be much more superficial than deep crawls, so if you have a newspaper site or stock ticker, don’t expect every page on your site to get a deep crawl every hour.

Indexing the Internet.

When Google’s flock of flying monkeys return to the castle, they bring vast amounts of data to be crunched. This is when “indexing” occurs, when the data gets dumped to Google’s massive banks of servers. The focus then turns toward getting that data into proper shape for storage in the database.   Crucially, the keywords’ frequency and placement on the page is also noted. For example, think about searching for “hammers”. A page that uses the word “hammer” once, in the second-to-last paragraph, is probably not as useful as a page that uses the word fifteen times, beginning with the title at the top of the page. In fact, the title gets an extra glance from Google, as does any other “metadata” that describes the content on the page. This comes in handy when figuring out how to rank pages, but we’ll get to that in a moment.   To speed things up, Google tosses out common and generally useless short words (don’t bother searching for “the” and r” unless it’s a necessary part of a title or phrase), along with many numbers and punctuation marks. It also turns capital letters into lower-case ones, and comes up with likely misspellings of words to help those who are pr0wn to typos.   A weakness in this method (depending on how you look at it) is that not all content can be crawled and indexed so easily. For years, Adobe PDFs were unreadable by Googlebot, so many important web documents were simply not being indexed. Through a combination of metatags and OCR, Google Search now includes PDFs (not all, but many). A similar problem persists with a number of other “opaque” elements, from entire websites powered by Flash to many types of embedded multimedia (or “rich media”) content. What Googlebot can’t read, your site doesn’t get any credit for.

Serving the Search Meal.

When you type in your search terms, Google compares them to the data in the index, goes back to grab a copy of the whole page that the index refers to, and spits out a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) consisting of links to and a brief description of the relevant pages. The database is made efficient due to parallel processing, which throws any given search at thousands of computers at once, allowing them to distribute the task between them and come up with answers much more quickly.   The PageRank, the order in which the results are listed is the main ingredient in Google’s Secret Sauce, an algorithm which Google says consists of over 200 individual factors.   Between what Google chooses to tell us and what has been reverse-engineered by SEO pros and curious hackers (not always an either / or population), we’ve learned some of the important factors. But many others are still a mystery, and Google infamously changes the recipe every so often to preserve the ‘organic’ nature of the results.

• The number of links is crucial, as is whether they are inbound or outbound links. Think about it this way: a link is a reference to somebody else’s info, an admission that someone else knows more about a subject than you do. So a page which has many outbound links to other pages is not as authoritative as a page which has plenty of inbound links but is stingy with its outbound links.
• Obviously, this is not the whole story; after all, you probably wouldn’t think much of an academic thesis paper if it didn’t back up its assertions with proper references. “Dangling links” or links that go to a page without any outbound links, are often actually worse for your Page Rank.
• Google tries its best to determine whether the links are relevant, useful, and valid, rather than simply unnecessary links or intentional spam links meant to game the system. It also takes into account where on the page they are located, how they “interact” with other links on the page, and also how they interact with keywords.
• Keywords — including both single words as well as phrases — are probably equally important. Like links, the order and placement make a big difference to PageRank. Few people know the exact way that Google ranks keywords, but similar order of words and proximity to other keywords seems to be a safe bet.
• Keyword placement in the content area has a different importance than in structural locations. This includes the crucial URL, title, header, subheadings, and footer areas, as well as in links TO the page.
• Date is quite important, too. Pages with a long history are much more likely to appear at the beginning of the SERP. Amazon will always beat that blog site that you registered yesterday, but due to popularity, relevance, and relocation on new servers, pages like Tim Berners-Lee’s 1990 NeXT site might be less likely to appear than a viral website from 2011.
• Change is just as important at this stage of the game as it was with Googlebot. And we don’t mean ANY little change; simply throwing in a few synonyms or an extra word here and there won’t fool Google. They’re looking for substantive changes in the content.
• In fact, spammy activities of all kinds risk Google’s wrath. The quickest way to get bumped way down the list, or thrown off the rankings entirely, is to engage in activities that Google considers suspicious or downright manipulative. Without examining every site for such nefarious acts, Google’s attention is drawn by sites that move up the rankings too quickly, or pick up too many links in too short of a time. “Keyword stuffing” is another no-no; Google will penalize any page that is filled with nothing but repetitions of keywords on Google’s list.

