Here are the top ten most popular news, blogs, and industry updates featured on CircleID during 2012 based on the overall readership of the posts for the past 12 months. Congratulations to all the participants whose posts reached top readership and best wishes to the entire community for 2013. more
I recently talked about the top trends of 2012. Well, now it's time for me to look into my crystal ball and predict the future. I believe that this year we'll see great developments when it comes to TR-069. I know you'll say that this was a trend last year, but I'm confident that 2013 is the year that this protocol will really shine. more
Well, 2012 is almost over, and we can now reflect on the major events that hit our industry this year. If I had to choose the top three trends from the past 12 months, they would have to be: 1. Over-the-top (OTT) services; 2. IPv6 deployments (finally!); 3. TR-069 adoption. Let's examine each of these in more detail. more
I'm a network engineer, and like many engineers I often gravitate to the big projects; large networks with problems of scale and complexity in my case. However, I also consider myself a student of Occam's razor and often quote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." In this spirit of "less is more" I have recently become intrigued by the problems appearing in home networking. more
The Internet has managed to collect its fair share of mythology, and one of the more persistent myths is that from its genesis in a cold war US think tank in the 1960's the Internet was designed with remarkable ability to "route around damage." Whether the story of this cold war think tank is true or not, the adoption of a stateless forwarding architecture, coupled with a dynamic routing system, does allow the network to "self-heal" under certain circumstances. Can we see this self-healing in today's network? more
Hurricane Sandy caused major damage in both the Caribbean and the North-Eastern part of the USA. In an earlier article (RIPE Atlas - Superstorm Sandy) we showed data on 15 RIPE Atlas probes that are located in or near the affected areas in the USA. Most of these locations now appear to be back to normal round trip times to targets we monitor. But the effects of Hurricane Sandy were felt beyond the immediately affected area. more
The Copyright Alert System, the result of a deal between big content and big ISPs, is a graduated response program - popularly known as the six strikes - that escalates from nastygrams, to copyright school, to Internet throttling. Just like SOPA/PIPA, enforcement targets will be arbitrarily selected by the content owners, but unlike SOPA/PIPA there will be no appeal via the courts - only to an arbitration firm hired by the program. more
I'm writing this in the midst of policy discussions between the Internet world (as embodied in ISOC) and the Telecommunications industry (ITU). The Internet and Telecommunications are very different concepts. The Internet allows us to focus on the task at hand. That's why it is so exciting. Historically telecommunication assumed value was created inside the network and this creates conflict with creating value outside the network. more
Hurricane Sandy has been a badly needed wake up call for the Internet community as to the threat of climate change. Although most people have forgotten, Sandy is the second hurricane to hit New York in as many years with Irene last August and a third tropical depression headed to New York at the time of this writing. Two, supposedly once in a hundred year storms, within such a short time frame should even make the most die-hard denialist that something's afoot. more
There is no doubt that any national infrastructure plan of the magnitude of national broadband networks as they are currently rolled out in 9 countries and which policies have been put in place in another 110 countries will have questions attached to it. Furthermore, this infrastructure is being developed for the digital economy, which, in itself, is a fast-moving world. Five years ago there were no smartphones, tablets, mobile apps or smart TVs. more
The enormous growth in mobile usage, doubling each year, is set to continue for several years in a row. According to Ericsson, by 2020 mobile operators will need to provide one thousand times the capacity that was required in 2010. Our assessment at BuddeComm is that the mobile industry has already fallen behind in delivering the capacity needed today, let alone coping with the enormous growth ahead; and that this situation will deteriorate before it improves. more
The fixed broadband network is the infrastructure needed to meet the needs, both economic and societal, of developed markets. While some people in some developed markets have abandoned their fixed telephone connection in favour of all-mobile solutions, the majority (90% plus) still have both a fixed and a mobile connection... And so wireless broadband and FttH will develop, in a complementary and harmonious way. There are several reasons for this. more
The idea of tracking data outages spawned from an early discussion on the outages forum including feedback from an outages survey about having a status page for (un)planned outages as a central resource. The purpose of such effort is to have a wider focus that one could view as opposed to having to check dozens of provider status pages. There were many ideas put forth but nothing really panned out and things kinda fell on the back burner. more
Google has officially rolled out its long-touted Google Fiber Project showcasing what broadband should look and feel like to all users. Yes, it sets the new standard for broadband connections with a 1Gig speedster, over 100 times faster than current broadband offerings in the U.S. Not-withstanding, just speed will not be the determining success factor; the availability of competitive programming will become the deciding judgment in Google's move to tout reasonable costs to bundled broadband. more
The Google Fiber project is receiving international attention. This in itself is a good thing, since it brings the benefits of high-speed FttH infrastructure to the attention of large numbers of people in business and government who will not have to deal with such developments on a regular basis... At the same time we have to look at Google Fiber from the point of view of operating in the American regulatory environment. Yes, we can all learn from its disruptive model, and particularly when the results of the more innovative elements of the services begin to kick in; but for other reasons there is no way that this model can be replicated elsewhere. more
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