WHOIS Policy at ICANN Continues to Fail

ICANN has once again acceded to the wants of contracted parties and is at risk of abdicating its duty to act in the global public interest when it comes to WHOIS policy. Its inability or unwillingness to date to reign in bad WHOIS policy, driven by contracted party interests, flies in the face of its previously-expressed policy goal “to ensure the continued availability of WHOIS to the greatest extent possible while maintaining the security and stability of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers.” more

Fixing the Supply Chain

Almost everybody in the broadband industry is now aware that the industry is suffering supply chain issues. ISPs are having problems obtaining many of the components needed to build a fiber network in a timely manner, which is causing havoc with fiber construction projects. I've been doing a lot of investigation into supply chain issues, and it turns out the supply chain is a lot more complex than I ever suspected, which means it's not going to be easy to get the supply chain back to normal. more

A Note to PhDs Transferring From Academia to the ML Industry

Congratulations. You have successfully defended your PhD dissertation, and it was a defining moment in your life. Your professorial experience and teaching assistant credentials are finally going to pay off. Further, you might have hundreds of citations, and PhDs are sought after because of their subject matter expertise. Well, that is OK. All that hard work and discipline allows you to use your newly earned moniker and seek out additional opportunities, either within the scope of academia or corporate options. Wait, Wait, Wait, not so fast. If you are thinking of just strolling into the industry and immediately begin earning a six-figure salary, think again, my friend. more

The Future of Satellite Broadband

People ask me a lot about what Starlink means for somebody building a rural broadband network. That set me to contemplate the long-term prospects for LEO satellite broadband. Today, the broadband provided by Starlink is a boon to rural subscribers who have had no alternatives. Hundreds of thousands of prospective customers have gotten onto the Starlink waiting list. It's not hard to understand why when the rural broadband alternatives are extraordinarily slow rural DSL, high orbit satellite broadband, or cellular hotspots. more

Fifty Years On – What to Expect in the Next 50 Years of the Internet

When did the Internet begin? It all gets a bit hazy after so many years, but by the early 1970s, research work in packet-switched networks was well underway, and while it wasn't running TCP at the time (the flag day when the ARPANET switched over to use TCP was not until 1 January 1983) but there was the base datagram internet protocol running in the early research ARPA network in the US. Given that this is now around 50 years ago, and given that so much has happened in the last 50 years, what does the next 50 years have in store? more

Multi-Orbit Broadband Internet Service

Three satellite companies, SES, Telesat, and Hughes, are working toward integrated, multi-orbit broadband Internet service and Eutelsat may join them... It is too soon for these companies to be offering integrated multi-orbit services, but they have begun testing and demonstrating switching and antenna technology. more

Why Domain Security Is Your First Line of Defense to Mitigate Phishing Attacks

According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), most cyberattacks, including ransomware and business email compromise, begin with phishing. Although losses due to ransomware now exceed billions annually, most ransomware protection and response measures don't protect against the most common phishing attacks. Established research shows that phishing attacks most commonly occur from a maliciously registered, confusingly similar domain name, a compromised or hijacked legitimate domain name, or via email header spoofing. more

Explaining Growth in Broadband Demand

I haven't talked about the growth of broadband usage for a while. However, I was explaining the exponential growth of broadband usage to somebody recently, and I suddenly realized an easy way for putting broadband growth into context. The amount of data used by the average broadband user has been doubling roughly every three years since the advent of the Internet. This exponential growth has been chugging along since the earliest dial-up days, and we're still seeing it today. more

RealTimeML Email Recommendation Engine Part V: Sentiment Analysis

In our continuing series on RealTime machine learning recommendations for email, we will discuss the importance of Sentiment Analysis in RealTime for Email. The initial feedback we've received from the field to develop a Sentiment Analysis model has been extraordinary. We initially want to dissect why we feel this model is essential, determine the components needed to serve real-time machine learning recommendations for higher engagement rates before the campaign send, and tailoring sentiment to the types of emails companies send. more

CENTR Publishes the CENTRstats Global TLD Report for Q2 2021

CENTR has published the latest edition of its CENTRstats Global TLD report, a quarterly publication that presents statistics and trends in domain name registrations of European country-code domains and the wider global market. more

Key Findings from the 2021 Domain Security Report

With cybercrime on the rise, companies in 2021 have experienced increased ransomware attacks, business email compromise (BEC), phishing attacks, supply chain attacks, and online brand and trademark abuse. While domain cyber risk is rising, the level of action being taken by Forbes Global 2000 companies to improve their domain security posture has remained unchanged, leaving these companies exposed to even more risk. The risk of not addressing your domain security can be catastrophic. more

Our New Infrastructure

Today, there is demand for more broadband as people realize the importance of being connected to the Internet, whether to access websites, stream entertainment, attend school, attend family events, work remotely, and so much more. This demand has been driven by the success of today's Internet. It is now time to recognize the Internet as infrastructure. The Internet's best-effort approach has allowed us to share the abundant capacity latent in the existing facilities by converting all traffic into packets. more

What Is the Domain Name Expiry Cycle and Why Should You Know About It?

Domain names are registered by the thousands every day. In July 2021, 236,336 domains were newly registered daily on average across all top-level domains (TLDs). Tens of thousands were also newly expired. Other months could be just as busy. "Newly registered" and "newly expired." Those are two terms I often get questions about. Newly registered domains are domains that someone just reserved, typically through a registrar or web hosting company. Newly expired domains, meanwhile, are those domains that someone had reserved but decided to let go for one reason or another. more

Improvements in Undersea Fiber

We often forget that a lot of things we do on the web rely on broadband traffic that passes through undersea cables. Any web traffic from overseas gets to the US through one of the many underwater fiber routes. Like with all fiber technologies, the engineers and vendors have regularly been making improvements. The technology involved in undersea cables is quite different than what is used for terrestrial fibers. A long fiber route includes repeater sites where the light signal is refreshed. Without repeaters, the average fiber light signal will die within about sixty miles. more

The Beginnings of 8K Video

In 2014 I wrote a blog asking if 4K video was going to become mainstream. At that time, 4K TVs were just hitting the market and cost $3,000 and higher. There was virtually no 4K video content on the web other than a few experimental videos on YouTube. But in seven short years, 4K has become a standard technology. Netflix and Amazon Prime have been shooting all original content in 4K for several years, and the rest of the industry has followed. more