Over on the Network Neutrality Squad yesterday, I noted, without comment, the following quote from the new Time Warner Cable privacy policy bill insert: "Operator's system, in delivering and routing the ISP Services, and the systems of Operator's Affiliated ISPs, may automatically log information concerning Internet addresses you contact, and the duration of your visits to such addresses." Today I will comment, and explain why such logging by ISPs creates a clear case for regulatory intervention, on both privacy and competition grounds. more
May become the access answer for many at the end of the road. The icicle dripping dish in the picture is the antenna for Starlink, a satellite-based broadband service from SpaceX -- one of Elon Musk's other companies. It came Saturday, just before the snow arrived here in Stowe, VT. It's heated, so I didn't have to shovel it out, and it's working despite its frozen beard. The pandemic has shown us that it is socially irresponsible to leave any family without broadband access. more
Digital Transformation (DX) is picking up speed. According to a recent announcement by IDC, the market is expected to grow at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.9% to reach a whopping 321 billion dollars by 2021. In 2018 alone, IDC expects that 326 billion will be spent on transforming how people and things communicate. Based on these numbers, it looks like Digital Transformation has become the real deal. more
Pretty much as long as there've been computers, one of the biggest challenges has been user education. How do you create software smart enough to inform a user when they're about to do something potentially disastrous - or, worse, when something disastrous has been done to them? As one of the world's largest access providers, Comcast has put a ton of thought into developing a notification system for their users. The solution Comcast developed involves, in effect, hijacking HTTP requests... more
On Monday, the Trump administration announced plans to auction off 100 megahertz of mid-band spectrum dedicated initially to military purposes for commercial use starting in mid-2022 to fuel 5G network deployment in the United States. more
In a non-operational NANOG discussion about Google bandwidth uses, several statements were made. It all started from the following post by Mark Boolootian: "Cringley has a theory and it involves Google, video, and oversubscribed backbones..." The following comment has to be one of the most important comments in the entire article and its a bit disturbing... more
The dream of a faster, safer, more affordable Internet in the Caribbean sometimes seems elusive. One group of Internet pioneers is taking steps to make it a reality. The Caribbean Peering and Interconnection Forum, or simply CarPIF, is an annual event that brings together the people responsible for delivering Internet services to the region, including internet service providers, internet exchange point operators, content delivery networks, data centre managers and other computer network professionals. more
The best engineers on the planet are coming to the same conclusion: a hybrid 4G/WiFi/landline network is the way to meet mobile demand. Folks like John Donovan of AT&T and Masayoshi Son of Softbank in Japan had this vision around 2007-2008. As the iPhone/iPad/Android made the coming demand clear, networks planners around the world evolved similar strategies. more
As if we didn't have a long enough list of problems to worry about, Lumen researchers at its Black Lotus Labs recently released a blog that said that it knows of three U.S. ISPs and one in India was hacked this summer. Lumen said the hackers took advantage of flaws in software provided by Versa Networks being used to manage wide-area networks. more
Today, in response to "It’s The Internet Stupid", Richard Bennett highlights (on the IP List) something I've noticed even among other advocates of 'Net Neutrality' (and how I've come to detest the term after its widespread and misguided overuse). Legislating against the concepts of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) or other preferential treatment of packets is not the brightest thing to do. I've seen others draw analogies to gun control using the 'guns don't kill people' argument... more
Unlike Bezos and Branson, they're going to stay there. Today we have space-based internet access and a terrestrial internet; within ten years, we'll have a space-based internet. Internet traffic will travel more miles in space than on terrestrial fiber. By that time, the great cloud data centers of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and their competitors and successors will mostly be in orbit as well. Five years from now, this transition will be obvious, accepted, and well underway... more
In this post I'd like to discuss the threat widely circulated insecure broadband routers pose today. We have touched on it before. Today, yet another public report of a vulnerable DSL modem type was posted to bugtraq, this time about a potential WIRELESS flaw with broadband routers being insecure at Deutsche Telekom. I haven't verified this one myself but it refers to "Deutsche Telekom Speedport w700v broadband router"... more
Canada has made impressive progress in mobile broadband deployment in recent months. This is partly due to operators needing to arrest falls in revenue from mobile voice services by buttressing their data capabilities, as also by the stimulus to the market introduced through the auction of Advanced Wireless Services spectrum in 2008. This auction overhauled the wireless market, introducing a number of smaller players which have added to the competitive mix as well as furthered the development of LTE. more
I have written a lot about the potential of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites for Internet service, but have not said much about medium-Earth orbit (MEO) satellites - until now. O3b (other three billion) is an MEO-satellite Internet service provider. Greg Wyler founded the company, and it was subsequently acquired by SES, a major geostationary-orbit (GSO) satellite company. (Wyler moved on to found future LEO Internet service provider OneWeb). more
Netscout recently released its latest Threat Intelligence Report that documents DDoS attacks in the second half of 2024. As has been the trend for many years, the largest target of DDoS attacks has been ISP networks. There were over 8.9 million DDoS attacks documented in the second half of last year, up 12.75% over the first half of the year. more