Grant Gross, IDG News Service, Stephen Lawson

Verizon Communications is putting the pedal to the metal on its FiOS service with a new 300Mbps option next month, offering a majority of its customers a wild Internet ride, though it hasn't said how much that ride will cost.

The company said Wednesday it will refresh its portfolio of services next month, introducing four new speed tiers. The most eye-catching will be the top plan, with 300Mbps (bits per second) downstream and 65Mbps upstream. With that grade of service, subscribers will be able to download a two-hour high-definition movie in 2.2 minutes and upload five minutes of HD home video in 31 seconds, according to Verizon. The fastest FiOS service now is 150Mbps downstream and 35Mbps upstream, with TV and voice, for $199.99 per month.

Global Internet Protocol traffic will reach an annual rate of 1.3 zettabytes in 2016 as more people connect more devices and download more video over the Internet, Cisco Systems predicted Wednesday.

With global IP traffic surpassing the zettabyte (1 billion terabyte) threshold, there will be more Internet traffic in 2016 than in all years up to 2012, said Doug Webster, senior director for service provider marketing at Cisco.

The U.S. government has launched a coordinated effort with several trade groups and private companies to combat botnets and educate affected computer users, the White House announced Wednesday.

The new effort to fight the large networks of compromised computers will involve a range of activities, including plans to share information about botnets among government and private organizations and a nationwide consumer education campaign, members of President Barack Obama's administration announced.

Research In Motion has warned that it expects an operating loss for the current quarter and has hired two investment banks to help it study alternative company strategies that might include licensing its OS.

The troubled BlackBerry maker said competitive pressures were hurting its business and that the current quarter, which ends June 2, is likely to end in a loss.

Corporations are starting to embrace technologies used to monitor employee Internet use, with 60 percent expected to watch workers' social media use for security breaches by 2015, according to a new report from Gartner.

Less than 10 percent of companies now monitor their employees' use of Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and other social media sites for security breaches, although many companies monitor social media for brand management and marketing purposes, said the report, released Tuesday.

Sprint Nextel will finish shutting down its narrowband iDEN network as early as June 30, 2013, the company disclosed on Tuesday.

The iDEN system is the infrastructure that serves Sprint's Nextel brand and its popular push-to-talk service, which date back to before Sprint acquired Nextel in 2005. But the by-now archaic data speeds of the technology and the costs of maintaining two totally separate networks, sounded the death knell for iDEN as far back as the merger deal's announcement in 2004.

Cisco Systems owned up to some miscalculations in its video collaboration strategy but showed off some promising future capabilities in a briefing with media this week.

The company's video meeting business is best known for its TelePresence Meeting Systems, especially the high-profile three-screen meeting rooms that include Cisco-designed furniture and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But Cisco is now looking beyond those swanky environments toward mobile devices that can bring video meetings to participants wherever they are.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission approved a rule change for part of the 800MHz band at a meeting on Thursday, opening the door for Sprint Nextel to use the band for its 4G LTE network.

Sprint has frequencies in the 800MHz SMR (Specialized Mobile Radio) band that so far have been dedicated to the iDEN network, which delivers the narrowband 2G service that Sprint acquired by buying Nextel in 2005. When the FCC carried out a rebanding project several years ago to eliminate interference between iDEN and public safety radios, it decided that services on those frequencies couldn't use channels wider than 25KHz. That channel width can't support anything more than a narrowband service such as iDEN, which delivers average throughput of 20Kbps (bits per second) to 30Kbps.

Two U.S. lawmakers have called on the U.S. Department of Justice to reopen its investigation into Google's snooping on Wi-Fi networks in 2010 after recent questions about the company's level of cooperation with federal inquiries.

Representatives Frank Pallone Jr., a New Jersey Democrat, and John Barrow, a Georgia Democrat, called on the DOJ to fully investigate Google's actions for potential violations of federal wiretapping laws. In light of a recently released U.S. Federal Communications Commission report on Wi-Fi snooping by Google Street View cars, the DOJ should take a new look at the company's actions, wrote the lawmakers, in a Thursday letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

The efforts of U.S. President Barack Obama's administration to streamline and improve the government's IT systems aren't proceeding as quickly as officials have suggested, a federal auditor said Thursday.

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has made "solid progress" toward IT reform, but officials there have oversold their progress, said David Powner, director of IT management issues at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

U.S. President Barack Obama has ordered all major government agencies to make two key services available on mobile phones within a year, in an effort to embrace a growing trend toward Web surfing on mobile devices.

Obama, in a directive issued Wednesday, also ordered federal agencies to create websites to report on their mobile progress. The websites are due within 90 days.

An Ohio startup company has raised US$200 million to fund gigabit-per-second broadband projects in six university communities across the U.S., the company announced Wednesday.

Gigabit Squared will work with the University Community Next Generation Innovation Project (Gig.U), a coalition of 30 universities focused on improved broadband, to select six communities in which to build the ultra-fast broadband networks, they said. The two organizations will select winning communities between November and the first quarter of 2013, Mark Ansboury, president of Gigabit Squared, said during a press conference.