In short, those who want to get better Page Rank should concentrate first on providing quality content before trying to optimize the content to get better placement on the SERP. Just as there are Black- and White-Hat Hackers, there are Black- and White-Hat SEO people — you can usually tell the difference by who complains most when Google changes the algorithm.   So there is actually a fourth answer to the question “How does Google Search work?” That answer is really only known by a handful of people who possess both intimate personal knowledge of Google’s secret sauce and the brains to understand all of the complex relationships between the elements. But mere mortals simply need to know why the sky is blue, not how to calculate the exact refraction of the wavelengths of spectra as it passes through the Earth’s atmosphere.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are struggling to find new customers. Since first-time buyers are rare these days, vendors are reduced to stealing each other’s customers. Many companies will give away what seems like anything for free to get a new customer. If you want free installation, free equipment, and other freebies, just sign on the dotted line.

The contract is part of the bait. It seems like a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo that you need to be a lawyer to understand. Well, it is important to read the contract in its entirety BEFORE you sign it.

Take the time to read through it. Ask your friends which providers they use, and find out what kind of contract they have. When the installer comes to your home, he will offer you the “routine” paperwork to sign. When you make the appointment, ask to see the paperwork you will need to sign so you can read through it ahead of time.

Early cancelation is worse than divorce!

• Return equipment
• Pay for any “free” equipment
• Early termination fee
• Pay for the first free month, or other discounted monthly fees
• If you purchased service as part of a bundle and get rid of just one part, the other services you are paying for are likely to go up drastically

Read the fine print for an “easy out” with an address where you can send any equipment and fees to; this will save you time on the phone getting the runaround.

Key contract words to look for:

• Termination or cancellation – both terms refer to if you drop one or all of the company’s services.
• By reference – this phrase means that other items you may be agreeing to are provided as additional references to the contract, but aren’t part of the contract. Ask for any additional things you are agreeing to by signing the contract.
• Jurisdiction – refers to the state laws that apply to a dispute between the company and you.
• Arbitration – most contracts include arbitration which means that disputes that would normally go to court are decided by a company appointed arbitrator that must follow the rules of the written contract.
• Limitation of liability means that you are only able to collect damages in the amount you have paid to the company, regardless of any emotional or other damage that you may incur.

Maximum usage and download limits

Some ISPs limit the amount of usage that consumers can use. This is an issue that is causing a lot of concern among high speed Internet users. When an ISPs servers are maxed out from an extreme amount of downloads, they may slow down or cut off the connection completely for users that generate a high percentage of the slow response at the server. Check in the contract you are signing to see if there is a cap on downloads or uploads.

Local providers: the solution for customers who don’t want a big contract

Locally owned providers are those that often resell services that are provided by a national vendor. These companies are seen by many to have an advantage because they provide better customer service, and many times no contract. So if you are opposed to contracts completely, check out some local high speed Internet providers. Even if they do have a contract, they are usually more willing to negotiate the specific terms. The other option if you really don’t want a contract is to pay a little higher retail rate, and negotiate out of the terms of a long-term contract.

Many times, customers are willing to put up with a contract full of heavy terms and fines for leaving in order to save some money. You should never sign a contract, without reading it thoroughly so you know what you are agreeing to.

Pando Networks, an online optimization service, conducted a study between January and June 2011 that examinedwherein the United States has the fastest Internet speeds and downloading completion rates.

The findings showed that the eastern states rule the country when it comes to internet speed. Eight of the ten fastest states are in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, while the nine out of the ten slowest states are in the Midwest and Mountain-West regions. By tracking the downloads of over four million users across the country, researchers found that some states are even averaging connectivity speeds as much as ten times faster than others.

