At NANOG 79 earlier this month Craig Labowitz from Nokia Deepfield presented on the impact on the COVID-19 pandemic on Internet use. The approach to the analysis used real-time streaming telemetry from Communication Service Provider (CSP) backbone and aggregation routers, and the data analysis covered content provider networks in North America, Europe and parts of Asia. more
Nokia Deepfield is another company that works in the background on the web, and that analyzes data traffic patterns for the big ISPs. Their June 4 report on web traffic reports about the same thing we're hearing from most large ISPs -- the volume of web traffic suddenly shot up since the onset of the pandemic. Nokia Deepfield says that the increase in traffic has settled in at about a 25% increase over pre-COVID levels. more
How are new technologies adopted in the Internet? What drives adoption? What impedes adoption? These were the questions posed at a panel session at the recent EuroDiG workshop in June. In many ways, this is an uncomfortable question for the Internet, given the Internet's uncontrolled runaway success in its first two decades. The IPv4 Internet was deployed about as quickly as capital, expertise, and resources could be bought to bear on the problem... more
A "New IP" framework was proposed to the ITU last year. This framework envisages a resurgence of a network-centric view of communications architectures where network-managed control mechanisms moderate application behaviors. It's not the first time that we've seen proposals to rethink the underlying architecture of the Internet's technology (for example, there were the "Clean Slate" efforts in the US research community a decade or so ago) and it certainly won't be the last. more
Many organizations and individuals are socially committed and voluntarily help the weak, the poor, and the sick. Others consider how they can contribute. Supporting organizations and individuals by starting an aid project, donating money, or providing human resources, can make a crucial difference. The corona crisis is a challenge for many, if not all. Scientists around the world are experimenting with cures and vaccines, and they need help. However, you don't have to be a virologist to help science fight COVID-19. more
The COVID-19 Pandemic is causing huge social and financial shifts, but so far, its impact on network security has gone under-reported. Yet with thousands of companies worldwide requiring millions of employees to work remotely, network administrators are seeing unprecedented changes in the ways that clients are using their networks and new threats that seek to leverage the current crisis. more
Technology always evolves, and I've been reading about where scientists envision the evolution of 5G. The first generation of 5G, which will be rolled out over the next 3-5 years, is mostly aimed at increasing the throughput of cellular networks. According to Cisco, North American cellular data volumes are growing at a torrid 36% per year, and even faster than that in some urban markets where the volumes of data are doubling every two years. The main goal of the first-generation 5G is to increase network capacity to handle that growth. more
While it might still be too early to make predictions, there are dozens of articles on the web predicting how the COVID-19 pandemic might change our long-term behavior. Here are some of the more interesting predictions I've seen that involve broadband and telecom... Millions of people were sent home for work or school to homes that didn't have good broadband. These folks have been telling the world for years that they don't have good broadband... more
The last few weeks have reinforced the importance of modern communication networks to societies. Health care providers, schools, governments, and businesses all rely on networks that enable us to connect and collaborate remotely. Had we encountered a similar pandemic ten years ago, we would not have been able to continue our activities on the level that is possible today. more
One of the many consequences of the coronavirus is that networks are going to see a shift in busy hour traffic. Busy hour traffic is just what it sounds like -- it's the time of the day when a network is busiest, and network engineers design networks to accommodate the expected peak amount of bandwidth usage. Verizon reported on March 18 that in the week since people started moving to work from home that they've seen a 20% overall increase in broadband traffic. more
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