This never-ending story is used by opportunistic telcos and their lobbyists to confuse the issue in order to gain regulatory or political advantage. The debate is now raging again in the USA. In an attempt to talk down their monopolistic position in the market the three telcos - and this time in particular, Comcast - are claiming that real competition does in fact exist in the American broadband market, citing competition from the mobile 4G LTE services as an example. more
Last year, I gave a short talk at the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO) Forum in (Abuja, Nigeria) on this topic and I thought I'd offer more details here. Let's say an African government has realised that IPv4 address exhaustion imposes limits its country's ICT development. Initial investigations indicate that deploying IPv6 is the only sustainable solution. Governments are however not very skilled in the bottom-up approach that is popular in the Internet world. more
I can't help but think that the situation in this rather old joke applies very precisely to the current Australian efforts to compel network operators, through some contemplated regulatory instrument, to record and retain network-collected data about their customers' online activities. What I'd like to examine here the emerging picture that while networks, and network operators, make convenient targets for such surveillance efforts, the reality of today's IP network's are far more complex, and Internet networks are increasingly ignorant about what their customers do. more
August 2014 is proving yet again to be an amusing month in the Australian political scene, and in this case the source of the amusement was watching a number of Australian politicians fumble around the topic of digital surveillance and proposed legislation relating to data retention measures. The politicians assured us that the proposed data retention measures were nothing untoward, and all that was being called for was the retention of "metadata" by Australian ISPs for a period of two years. more
At APNIC Labs we've been working on developing a new approach to navigating through some of our data sets the describe aspects of IPv6 deployment, the use of DNSSEC and some measurements relating to the current state of BGP. The intent of this particular set of data collections is to allow the data to be placed into a relative context, displaying comparison of the individual measurements at a level of geographic regions, individual countries, and individual networks. more
The Internet Society (ISOC) has been working with the African Union (AU) to facilitate the African Internet Exchange System (AXIS). This AXIS project funded by the EU-Africa Infrastructure Trust Fund and the Government of Luxembourg will help keep Internet traffic in Africa internal to the continent and avoid expensive international transit costs and delay latency in routing Internet traffic through other continents. more
The Internet Association -- a trade group that represents 36 companies including Google, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo, and PayPal -- submitted comments (PDF) to the Federal Communications Commission on Monday to formally oppose a proposal to let Internet service providers charge content providers for priority access in their networks. The FCC is currently weighing a proposal to establish guidelines to protect the open Internet. more
I'm sure we've all heard about "the open Internet." The expression builds upon a rich pedigree of term "open" in various contexts. For example, "open government" is the governing doctrine which holds that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight, a concept that appears to be able to trace its antecedents back to the age of enlightenment in 17th century Europe. more
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the standards body for the Internet. It is the organization that publishes and maintains the standards describing the Internet Protocol (IP -- versions 4 and 6), and all directly related and supporting protocols, such as TCP, UDP, DNS (and DNSSEC), BGP, DHCP, NDP, the list goes on, and on... But how do they do that? How does the IETF produce documents, and ensure that they are high quality, relevant, and influential? more
A new coalition of public and private entities was launched today with the mission to support the rights of local communities to make their own decisions regarding broadband Internet networks - "unhindered by state laws or other policies that attempt to stifle or preclude local innovation and investment." more
What is the impact of IPv6 on telecommunications, VoIP, unified communications, etc? Why should telecom operators care about IPv6? What VoIP systems already support IPv6? What efforts are underway within organizations like the IETF and the SIP Forum to ensure that telecommunications can work over IPv6? more
The timeline of the Net Neutrality issue has been detailed here. And quoting from Vox: 'Wheeler said that peering is "an issue that we are investigating, it's an issue we are very interested in, but it's not the issue here today."' more
Over the last few years, there has been an increased effort to modernize the U.S. electric grid. Building a "Smart Grid" has been central in the effort to help utilities better manage their resources, minimize power outages and reduce energy consumption. However, adding more electronic devices and sensors to the grid's network has made it a prime target of cyberattacks, like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which if successful, could cause wide-spread disruption of services affecting many other sectors. more
When talking about the problems of attracting infrastructure funds to the telecoms industry, I would make one exception; that is backbone infrastructure... We increasingly describes mobile networks as fibre networks with a wireless access component. This clearly indicates the need for fixed backbone network capacity, eventually all the way to the street. more
Mozilla says that the FCC shouldn't look at an Internet line only as a relationship between an Internet provider and a subscriber. Regulators should formally recognize that there's a third party involved: Content providers such as websites, apps, gaming and more, Mozilla says. more
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