Featured Blogs

How Are You Solving the Digital Divide

One of the most common questions I'm being asked these days is from local politicians and economic development folks who want examples of other communities that are tackling and solving the digital divide. I'm able to trot out the big-picture stories because they come to my attention in reading about the industry. As an example, just before I wrote this blog, I read an article that says that the State of Maryland will be providing 150,000 laptops to homes... more

The Cost of Walled-Garden Designs

The Swedish morning daily Svenska Dagbladet on their editorial page yesterday writes about the EU threat to intervene at mobile roaming costs for voice, SMS and data. The editorial is pushing the point that it's wrong for the EU to try and price regulate the market, but instead the free market will prevail. They even seem to be indicating that the current pricing is fair and that an EU price regulation would hamper investments. In very general terms I would agree with the editorial... more

Am I Safer Within an Organization or by Myself?

An Internet Bill of Rights may or may not be a good idea. The point here is that, besides highly commendable topics such as net neutrality and privacy, some of them seem to mandate cybersecurity. Approved in Brazil last May, the Marco Civil includes the principle of preservation of stability, security and functionality of the network, via technical measures consistent with international standards.  more

VoIP’s Threadbare New Clothes

Om has burnt the midnight oil analyzing Vonage's S-1 filing, coming to the conclusion that, while churn may not be as ugly as people thought, it's still cause for concern, and apparently intensifying. His point at the end about definitions is particularly good, as excluding cancellations in the first 30-days is undoubtedly flattering to the numbers. The net present value of Vonage's lifetime customer revenues is an issue which VoIP-watchers have long speculated about with trepidation -- what if marketing spending, churn, and price competition combined to form a toxic soup which fatally poisoned the economic proposition for access-independent VoIP? more

Traditional Big ISPs Stagnate

In the first quarter of this year, the big cable companies added 482,000 customers, while telcos added over 50,000 customers. In what is a surprise to the industry, that growth has disappeared, and all of the big ISPs collectively lost almost 150,000 customers. That's a loss of 60,000 customers for the cable companies and 88,000 for the big telcos. The following statistics have been compiled by the Leichtman Research Group, which tracks the broadband performance of the largest ISPs in the country. more

The 3 Keys to Unlock Your Operational Performance

Like any business, service providers must constantly evaluate the success of their operations. For implementations and installments, this is usually done by setting a strategic objective and then measuring progress made towards completion. But for operational teams, success is often measured by the repeated achievement of daily goals aligned to corporate objectives. Setting these benchmarks and collecting this data is accomplished by frequently running key performance indicators (KPIs). more

Three Reasons Why CISOs Need to Know How Their Company Is Managing Their Domains

Companies today manage hundreds or even thousands of domain names that support their organization, their visitors from different countries, and their brands and trademarks. They register misspelling of their names as a defensive strategy to protect their brand from online fraud, or from losing traffic to simple user typos. more

The New Privacy Law in California

The State of California often leads the country in addressing regulatory issues. This makes sense since the State has a population of nearly 40 million and an economy that would be the fifth largest in the world if California were a separate country. A new law was enacted on the last day of the California Legislature that was signed by Governor Gavin Newson this month. more

ICANN at 20: Looking Back Forward

This year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), marks its 20th anniversary since inception. ICANN was birthed as a result of the infamous DNS Wars - in 1994, the U.S National Science Foundation, the then overseer of the Internet infrastructure decided to sub-contract the management of the Domain Name System (DNS) to a private U.S company called Network Solutions INC (NSI). This move was not well received by the Internet community, culminating in the so-called "DNS Wars" more

IDN ccTLD Fast Track developments

The IDN ccTLD Fast Track program is moving along rapidly, with ICANN's announcement that both the Simplified and Traditional Chinese script versions of .china have passed the string evaluation phase of the IDN ccTLD Fast Track Program. Alongside this, ICANN have also announced the release of a proposed implementation plan for 'Synchronised IDN ccTLDs' that will create the rules by which these variant IDN ccTLDs will coexist. more

How Companies Can Use the UDRP to Combat Rising COVID-19-Related Phishing

Straightforward out-of-court domain name proceeding can provide efficient relief against fraudulent websites and email. Google has seen a steep rise amid the Coronavirus pandemic in new websites set up to engage in phishing (i.e. fraudulent attempts to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and financial details). Companies in all industries - not just the financial sector - are at risk from this nefarious practice. But one relatively simple out-of-court proceeding may provide relief. more

How Much Are You Losing to Internal Fraud?

Think your organization is exempt from in-house network abuse? Think again. A CFCA Global Fraud Survey of communication service providers found that dealer fraud was one of the top five methods of fraud, costing $US 3.35 billion annually. In this scenario, customer service representatives (CSRs) or administrators with access to account information may upgrade friends or family to a premium service package or even provide free access to services. more

Poor Rural Connectivity Costs Lives

The Washington Post wrote an article recently that talked about how poor rural connectivity cost lives during a tornado in Louisiana. Around the country, there are now elaborate alert systems in areas subject to tornados and other dangerous weather events. These alerts have been shown to save lives since they give folks enough time to seek shelter or get out of the path of a storm. more

My Top Takeaways from DNS-OARC 24

The 24th DNS-OARC meeting was held last week in Buenos Aires -- a two-day DNS workshop with amazingly good, consistent content. The programme committee are to be congratulated on maintaining a high quality of presentations. Here are my picks of the workshop. They fall into three groups, covering themes I found interesting... These presentations related to the ongoing problem of DNS as a source of reflection attacks, or a victim of attempted DDoS... more

Will COVID-19 Traffic Kill the Internet?

This is the question being asked all across the industry as the volume of data traffic has leaped upward due to students and employees working from their homes. We got our first glimpse of the impact of the crisis when Verizon announced a week into the crisis that they were seeing a 22% increase in data traffic in their network. More recently, AT&T announced a 27% increase in network traffic. more