The current average download speed for the entire United States is 600 kilobytes per second (KBps). This is only about 1/4 as fast as those in South Korea, which leads the world in internet speeds, according to Akami, an internet monitoring firm. Idaho is listed as the state with the slowest connection in the country, with average speeds of 318 KBps, making it almost three times slower than the fastest connection in the country.

When it comes to download completion rates, the data reflected that the states with slower downloading rates were also those least likely to complete a download once they started it. In Hawaii, users who have a slower speed of 432 KBps completed 87 percent of downloads, whereas the users in the District of Columbia, who have a rate of 759 KBps, finished only 80 percent of downloads. Pando reported that these statistics show that “high-speed internet users may not necessarily hold thef most stable connections or be the most patient internet users.” The Information Technology and Innovation Foundationranks the United States at 15th in the world for internet speeds but here are the top ten states within the country with the best internet speeds.

So which states have the fastest internet connections? Here’s the list:

10. Virginia

Average speed: 675 KBps

Average completion rate: 88 percent

9. Pennsylvania

Average speed: 689 KBps

Average completion rate: 85 percent

8.Connecticut

Average speed: 711 KBps

Average completion rate: 85 percent

7. New York

Average speed: 722 KBps

Average completion rate: 86 percent

6. District of Columbia

Average speed: 759 KBps

Average completion rate: 80 percent

5. Maryland

Average speed: 805 KBps

Average completion rate: 89 percent

4. Delaware

Average speed: 841 KBps

Average completion rate: 89 percent

3. Massachusetts

Average speed: 851 KBps

Average completion rate: 88 percent

(Andover, a Massachusetts suburb, is the city with the fastest download speeds in the country, with an average of 2,801 KBps.)

2. New Jersey

Average speed: 851 KBps

Average completion rate: 87 percent

1. Rhode Island

Average speed: 894 KBps

Average completion rate: 88 percent

Comcast has come under fire recently for introducing a cap on the amount of data that subscribers can use in a given month. Although the company compromised by raising that cap, and eventually banished it altogether, there are many people who argue than any artificial ceiling is too oppressive.

Certainly, nobody really wants a limit on their Internet connection. It feels like an abuse of power, curbing the very freedom that the Internet made possible. It’s like The Man telling you how many miles you can drive each month.

On the other hand, a mileage limit is a perfectly valid way of dealing with congested roads. When there are only a few drivers on the road, you can go back and forth from point A to point B as much as you like. But when everybody goes to work, traffic gets slower and slower.

Given the current state of our network infrastructure, bandwidth is a limited resource — and those who sell access to the network have a responsibility to provide a certain level of service to each customer. Seen in this light, bandwidth caps are a reasonable solution, and an attempt to do the most good for the most people.

Bandwidth Caps, By the Numbers

Before opting for usage-based billing, Comcast’s compromise was to raise their data cap to 300GB per month. This was considerably higher than AT&T’s 150GB cap for DSL subscribers, and beats AT&T’s 250GB cap for U-verse customers. Both companies agree that an outsized chunk of bandwidth is being used by a small number of subscribers — AT&T claims that 2% of users consume 20% of bandwidth.

What does 300GB mean in real-world use? Well, let’s take a look at my habits, which would be on the extreme end of usage, and see if we can’t flesh the concept out a bit. One of the ways that I check my own usage is via BitTorrent. Yes, I use P2P filesharing — sometimes I’ll even leave it uploading and download all night while I sleep (soundly, with a clear conscience). This past month, I show 115GB of combined upload and download.

As a tech writer and online gamer, I’m also on the Internet an average of 10-16 hours each day. Even so, I’d estimate that my browsing, blogging, gaming, social media, and email habits probably average (at most) a half-dozen Gigabytes in a month.

AT&T claims that the average use, all things included, is 8GB – 10GB per month. Even if you suspect AT&T of rounding down a bit, that’s less than one-tenth of their lowest data cap. As a very general rule of thumb, the average Netflix HD film is in the area of 5GB in size. This means that you’d have to stream 40 HD films each month to hit a 200GB bandwidth cap.

Why So Cap Happy?

