Featured Blogs

Incumbents Fight Broadband Improvement

There was a recent article in the Bangor Daily News about Charter Communications fighting a move by small towns in Maine to bring fiber broadband. To anybody who has been in the business for a while, this is nothing new. The big cable companies and telcos have fought municipal broadband for decades. The article highlights a recent public meeting in the small town of Leeds, a town of under 2,300. The town was hoping to partner with Axiom Technologies, a nearby ISP, to provide fiber broadband. more

China Using Cybertechnologies to Expand Their Political Cloud

A few months ago, I mentioned that China’s social code would also be expanded to companies who want to deal with China. I have come across information that shows that China is indeed serious about this. China’s cyberspace regulator has proposed requiring companies pursuing share listings in Hong Kong to apply for cybersecurity inspections if they handle data that concerns national security. Large internet platforms planning to set up headquarters, operating or research centers abroad will have to submit a report to regulators. more

The Fight Over 12 GHz Spectrum

For an agency that has tried to wash its hands from regulating broadband, the FCC finds itself again trying to decide an issue that is all about broadband. There is a heavyweight battle going on at the FCC over how to use the 12 GHz spectrum, and while this may seem like a spectrum issue, it's all about broadband. 12 GHz spectrum is key to several broadband technologies. First, this is the spectrum that is best suited for transmitting data between the earth and satellite constellations. more

JD Falk – a Decade Afterwards

I can still hear it. ‘Hee hee’. That’s good. We all have unique laughs, but few are distinctive. Fewer yet belly the true nature of the human being issuing them. British insult comedian Jimmy Carr has one such laugh, a tri-tone ‘dah dah DUH,’ rising on the third expulsion. It has a bell-like quality, ringing, embodying the deft touch that Don Rickles had of insulting while loving, something Carr has mastered. It lets you know that despite him having just said something shocking and horrid, he is laughing with, never at, reassuring the target, ‘all is well.’ more

Why Did Russia Test an Anti-Satellite Missile and Why Doesn’t China Condemn the Test?

On November 15th, Russia used an anti-satellite missile to destroy COSMOS 1408, a defunct spy satellite. The explosion quickly created over 1,500 pieces of trackable debris and will likely generate hundreds of thousands of smaller pieces. As a precautionary measure, the astronauts on the International Space Station, two of whom are Russians, took shelter in escape shuttles during two orbits. The anti-satellite test was widely criticized, but the Russian defense ministry released a statement saying... more

Five Reasons to Avoid Using Maps on Websites

Robert Frost wrote that good fences make good neighbors. Yet when it comes to virtual fences, visualized as maps, I'm not sure there is any way to create "good fences." So many regions around the world are under dispute. And even regions that may appear settled may be anything but. I've long written about the problems of using flags on your website, particularly for navigation. But maps often present a much larger geopolitical challenge. If you can avoid using them, do so. more

Big Internet Outages - There Is No Such Thing as a Routine Software Upgrade

Last year I wrote about big disruptive outages on the T-Mobile and the CenturyLink networks. Those outages demonstrate how a single circuit failure on a transport route or a single software error in a data center can spread quickly and cause big outages. I join a lot of the industry in blaming the spread of these outages on the concentration and centralization of networks where the nationwide routing of big networks is now controlled by only a handful of technicians in a few locations. In early October, we saw the granddaddy of all network outages... more

Remembering the Cybersecurity Treaty That Never Happened

The cybercrime legal community from around the globe is meeting under the aegis of the Council of Europe (COE) to hold the annual Cooperation against Cybercrime conference dubbed Octopus 2021. It is also celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Cybercrime Convention treaty signed in November 2001 in Budapest. Not celebrated and little known, however, is the Stanford Draft -- A Proposal for an International Convention on Cyber Crime and Terrorism -- and the initiative begun in 1997 which brought about that draft treaty instrument. more

Notes from NANOG 83

The network operations community is cautiously heading back into a mode of in-person meetings, and the NANOG meeting at the start of November was a hybrid affair with a mix of in-person and virtual participation, both by the presenters and the attendees. I was one of the virtual mob, and these are my notes from the presentations I found to be of personal interest. I hope you might also find them to be of interest as well... The year 2021 has not been a good year for Internet outages. more

DOTZON Study: Digital Company Brands 2021

DOTZON presents the fourth edition of the Digital Company Brands study. After having introduced the study in 2018, DOTZON continued to expand and enhance the underlying data to display how cities successfully use their Digital Company Brands. The Digital Company Brand is the digital dimension of a company brand and mirrors the "digitalness" of a company. Purely digital company brands developed for the first time in the 1990s, with the emergence of Internet business models. Some of them were based solely on a generic Internet address, for example, www.hotel.de or www.amazon.com. more

Why the Cloud Is the Solution for Telecom Upgrades

With so much "cloud-talk" across every industry -- many presume that every company with serious telecom operations has already moved there -- but they haven't. In fact, 20 to 25% of global companies are still using legacy PBX systems and MPLS networks and waiting to replace them and move over to SD-Wan/mesh solutions. These advancements can be done successfully after an infrastructure audit has been conducted to identify operational weaknesses and threat vulnerabilities and measuring efficiencies of each feature for usage optimization and increased productivity. more

SpaceX’s Rural Development Project in India

Sanjay Bhargava, Starlink Country Director for India at SpaceX (source)SpaceX Starlink is moving quickly in India. Last April, they said they would be offering service in 2022 and began accepting pre-orders. In July, SpaceX committed to manufacturing antenna systems and terminals in India and, at the end of September, Sanjay Bhargava, who had been with Elon Musk at Paypal, was selected to head Starlink in India. In the last week or two, they set up a wholly-owned subsidiary that will apply for licenses, seek Indian distribution partners, and attempt to sell 200,000 units - 80% in rural districts - in 2022. more

Potential Impacts of Large-Scale Metaverses on Internet Governance: Bandwidth

Neal Stephenson’s foundational cyberpunk novel Snow Crash brought to the public the concept of a metaverse, a virtual reality in which people interact using avatars in a manufactured ecosystem, eschewing the limitations of human existence. More recently, Ready Player One capitalized on that idea and brought it back to prominence with a bestselling novel and subsequent film adaptation. Amid rebranding efforts and seeking a new way forward, Mark Zuckerberg has made it Facebook’s (now Meta Platforms) priority to build a platform that could enable the metaverse to become a mainstream technology with the sort of reach that their social networks and WhatsApp have. more

Predicting Future Broadband Prices

I've been giving a lot of thought lately to the long-term trajectory of broadband prices. This is something that should be considered by anybody who is thinking about competing in a market against a big cable company. It's not an easy question to get your hands around since many factors might affect future rates. The following are some of the major trends that I think must be considered. First is pressure on the big ISPs from Wall Street. more

Content Blocking at the DNS Level in Germany

For those who follow the issue of blocking illegal content from the Internet, there is an interesting development in relation to this issue here in Germany, and I will tell you a little about it. One way to make it difficult to access illegal content is to block it directly in the DNS. But what is DNS for? Basically, it serves to translate the domain name into the IP of the server that is hosting the content. By blocking directly at the DNS level, a query to a domain will no longer bring the server's IP number, and with that, the user no longer accesses that content. more