Today's announcement from the Commission that it intends to roll back the exercise of Title II utility-style regulation over "any person engaged in the provision of broadband internet access service" at its 14 December meeting is the right step. As a veteran of 40 years of internet related regulatory wars in the FCC and numerous other venues, the Commission's decision and the actual Rules promulgated in the February 2015 Report & Order stand among the most ill-considered application of authority and regulatory gerrymandering ever witnessed. more
In an earlier post, I described Havana's community network, SNET, and wondered what it could become if the government and ETECSA were willing to legitimatize and support it. Spain's Guifi.net provides a possible answer to that question. Guifi.net is said to be the largest community network in the world. It began in 2004 and has grown to have 34,165 nodes online with 16,758 planned, 407 building, 612 testing and 4,043 inactive. more
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai today released a statement on his draft "Restoring Internet Freedom Order", circulated to Commissioners this morning and will be voted on at the FCC's Open Meeting on December 14 more
I've written several posts on Cuba's user-deployed street networks (SNET), the largest of which is SNET in Havana. (SNET was originally built by the gaming community, but the range of services has grown substantially). My posts and journalist's accounts like this one describe SNET, but a new paper presents SNET measurement data as well as descriptive material. more
Consumers are embracing VoIP services now more than ever as they get used to calling over Internet application services such as Skype, Facetime, and Google Hangouts. Market Research Store predict that the global value of the VoIP services market is expected to reach above USD140 billion in 2021, representing a compound annual growth rate of above 9.1% between 2016 and 2021. more
In case you missed it (you probably didn't), the Internet was hit with the Monday blues this week. As operator-focused lists and blogs identified, "at 17:47:05 UTC yesterday (6 November 2017), Level 3 (AS3356) began globally announcing thousands of BGP routes that had been learned from customers and peers and that were intended to stay internal to Level 3. By doing so, internet traffic to large eyeball networks like Comcast and Bell Canada, as well as major content providers like Netflix, was mistakenly sent through Level 3's misconfigured routers." more
Monday saw a nationwide series of outages due to a misconfiguration at Level 3, an internet backbone company. more
RIPE held its 75th meeting in Dubai in mid-October. As usual, there was a diverse set of presentations covering a broad range of activities that are taking place on today's Internet. The topics include issues relating to network operations, regulatory policies, peering and interconnection, communications practices within data centers, IPv6, the DNS, routing and network measurement. If that's not enough, the topic of the Internet of Things has been added as a Working Group in the RIPE pantheon. If you add address policy, database and RIPE services to the mix, you get a pretty packed five days with topics that would appeal to most Internet folks. more
In 1990, Teledesic was formed to deliver satellite-based Internet service. Cellular pioneer Craig McCaw, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal were early investors and Boeing was both an investor and the prime contractor. Teledesic hoped to offer global Internet connectivity using a constellation of 840 satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) at an altitude of 700 km... Teledesic failed. Twenty seven years later three companies SpaceX, OneWeb and Boeing are trying to do what Teledesic could not do. Will they succeed? more
On the 25th of September, the northern autonomous region of Iraq known as Kurdistan voted to become an independent country. This vote has led to a current standoff between the central Iraqi government and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), with the Kurds threatening to cut off internet service into Iraq in retaliation for any punitive measures inflicted by Baghdad on the KRG. The following analysis was written by Doug Madory of Oracle Dyn after ISIS took control of Mosul, Iraq in 2014. It describes how the internet of Iraq came to be dependent on international connections through telecoms based in Kurdistan. more
In 2015, ETECSA announced/leaked a plan to make ADSL service available in 50% of Cuban homes by 2020. I was skeptical. Doing so would mean investing a lot of money for obsolete technology between 2015 and 2020. They have recently announced the availability of ADSL connectivity at homes in portions of seven cities and, by December, they say some home connectivity will be available in every province. more
Three companies, SpaceX, OneWeb and Boeing have announced ambitious plans to put thousands of Internet-service satellites in non-geostationary low-Earth orbit (NGSO) and other companies like ViaSat and SES are currently operating hundreds of communication satellites in medium-Earth and higher, geostationary orbits. With so many satellites orbiting in different planes and at different altitudes, there are bound to be frequent "inline events"... more
The FCC has granted Alphabet's Project Loon an experimental license to operate in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands for the purpose of helping the islands regain Internet connectivity. more
Network experts monitoring North Korea have detected activation of a new internet path out of North Korea. Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Dyn, along with North Korea expert Martyn Williams, report that at 09:07:51 UTC on 1 October 2017, the country's single internet provider, Star JV (AS131269), gained a new connection to the global internet through Russian fixed-line provider Transtelecom (AS20485), often referred to as TTK. more
Most service providers are aware that there needs to be a simple, fast way to identify subscribers. Unfortunately, in reality, mapping IP addresses back to subscribers for identification purposes - such as lawful interception requests or acceptable use policy violations - can be complicated. It usually involves analyzing data sets, completing manual audits, or reliance on multi-step solutions. more
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