ISPs have more than one reason for employing data caps, and some of them aren’t comforting. Because a number of the major ISPs are also media corporations, they have a vested interest in punishing excessive filesharers. To them, all filesharing is illegal — an assertion that is patently ludicrous to those of us who serve up things like OpenOffice and Ubuntu. Yet there is validity to the assertion that pirates tend to use a much greater amount of bandwidth, and that law-abiding folks on the same network don’t deserve to suffer slower connections because of it.

Still, eyebrows simply must be raised when you discover that Comcast doesn’t count their own in-house streaming video service against your total data usage. That isn’t anti-piracy, that’s just anticompetitive. And Comcast has a history of such shady practices; I suppose it’s a silver lining that they actually announced the data caps this time around. But all of this is not an argument against data caps or usage-based billing — it’s an argument to keep Comcast honest and transparent to their customers.

But It’s Not My Fault!

It is a bit frustrating that we’re facing data caps at the same time that basic Internet use is more bandwidth-heavy than ever. More people are online, using more cloud-based services, interactive Web 2.0 apps and sites, and more and higher-quality audio and video. I sympathize with anyone who resents their monthly data totals rising due to popup video ads that start playing automatically while you’re simply trying to read the news.

Having said that, a higher-bandwidth interactive multimedia Internet is what people want, and what people have come to expect. More and more people, in fact; when web surfing was the occasional hobby of the relatively geeky few, unlimited bandwidth made plenty of sense. When 4 out of every 5 people go online at least once a day, bandwidth becomes a much more limited commodity. And the space is getting crowded.

The situation is closer to being dire for mobile ISPs, whose potential spectrum is restricted to a relatively narrow band of frequencies fought over by several competing carriers. Just as with Internet use as a whole, smartphone and tablet users have quickly grown accustomed to bandwidth-heavy practices such as watching videos and listening to music — you know, the reasons that we bought mobile devices in the first place. One by one, the major wireless service providers have eliminated their unlimited data plans — and similarly, the vast majority of people have not run into any difficulty staying within their monthly caps.

Alternatives to Bandwidth Caps

With copper-wire ISPs, the bandwidth is much more subject to inherent physical limitations, and the more capacious fiber carries a far higher cost of investment for the infrastructure providers. Even fiber leader Verizon abandoned expansion of its acclaimed FiOS network last year, having apparently exhausted the supply of areas affluent enough to allow Verizon to eventually recoup the investment. The only active fiber deployment right now is from Google — and that won’t help unless you happen to live in Kansas City. So once subscriber capacity begins to saturate available bandwidth, there are really only three options: data caps, throttling, or metered billing. Before settling on usage-based billing in which users are required to pay a la carte for additional chunks of data, Comcast tested throttling (more or less by Federal court order), but customers are even less excited about limited speeds than they are about limited downloads. Some are saying that metered billing is inevitable, and that the Internet should be treated as a utility — and when that day comes, many of us are likely to look back fondly on the days when we only had a 300GB cap to worry about.

Providing access to the Internet is fundamentally a business, not a public service. Still, any responsible and competitive company knows that customer satisfaction is absolutely necessary. Only a select few really understand that the real goal is happiness. Happiness mainly means that customers are eager to recommend their ISP. Instead of checking off a “satisfied” box on an automated survey, happy customers will write glowing reviews and discuss what the ISP has done to earn their continued business. For each of the major ways that people get their Internet access, I’ll give you one example of a company that really seems to care about your happiness. Keep in mind that your ISP choices are largely determined by your location (it’s sad but true, sometimes the best choice in your area is satisfaction rather than full-on happiness).

