Networks

Download Speeds of GSM and 3GSM Networks

ARCchart is selling a new report entitled Mobile Broadband Performance of Carrier Networks. I can't personally justify the purchase, but I notice this wonderful graph in their sample. ARCchart gave mobile users free speed test applications... more

More on Networks and Nationalization With Respect to Cyberwar

As a follow up to Susan Brenner's Networks and Nationalization and my comment there, I will go further in this post and talk about the "cyberwar" and "offense" aspects of her article. I think I made this point elsewhere as well... but before getting into a war, it'd be a brilliant idea to actually know that you can win. Cyberwarfare is the sort of game where you don't really need to be a huge government with the largest standing army in the world and sophisticated weaponry in order to win... more

Iranian Protesters Urged Not to DDoS Gov Sites, Could Backfire as Country’s Networks Are Centralized

In the midst of heavy demonstrations in the street of Iran against current regime and controversial election results, online activist have began organizing online attacks against government websites. Activists are asking supporters to use tools currently being spread via Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites to participate in the attack. However as one blogger writes, the attack might in fact back fire in a country like Iran where network infrastructure is relatively centralized... more

A Closer Look at Iran’s State of Internet, Strange Transit Changes in Wake of Controversial Election

Many media sources have reported outages in Iranian mobile networks and Internet services in the wake of Friday's controversial elections. We took a look at the state of Iranian Internet transit, as seen in the aggregated global routing tables, and found that the story is not as clear-cut as has been reported. There's no question that something large happened in the Iranian telecom space, and that the timing aligns with the close of voting and the emerging controversy... more

Annual Global IP Traffic Will Exceed Two-Third of a Zettabyte in 4 Years

Annual global IP traffic will pass two-thirds of a zettabyte in four years according the Cisco's Visual Networking Index report. The economic downturn has only slightly tempered traffic growth and the global IP traffic is expected to quintuple from 2008 to 2013. Cisco predicts IP traffic to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40%. more

Cyber Security and the White House

A few months ago, an article appeared on arstechnica.com asking the question "Should cybersecurity be managed from the White House?" During the recent presidential elections in the United States and the federal elections in Canada, the two major players in both parties had differing views that crossed borders. In the US, the McCain campaign tended to favor free market solutions to the problem of cybersecurity, and the Conservatives in Canada took a similar position... more

Implications of California Telecom Attack Gone Un-Reported

In an article titled "A Cyber-Attack on an American City", Bruce Perens writes: "Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes serving the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported. That attack demonstrated a severe fault in American infrastructure: its centralization. The city of Morgan Hill and parts of three counties lost 911 service, cellular mobile telephone communications, land-line telephone, DSL internet and private networks, central station fire and burglar alarms, ATMs, credit card terminals, and monitoring of critical utilities..." more

Will ENUM Deliver?

ENUM (E.164 NUmber Mapping) is a technology that has been around for a little while that has promised much and, so far, delivered little to the average user. As Nominet has recently been awarded the contract to administer the UK 4.4.e164.arpa delegation, I thought it was time that I put my thoughts on this subject down in writing. I'm going to cover the potential of ENUM in the telecoms industry and what it could mean to you, along with how it is currently being used and what potential security issues surround ENUM. more

Designing Secure Networks with Cisco Technology, Part 4

In this multipart series I will be presenting some of the leading industry-standard best practices for enterprise network security using Cisco technologies... In Part 3 of this series I began to discuss Cisco technologies as a standard for enterprise data security. In this article we take a look at how Cisco firewall and packet filtering technologies can be used at the network perimeter to enhance enterprise security. more

More Cracks Appearing in Mobile Market

When I wrote the BuddeComm analysis on the introduction of Apple's iPhone I commented that the most significant element of this event was that it would begin to create cracks in the flawed business models of the mobile operators, who are desperately hanging on to their closed networks very much like the fixed operators were fighting tooth and nail against opening up their networks. We have seen that the fixed operators have largely lost this battle and we predict that the future of the mobile networks will be no different... more

The Slow Mainstreaming of IPv6

Slowly, we’re making progress mainstreaming IPv6. I wanted to post on a few interesting developments. Late last month, Netflix got an IPv6 allocation from ARIN, and they’re advertising it in BGP... I look forward to the day I can stream movies to my Netflix set-top box over IPv6. more

Designing Secure Networks with Cisco Technology, Part 1

In this multipart series I will be presenting some of the leading industry-standard best practices for enterprise network security using Cisco technologies.... "Wisdom consists in being able to distinguish among dangers and make a choice of the least harmful." That quote is quite possibly the most accurate depiction possible of the never-ending struggle between network security and corporate budget. Providing a mechanism to defend the enterprise network from every conceivable threat is impossible in terms of both technology and funding. more

VoIP Security Predictions for 2009

Here are my VoIP and Voice security predictions for 2009, limited to just a few, key predictions... The poor economy will slow the adoption rate for VoIP and Unified Communications (UC). This will continue to limit the size of the enterprise VoIP deployments for potential hackers to exploit. VoIP/UC will continue to be mostly an internal/campus application where the threat level for attack is low, so deployments will be largely secured along the same lines as other data network applications. more

Network Solutions Under Large Scale DDoS Attack, Millions of Websites Potentially Unreachable

Network Solutions is having problems with "all" its name servers, according to their tech support and a recent post on North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) mailing list indicates that it has been under very large-scale UDP/53 DDoS attack for the last 48 hour period. As a result, domain names hosted with Network Solutions' Worldnic have been affected. Network Solutions is one of the leading domain registrars and DNS hosting providers in the world, managing more than 7.6 million domain names. more

IPv6… The Dangers of Prolonged Inter AS Tunnel Vision

Tunnel vision is a rather serious medical condition and the Internet or at least a number of service providers could be at risk if not treated soon enough. Symptoms of inter AS (Autonomous System) tunnel vision are many slower connections with IPv6 compared to IPv4 with some failing all together. Reason is that tunnels, especially inter-AS tunnels, can lead to long paths and non-optimal routing. more