Microsoft today made its planned official announcement of the Xbox One next-generation gaming console. If you consider not knowing how much it costs or exactly when it will be available to buy a reveal, Microsoft revealed various details of how the new system will work. One of the more controversial features of the Xbox One is its network connectivity. Unlike the current-generation Xbox 360, the One will require connecting to the Internet periodically. Based on comments from at least one Microsoft representative, it appears Xbox One must not be disconnected from the Internet for more than one day at a time when using its functionality. What exactly happens if you don't keep your console connected? Details remain unclear. But given how much difficulty people have getting their Xbox 360 connected to home networks and the Web, let's hope the One includes some much-improved network technology.
→ Readers Respond - Problems Connecting an Xbox to a Wireless Network

A terabyte is an impressive amount of data, equivalent to hundreds of full-length movies or millions of digital photos. Typical households would need years to see that much data flow through their home networks. On popular Internet sites, though, the traffic (and the cost of supporting that traffic) adds up much, much faster.

Besides movies, digital still photos are one of the primary sources of big data on the Web. Google has been working for the past several years on technology designed to save network bandwidth used in transferring photos by reducing the amount of data needed to store each picture. Google is now claiming their WebP image file format is saving terabytes of bandwidth on their networks every day - an impressive accomplishment.

→ More - Google Cuts Network Usage by Terabytes, Switching to WebP (cnet.com)
→ See also - The Newest Graphics File Format, WebP (2010)

Recent reports from the Wall Street Journal and other sources indicate U.S. sports content provider ESPN is interested in subsidizing the cost of Internet for people who use its services. The idea is to help folks watching videos on mobile devices from incurring high charges on their data plans. Critics are immediately raising concerns over net neutrality - free access to information and uniform policies for managing the bandwidth of applications - that has been actively debated for many years.
→ See also - A Mobile Internet Subsidized by Content Providers: ESPN Might Want It but You Shouldn't (gigaom.com)

British Telecom is the latest service provider looking to roll out IP address sharing technology to its customers. Similar to how home networks use routers to hide and manage a group of private addresses behind one public one, Internet providers can also implement address translation on their servers to route multiple customers through one shared IP number. Unfortunately, this technology when enabled often interferes with the functioning of some important Internet applications. For example:

• remote access applications may not be able to connect to your home network
• online gaming sessions (including those over Xbox Live or PlayStation Network) may fail
• it may not be possible to share files with others on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks

Note that providers could avoid these IP sharing hack if they simply upgraded their networks to IPv6.

→ More - Customers Fume as BT Introduces IP Sharing (pcpro.co.uk)