Cable and Telephone Companies

Many people get hardwired Internet access from cable and telephone companies such as AT&T, Comcast, Cox Communications, et cetera. Most of these cable ISPs are both giant corporations and virtual monopolies in their regional service area. Neither of which tends to equate to personal attention and customer happiness. On the good side, established and professional policies of customer service are more likely to guarantee a certain level of satisfaction. But there are some obvious exceptions. Who Cares: WOW! Internet – Midwest (Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Cleveland, and Columbus) “The sales rep even called during the install to make sure the installer was there on time (he showed up early) and after the install to make sure I had a pleasant experience. I’ve never been treated so well.” – Couch Potato, Evansville, IN

Cell Providers

Increasingly, more people are getting wireless Internet access through their cell provider (AT&T again, plus Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc). Again, these are almost always BIG national or multinational corporations, usually without even the cable companies’ distinct regional headquarters. PLUS, most of the in-person retail outlets are even less interested in customer service; employees will usually just refer any real issues to the national support anyway (official retail stores are bad enough, but re-sellers are almost universally unhelpful). So you’ll often deal with outsourced and automated customer service. They are easier to compare, overall, but it’s almost a given that the customer ends up feeling less personally cared-for. Who Cares: Boost Mobile – non-contract wireless provider On the contract side, J. D. Power’s 2011 U.S. Wireless Customer Care Performance Studies give Verizon an edge (about 77%) in customer satisfaction, but it’s not a significant lead over the worst (AT&T, at 76.1%). The non-contract providers show a much different curve; Boost Mobile has a clear lead, about 6% better than the runner-up, and almost 12% better than the worst.

Local/Regional ISPs

Local and regional dedicated ISPs are the most obvious examples of customer happiness (or, sometimes, lack thereof). With a greater need to compete and a specific focus on internet service (i.e., no telephone or TV), local ISPs generally offer a much more personal and hands-on approach to connection quality and customer service. You’ll typically see the most specific and enthusiastic reviews in this area. Who Cares: Sonic.net – Northern California “Sonic is a small company in the Bay, so they actually care about their customers and their needs.The max waiting time for support is about 2 minutes and the support is based in the Bay Area and are highly trained…overall, one of the nicest ISP’s out there, with great support.” – soorma, from Chico, California

What seems to be a simple question gets complicated when you consider that now, more than ever, people are now getting on the internet in a number of different ways.

The fundamental route is still a hardwired connection, either via dial-up (don’t laugh, for many, especially in rural areas, it’s still the only option) or high-speed broadband access, such as DSL, Cable, Fiber Optic, etc. Increasingly, however, people are going wireless, whether it’s satellite broadband for home or office use, cellular broadband (including 3G and 4G) for mobile devices, or other mixed, and often lower speed, wireless solutions like WiFi.

A general overview of largest ISPs by broadband subscribers was provided by research firm Teleogaphy last year, and the rankings, although certainly not the specific subscriber counts, are still largely accurate:

1. China Telecom (55M)
2. China Unicom (42M)
3. NTT (17M)
4. Comcast (17M)
5. AT&T (16.5M)

China, unsurprisingly, takes the lead here, followed at a distance by Japan and the United States. An interesting note is how SMALL some of these numbers are, compared to the populations of the respective countries. One conclusion that can be drawn is that there is still plenty of competition in the broadband market, and the big cable and telephone companies may be struggling to fully leverage their existing regional advantage.

Teleography also shows that mobile subscribers follow a similar pattern, although here the US and Japan drop off the Top 5 completely, replaced by India:

1. China Telecom (617M)
2. China Unicom (182M)
3. Bharti Airtel (169M)
4. RCOM ‒ Reliance Communications (143M)
5. Vodafone Essar (142M)

Huge numbers, but keep in mind that ‘mobile subscribers’ does not equate to Internet access; given the wide variety of calling, text, and data plans, the companies listed above may not actually be providing Internet access to a large percentage of their subscribers.

When we instead examine the number of 3G subscribers, the picture changes drastically:

1. NTT DoCoMo (57.3M)
2. AT&T Mobility (43.5M)
3. China Mobile (35M)
4. Verizon Wireless (34.6M)
5. KDDI (30.6M)

Here’s where the US and Japan surge back into the spotlight, and India drops out. While 3G is by no means the sole means of wireless Internet service, the rankings clearly show that mobile data usage is eclipsing wired subscriptions from the top providers. On the other hand, customers have a much more narrow choice of mobile service providers, so we can expect to see greater numbers concentrated in fewer names.

