Networks

Asia Pacific IPv4 Exhausted, Becomes First Region Unable to Meet IPv4 Demand

Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) today announced it has reached the last block of its available pool of IPv4 addresses. The day is marked as key turning point which initiates a major change in regional delegation policy. more

A Closer Look at the ‘Level 3 + Global Crossing’ Union

On Monday, 11 April 2011, Level 3 announced they had entered a definitive agreement to acquire Global Crossing. According to the Renesys Market Intelligence rankings, this merger would bring together the world's #1 and #2 global providers, with over half the Internet market on earth dependent on the combined entity. If the deal gained regulatory approval in the US and elsewhere today, how would the Internet provider landscape change? We'll answer that question in this blog, giving the proposed union a fictional name of Level Crossing for the purposes of our discussion. more

Major International Botnet Disabled Says U.S. Department of Justice

The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI announced on Wednesday that they have taken actions to disable an international botnet of more than two million infected computers responsible for stealing corporate data including user names, passwords and financial information. more

Unlimited Bandwidth is Disrupting Infrastructure Models

Over the last ten years we have heard a lot about edge-based services. These were needed to enable the operation of applications at the edge of the network, as the lack of available bandwidth capacity made it difficult to do so over the core network. However, with the prospect of limitless bandwidth the design of the network is changing again. more

North American Broadband Trends

The broadband sector, like the wireless sector, is one of the strongest growth areas of telecommunications. Unlike most OECD countries, where DSL tends to dominate, the majority of subscribers in the US fixed broadband market are cable subscribers. During 2010 the gap continued to widen as the cable companies accounted for 70% of new broadband subscribers compared to the telcos' 30%. Although new broadband networks such as FttH and WiMAX are being widely deployed, broadband competition in each region is still generally limited to one DSL and one cable operator. more

Cloud Services Drive Data Center Markets

Research from Infonetics shows that last year was a strong year for data centre network equipment sales, due to a rebound from bare-bones 2009 spending levels and, more importantly, fundamental trends favouring investments in the data centre, such as the explosion of content and traffic, use of virtualization, and increasingly, cloud-based services and architectures. more

Old Cloud vs. New Cloud

Images of clouds have been used when discussing networks for quite some time. When traditional telecoms companies were selling point-to-point circuits a drawing of a cloud was sometimes used. The cloud symbol helped indicate the provider?s domain of responsibility, effectively hid the internal complexity of the network and focused on the end user. This was all fine when the product offered was an end-to-end circuit. more

DNSSEC - Let’s Stay the Course!

I don't know about you, but I'm starting to think that DNSSEC being so hot these days is a mixed blessing. Yes, it's wonderful that after so many years there is finally broad consensus for making DNSSEC happen. But being so prominent also means the protocol is taking shots from those who don't want to make the necessary software, hardware and operational modifications needed. And DNSSEC has taken some shots from those who just want to be contrarian. more

Caidagram: Visualising Geographically Annotated Internet Measurements

With measurement networks rapidly evolving up to hundreds of nodes, it becomes more and more challenging to extract useful visualisations from tons of collected data. At the same time, geographical information related to Internet measurements (either known or inferred with state-of-the-art techniques) can be exploited to build tools based on geography as a common knowledge base. We wanted to develop a tool to visualise different classes of geographically annotated Internet data, e.g., topology, address allocation, DNS and economical data. more

Collecting Cybercrime Data: Can Signal Spam Be a Piece of the Puzzle?

The gathering of coherent data on cybercrime is a problem most countries haven't found a solution for. So far. In 2011 it is a well known fact that spam, cybercrime and botnets are all interrelated. The French database Signal Spam may be a significant part of the solution to gather, analyse and distribute data on spam, phishing, cybercrimes and botnets, but also be a forum in which commercial mass e-mail senders and ISPs can work on trust. more

IPv6: The High VoLTEage Telephony Generator

According to IDC, smartphones outsold personal computers, laptops included in Q4 2010! Nokia just announced the demise of the Venerable Symbian in favour of Windows 7 phone and Microsoft's bing search engine! Tectonic shifts are under way to adapt to the rise of wireless broadband, an all IP world, and the growing weight of Apple and Google Android. It is also time to head once again for Barcelona with the Mobile World Congress starting on the 14th. Highlights this year? more

Rise of the Caribbean Mobile Market

It is no secret that in the Caribbean people are crazy about their cell phones. In fact, the Caribbean has one of the highest levels of mobile phone penetration in the world. According to a report from BuddeComm, an Australia-based telecom research firm, mobile phone penetration in Latin America and the Caribbean reached an estimated 80% in early 2009, well above the world average which was about 58%. The report stated that Latin America and the Caribbean together now account for an estimated 12% of the world's 3.97 billion mobile subscribers. more

Recent Enhancements to ARIN’s whoIS-RWS Service

ARIN deployed a series of enhancements to its Whois-RWS service today. This includes enabling CIDR support and IPv6 lookups in the search box on the web page, provided plain text rendering of lists of ASNs and networks on the web - plus enhanced CIDR query matching on WHOIS port 43. more

Internet Service Restored in Egypt

Renesys reports that Internet services in Egypt have been restored. According to the report, Egyptian Internet providers returned to the Internet at 09:29:31 UTC (11:29am Cairo time). "Websites such as the Egyptian Stock Exchange, Commercial International Bank of Egypt, MCDR, and the US Embassy in Cairo, are once again reachable. All major Egyptian ISPs appear to have readvertised routes to their domestic customer networks in the global routing table."
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DDoS Attack Size Breaks 100 Gbps for First Time, Up 1000% Since 2005

"2010 should be viewed as the year distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks became mainstream as many high profile attacks were launched against popular Internet services and other well known targets," reports Arbor Networks in its just released Sixth Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report. According to the report, the year also witnessed a sharp escalation in the scale and frequency of DDoS attack activity on the Internet. The 100 Gbps attack barrier was reached for the first time while application layer attacks hit an all-time high. Service providers experienced a marked impact on operational expense, revenue loss and customer churn as a result. more