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Since the first dot-com boom, unmetered Internet access has been the industry standard. But recently, usage-based billing has been staging a comeback.

Comcast instituted a bandwidth cap in 2008, and some other wired ISPs, including AT&T, have followed suit. In 2010, three of the four national wireless carriers—Sprint is the only holdout—switched from unlimited data plans to plans featuring bandwidth caps. To many people, the argument for metered bandwidth seems intuitive and obvious. Bandwidth is a scarce resource, and advocates argue that usage-based pricing encourages efficient network use and ensures that heavy users pay their "fair share." Yet the economics of metering aren't as simple as they might appear. Companies are often surprised by how well flat-rate billing schemes work. Customers love them, and flat-rate billing encourages more intensive use of networks that sit idle most of the time. Network providers insist that they are simply trying to cope with rapidly rising demand for bandwidth. But critics charge that the trend toward bandwidth caps is driven by more sinister motives, especially in the residential broadband market.

In this story we'll examine the economics of metering and try to explain why it has suddenly come back into vogue.

The US is falling in the quality of broadband its ISPs are offering on a quarterly basis, although in the fourth quarter of 2011 that fall in speeds was seen by several other counties, with overall broadband speeds falling to a global average 2.3 Mbps from the third quarter to the fourth. The data comes from Akamai’s State of the Internet report, which uses the content delivery network’s data to construct a detailed report on web speeds, security and mobile connections. Om has covered the big picture, but here’s what the report says about the US. For the year, the global average connection speed was up a 19 percent, with double-digit percentage growth seen in eight of the top 10 countries and also in the US, which is ranked 13th. The U.S.’s average connection speed is 5.8 Mbps — a 14 percent increase from the previous year. Overall our average peak connection speeds ranged from 36 Mbps in Delaware down to 13.3 Mbps in Arkansas.

The demand for mobility is burgeoning, and as agencies plan their own mobile apps or Web portals, they often find themselves with more questions than answers.

Mobile apps promise to increase productivity and save time and money — heck, the work will practically do itself. A well designed app can cure warts and baldness, make project leaders run faster and jump higher. Amid these grand claims and true success stories from governments with developed mobile presences, many agencies tread carefully toward their mobile futures, hoping to avoid the mistakes others have made. One lesson governments have learned is that creating a nice-looking, easy-to-use app isn’t enough. These apps must seamlessly integrate into the agency’s back-end systems — otherwise they create more work for employees who must manually re-enter the information submitted through the app into the appropriate system or workflow.

Tom Brokaw, Katie Couric and David Gregory endorsing presidential candidates: Could it happen? Actually, it already is -- though not quite in the way you might imagine.

For decades, scholars have studied and debated the impact of media, both paid and earned, on the decision-making of swing voters. Earned media -- i.e., news -- is generally believed to have limited impact, because the types of broadcasts valued by swing voters are unlikely to contain the pointed messages that are more effective at moving minds. Media outlets delivering more one-sided messages, on the other hand -- such as FOX News Channel or MSNBC -- are watched mainly by people who already have made up their minds. Meanwhile, paid media, or traditional campaign advertising, can be targeted at swing voters. But messages and messengers with particular partisan or other motives may not have the credibility to alter those voters’ decisions. What happens, though, when swing voters are confronted by negative messages delivered by credible messengers?