Networks

FCC Proposes Super Wifi Networks Across the U.S.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing the creation of "Super WiFi" networks across the United States providing free, highspeed, long-range WiFi networks, according to a report from the Washington Post. more

IPv6 Deployment: Just Where Are We?

In this article we'd like to look at some measures of the use of IPv4 and IPv6 protocols in today's Internet and see if we can draw any conclusions about just how far down the track we are with the IPv6 part of dual stack deployment. We'll use a number of measurements that have been made consistently since 1 January 2004 to the present, where we can distinguish between the relative levels of IPv4 and IPv6 use in various ways. more

8 Security Considerations for IPv6 Deployment

Feb. 3, 2011, came and went without much fanfare, but it was a milestone for Internet stakeholders, whether they knew it or not. On that Thursday, the last available IPv4 addresses were allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Though some Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) have a reasonable inventory of IP addresses that could last another year or two, the days of "new" IPv4 address allocations are largely over. more

Revisiting Apple and IPv6

A few weeks ago I wrote about Apple's IPv6 announcements at the Apple Developers Conference. While I thought that in IPv6 terms Apple gets it, the story was not complete and there were a number of aspects of Apple's systems that were not quite there with IPv6. So I gave them a 7/10 for their IPv6 efforts. Time to reassess that score in the light of a few recent posts from Apple. more

IPv6 Security Myth #9: There Aren’t Any IPv6 Security Resources

We are approaching the end of this 10 part series on the most common IPv6 security myths. Now it's time to turn our eyes away from security risks to focus a bit more on security resources. Today's myth is actually one of the most harmful to those who hold it. If you believe that there is no good information out there, it's nearly impossible to find that information. So let's get down to it and dispel our 9th myth. more

Will US Government Directives Spur IPv6 Adoption?

Yesterday, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration of the U.S. government hosted a workshop discussing the state of IPv6 in the United States and its impact on industry, government, and the Internet economy. I was asked to be a panelist, along with industry executives from ARIN, ISOC, ICANN, Comcast, Akamai, Verizon, Google, VeriSign, DOE, NIST, and DREN. Moderated by Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer of the United States and Vivek Kundra, Chief Information Officer of the United States, this was the first event in the past few years to truly shine a spotlight on IPv6 adoption (or lack thereof) and introduce key directives to move this issue forward. more

Still Waiting for IPv6

It's now been a decade since the world officially ran out of blocks of IP addresses. In early 2011 the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) announced that it had allocated the last block of IPv4 addresses and warned ISPs to start using the new IPv6 addresses. But here we are a decade later and not one of my clients has converted to IPv6. more

NANOG 61 - Impressions of Some Presentations

The recent NANOG 61 meeting was a pretty typical NANOG meeting, with a plenary stream, some interest group sessions, and an ARIN Public Policy session. The meeting attracted some 898 registered attendees, which was the biggest NANOG to date. No doubt the 70 registrations from Microsoft helped in this number, as the location for NANOG 61 was in Bellevue, Washington State, but even so the interest in NANOG continues to grow... more

IPv6 Security Myth #6: IPv6 is Too New to be Attacked

Here we are, half-way through this list of the top 10 IPv6 security myths! Welcome to myth #6. Since IPv6 is just now being deployed at any real scale on true production networks, some may think that the attackers have yet to catch up. As we learned in Myth #2, IPv6 was actually designed starting 15-20 years ago. While it didn't see widespread commercial adoption until the last several years, there has been plenty of time to develop at least a couple suites of test/attack tools. 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

Beyond Neutrality - Enabling a World of Connected Things

The growing interest in the "Internet of Things" is forcing us to think beyond the web to a much larger world of connected devices. We can tolerate the many barriers to connectivity because we expect that someone can provide the necessary credentials to log in to the providers' services and to adjust Wi-Fi access keys whenever the access point changes or simply to click "agree" at a hotspot. This doesn't work for "things" which can't recognize a sign-on or "agree screen". more

IPv6 Security Myth #7: 96 More Bits, No Magic

This week's myth is interesting because if we weren't talking security it wouldn't be a myth. Say what? The phrase "96 more bits, no magic" is basically a way of saying that IPv6 is just like IPv4, with longer addresses. From a pure routing and switching perspective, this is quite accurate. OSPF, IS-IS, and BGP all work pretty much the same, regardless of address family. Nothing about finding best paths and forwarding packets changes all that much from IPv4 to IPv6. more

Silvia Hagen: It’s Not About IPv6 Transition But Urgent Integration

As the IPv4 address pool is rapidly reaching exhaustion, Silvia Hagen, a leading expert on IPv6 and the author of O'Reilly's book, "IPv6 Essentials," stresses that a primary step towards IPv6 address space is not about "transition" but "integration". IPv4 and IPv6 are going to co-exist for many years to come and so what companies need to do, in the first place, is to look at their IPv4 landscape and identify areas of priority, Hagen said in a recent interview with CircleID. more

Cloud Is the New Mainframe

Cloud computing, from a business and management perspective, has a great deal in common with mainframe computing. Mainframes are powerful, expensive and centralized pieces of computing equipment. This is in line with their role as infrastructure for mission-critical applications. For these types of applications, mainframes can be fairly efficient, even though they tend to need large teams of support specialists... Cloud computing is a new style of computing... more

Analysis of 7.5 Trillion DNS Queries Reveals Public Resolvers Dominate the Internet

A recent report by NS1 provides a comprehensive look at global DNS traffic trends. It reveals that public resolvers dominate the internet, accounting for nearly 60% of recursive DNS usage. Telecom giants represent nearly 9%, with Google the clear front-runner at a little over 30%, followed by Amazon Web Services at 16%. more