Networks

Canadian Telcos Fast Tracking FttH to Combat Cable Operators

There are a number of stimuli which are pushing Canada's burgeoning FttH market, and the government and telcos alike have made significant steps to improve the reach and capacity of broadband infrastructure. These measures will show real benefits for consumers in recent years. From the government's side, its Economic Action Plan, launched in 2009 as a response to the global financial crisis, included a pledge to provide $225 million over three years towards its Broadband Canada Program, geared to extending broadband coverage to underserved communities. more

Growth in IPv6-Capable DNS Infrastructure

In our last post on CircleID we showed encouraging growth in the number of IPv6-enabled networks. But announcing an IPv6 prefix is only one of the first steps a network operator should take when deploying IPv6. For a full IPv6 deployment, IPv6 needs to be enabled on network infrastructure and made available to end users. One key piece of infrastructure for which we can measure IPv6 capabilities are DNS resolvers. more

The Top 3 Emerging Threats on the Internet

Last week at RSA, Bruce Schneier gave a talk on the top 3 emerging threats on the Internet. Whereas we in the security field usually talk about spam, malware and cyber crime, he talked about three meta-trends that all have the potential to be more dangerous than the cybercriminals. Here are my notes. more

MegaBust’s MegaQuestions Cloud the Net’s Future

Mid-January 2012 marked a major inflection point for digital copyright policy in the United States... Yet no one involved with Congressional interaction on either side of the issue believes it has been sidetracked for long, and "Hollywood" and "Silicon Valley" are both plotting their next moves in this high-stakes game to further define the responsibilities and potential liabilities... The resolution of this dispute will determine the ability of Internet services to move to "the cloud"... more

Cloud Computing’s Concealed Complexity

James Urquhart claims Cloud is complex - deal with it, adding that "If you are looking to cloud computing to simplify your IT environment, I'm afraid I have bad news for you" and citing his earlier CNET post drawing analogies to a recent flash crash. Cloud computing systems are complex, in the same way that nuclear power stations are complex - they also have catastrophic failure modes... more

Protecting Intellectual Property is Good; Mandatory DNS Filtering is Bad

It has been about six months since I got together with four of my friends from the DNS world and we co-authored a white paper which explains the technical problems with mandated DNS filtering. The legislation we were responding to was S. 968, also called the PROTECT-IP act, which was introduced this year in the U. S. Senate. By all accounts we can expect a similar U. S. House of Representatives bill soon, so we've written a letter to both the House and Senate, renewing and updating our concerns. more

Making Internet Faster: Google, OpenDNS and Others Announce Joint Effort

Google, OpenDNS, content delivery networks and other operators have announced a joint effort called "The Global Internet Speedup," to "make the Internet faster". According to the group, this collaboration will be executed via an open IETF proposed standard called "edns-client-subnet" in order to help better direct content to users thereby decreasing latency, decreasing congestion, increasing transfer speeds and helping the Internet to scale faster and further. more

Two Stage Filtering for IPv6 Electronic Mail

I'm a guest at the MAAWG conference in San Francisco this week and several people have now mentioned to me the problem and the opportunity of anti-spam e-mail filtering for IPv6. Tomorrow is World IPv6 Day but since a bunch of the pieces have clicked together in my head I'll post this a day early. more

Syrian Internet Shutdown

James Cowie from Renesys reports: "Starting at 3:35 UTC today (6:35am local time), approximately two-thirds of all Syrian networks became unreachable from the global Internet. Over the course of roughly half an hour, the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table." more

Court Approves Nortel’s Sale of IPv4 Addresses to Microsoft

Yesterday morning (26-April-2011), in US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, Judge Kevin Gross signed an order authorizing Nortel's sale of IPv4 addresses to Microsoft. This is an important moment for the Internet community, as it represents the beginning of a new market-based mechanism for the distribution of scarce IPv4 address resources. As the various Regional Internet Registry (RIR) organizations exhaust their supply, traditional "needs-based" distribution will become impossible. more

7 Must Have Attributes of an IP Address Management System

Exponential growth of networks combined with the complexity introduced by IT initiatives e.g. VoIP, Cloud computing, server virtualization, desktop virtualization, IPv6 and service automation has required network teams to look for tools to automate IP address management (IPAM). Automated IPAM tools allow administrators to allocate subnets, allocate/track/reclaim IP addresses and provide visibility into the networks. Here are some examples of what a typical IPAM tool can do... more

Cable Trounces the Telcos

Yesterday, Netflix posted graphs of how well various ISPs deal with Netflix video streams. The results are striking. All the cable companies easily beat all the phone companies with the exception of Verizon where we're seeing a mix of DSL and FiOS results. more

Facebook Outage Possibly Global

Craig Labovitz reporting from Arbor Networks: "We use ATLAS data to graph Facebook (AS32934) traffic with 80 ISPs around the world between 5pm September 22 and 5pm EDT today. You can see Facebook traffic plummet around 1:30pm and return shortly after 4pm. From a quick glance at the data, the outage appears to be global (impacting most of the 80 ISPs)." more

Network Complexity: Three Trends That are Contributing to a “Perfect Storm”

Most everyone who visits CircleID is familiar with Moore's Law, which stated simply holds that computing power doubles every 18 months. This has been going on since the 1960s and shows no sign of slowing. Moore's Law drives faster and faster computing, which produces more and more data and network complexity. This inexorable trend is putting immense pressure on corporate networks, and the strain is too much for many of them to handle on their own. more

Resources for Cleaning Your Network

The first step (but certainly not the last) towards saving the internet from spam, malware, and other abuse is to keep your own network clean. A friend of CAUCE, who wishes to remain anonymous, offers these tips and resources to help you identify problem traffic emanating from your network, and clean it up. Though primarily written for ISPs, many of the items below should apply equally well to any network owner. more