What the experts say

The coming bandwidth boom

More people than ever are downloading audio and video files from the Internet, said Michael Sivy in Money. That’s placing an unprecedented burden on its infrastructure—video files, for instance, eat up 45 times as much bandwidth as text files. “Sooner or later, the need for greater bandwidth will spark a construction boom” similar in scale to the switch from dial-up to broadband connections over the past two decades. Capital spending on networking technologies could increase by 50 percent to 100 percent during the next 20 years. “No two companies should benefit more than Corning, the leading maker of optical fiber that carries data, and Cisco, the top manufacturer of switching systems that direct how all packets of information get to their destination.” Both companies’ share prices are now trading at just 17 times earnings. “If you’re a long-term investor, this situation represents a perfect buying opportunity.”

Wedding gifts: How much?

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With summer wedding season comes the dilemma of how much to spend on the bride and groom, said Lisa Scherzer in SmartMoney. “There’s a fine line between breaking the bank to buy a generous gift and looking like a cheapskate.” A typical standard is $75 if you go solo and about twice as much if you bring a date, says Modern Bride’s Betsy Goldberg. But that can vary considerably depending on your budget, relationship with the bride and groom, and how far you had to travel to get to the event. “Most couples understand that the $500 you shelled out to attend their Bahamas beach wedding doesn’t leave you much to spend on a big-ticket gift.” Don’t pay too much attention to the rule of thumb tying a gift’s value to the price per dinner serving, recommends Martha Woodham, author of The Bride Did What?! Etiquette for the Wedding Impaired. A gift, she says, “is not “the admission price to the wedding.”

Watch where you spend

Most borrowers know that late payments and high balances can ding their credit scores, said Jessica Silver-Greenberg in BusinessWeek. “But what about frequenting a massage parlor, retreading a tire, or visiting a marriage counselor?” A recent Federal Trade Commission suit, filed against card issuer CompuCredit, suggests that lenders sometimes consider the nature of borrowers’ activities when deciding to reduce lines of credit. “With competition increasing, databases improving, and technology advancing, companies can include more factors than ever in their models.” Something to think about when tempted to get a cash advance at the casino.