For broadband subscribers in the US, the vast majority of subscribers are getting service via their cable and telephone companies:

1. Comcast (17.4M)
2. AT&T (16.5M)
3. Time Warner (10M)
4. Verizon (8.5M)
5. Cox Communications (4.1M)

Obviously, AT&T and Verizon have a significant foothold in both wired and wireless Internet, while the others are largely cable companies that have added Internet service to a growing list of options.

Internet usage has changed dramatically over the last few years. From 1996 internet speeds, the number of households with broadband access, and the types of web browsers we use have all shifted.

To show you the changing tides of high speed internet in the U.S., we’ve put together this snazzy infographic that looks at a few of the shifts we’ve seen over the last 15 years. Click to view a larger version.

According to a May 2011 report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 78 percent of Americans now have internet access, and 60 percent of Americans have a broadband connection.

The flip side of this unprecedented overall penetration is that U.S. internet adoption is actually slowing compared to all previous years. Simply put, those who don’t already have internet access probably either can’t get it or don’t want it. There are still plenty of areas where internet service, especially broadband, is still largely unavailable. And there are still significant portions of the population that lack the interest or the means to sign up with an ISP.

DSL and cable still command the lion’s share of hardwired broadband connections, although there is a surge in consumer interest in the increasing deployment of fiber optic internet service. Interestingly, the broadband numbers are slightly down from the previous years. In an uncertain economy, one could easily conclude that Americans are cutting access speeds in order to cut costs. Also, this could reflect the increasing trend to migrate to a mobile provider to get internet from a smartphone with a data plan, instead of a home PC with a broadband ISP.

Pew survey results show that 83% of adult Americans own cell phones, and for 42% of these (i.e., 35% of all US adults), it’s a smartphone. Given the things American’s say they do most with the internet, smartphones are increasingly able to satisfy their needs with far more immediacy and convenience than a bigger, less portable PC.

In addition to more and better devices, mobile providers are offering higher bandwidth and more coverage than ever. This is both good and bad. Due to the increase in subscribers using more available bandwidth, contract providers have felt it necessary to almost completely phase out their previous ‘unlimited’ data plans (the ‘last man standing’ is Sprint, and probably not for long). Despite enjoying more customers, the average cost of providers’ mobile plans keep creeping up and perhaps, as a result, the uncertain economic landscape has been something of a boon for prepaid mobile providers.

Meanwhile, the internet itself hasn’t changed too much. The slow transition to the much-touted “Web 2.0” continues, with more focus on interactive web apps and social media. More people are streaming rather than downloading video and audio — in part due to a combination of higher bandwidth connections and greater use of devices less geared toward storage, such as smartphones, tablets, and netbooks. Likewise, more and more websites are optimizing their pages for mobile device usage, or creating separate mobile versions.

So on one hand, the ‘geography’ of the internet is much the same as it was a year ago, but the ISP ‘roads’ that we take to get on and around it have evolved dramatically.

The Buggles proclaimed in 1979 that video killed the radio star. Roughly two years later, at 12:01 AM on August 1, 1981 MTV came online as a fledgling music video television station by airing that particular video. Truer words were never spoken.

Not too many years later the World Wide Web became more and more available around the world. Today, hardly a person in any industrialized country in the world could make-do without the Internet. Like the radio star, there are many casualties with the advent of the Information Superhighway.

Here’s a list of 10 things that have essentially gone the way of the dinosaur as a result.

Inter-office memos

Once upon a time, corporate typed memos would make their way from the top of the organizational down, usually delivered by hand by someone in the mailroom. Each employee in the company was handed one, and sometimes the really important or permanent ones were pinned to a corkboard in the break room. About two seconds after email hit the scene, the inter-office memo shot straight to the top of the endangered-species list, its demise nearly instantaneous.

Phone books

When was the last time you actually opened up that kitchen cupboard and pulled out a phone book for any reason other than to toss it in the garbage? For many serious internet users, phone books were cut off back in the mid-1990s. For nearly everyone else, spurred by the prominence of cell phones, 2005 was pretty much the end. Today, our first instinct is to go online, which means phone books are officially obsolete.

Handwriting

Even my parents, in their late 70s, no longer hand write letters or other similar communiqués. It is email, text messages, or instant messages for them, which makes me wonder if stamps aren’t the next threatened species. Even students today are learning on computers, which is a vast departure from my days in elementary school, when I seemingly lost about a million #2 pencils. If it’s any consolation, we’re much better typists today than ever before.

Privacy

If we ever did have such a thing, we don’t any longer. The internet advanced what’s known as the “open bookÝ society. The theory behind it suggests the more a business or other similar enterprise opens its proverbial kimono to show all, the more accessible it will make itself for customers and clients. Sadly, there was never a real answer given for how the “open book” would affect individuals. In short, our individual privacy has been murdered.

Sure, we can control some of it, but when little Tommy and Sally are busy posting every family picture ever taken, and telling their friends where you’re going on vacation, and how much money you make all over Facebook, it doesn’t take long to realize if you’re not totally and completely off the grid, you can give up the illusion of personal privacy. For what it’s worth, it’s helped me sleep easier at night, aside from the fact they might know everything about me.

Daily newspapers

If you’ve ever wanted to see an entire industry on life-support, look no further than print newspapers. As more and more news content is made instantly available online, less and less content is being sought that will already be many hours old by the time your sprinkler system completely ruins the front page of your local rag. One day there will be no more print newspapers. Gone will be the delivery boys and girls who will have already created an app that will deliver the news to your phone. For old times’ sake, buy a newspaper once in a while if for no other reason than nostalgia.

Video stores

Remember when there was a video store on every corner? Remember how every grocery-, drug-, and convenience storestocked lots and lots of videos for rent and sale? No? Then it’s because you’re a young person. For the rest of us, we’ve seen the internet, and companies like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, nearly make obsolete that very notion of a corner video store. Now, we just point and click. No late fees, no rewind fees, no not finding something to watch.

In-person conversations

For millions of shy and introverted victims of agoraphobia, the advent of the online community and its subsequent spinoffs has been nothing short of life-altering. For the rest of us, we’re witnessing the very early stages of the death of the in-person conversations. Dying are the face-to-face meetings that we rely on to come to grips with the fact that we’re just as screwed up as everyone else. I wonder how I’ll conduct the old “birds and the bees“ conversation with my now-two-year-old son? Webcam?Text message? Facebook chat? To Be Determined.

Door-to-door job searches

If you’re like most people my age—pushing 50—then you’ve done your fair share of knocking on doors and filling out applications while a patient receptionist pretended to care. Today, nearly every company in the world accepts applications online. In fact, it’s become the preferred method. It’s efficient and a lot less personally intrusive and stressful than past methods. Today, a person could be hired entirely over the internet as more and more companies turn to video interviews. It’s easier than ever before to apply for a job today. See? Not all internet-related “snuffs” are such a bad thing, huh?

Music Television

Not only did video kill the radio star, but online video killed music-video television. As an impressionable youth, I recall spending countless, empty hours glued to my couch watching MTV on the old console television. Today, I’m seldom without my laptop so I can’t really be bothered to discover which channel on my cable programming belongs to MTV. Doesn’t really matter anyway because they don’t show music videos any longer. YouTube and the like ensured their swift and permanent death. Today, bands and other artists release their latest videos directly to online resources.

Language

Language is fluid and ever-evolving, and I have mixed emotions about the current evolution, filled with emoticons and text-message shorthand. I don’t mind acronyms like BRB (be right back), AFK (away from keyboard), and LOL (laugh out loud). I don’t even mind OMG, BFF, and TTYL. But I’ll be hanged if I can abide the butchering of the language through the intentional shortening of words. ‘What’ becomes ‘wot’ and any word that can be represented by a number, like two, too, and to, or fore, four, and four, become 2 and 4 no matter their context or usage. Don’t get me wrong. I understand lazy, I understand shorthand, and I’m a big fan of the internet. But I’m also a writer and I’ll always prefer the more traditional use of our language. TTFN.