Across the Internet, yesterday, Google users twittered, blogged and emailed that Google search and mail were not usable. And, yesterday afternoon, on Google’s official blog, Urs Hoelzle reported that Google “direct[ed] some […] web traffic through Asia”... Even though Google is very well-connected to a diverse set of other networks, two of these relationships predominate. It is through these relationships that much of the Internet reaches Google... more
Senior Research Engineer, Doug Madory at Renesys reports: "A few hours ago, we observed a total Internet blackout in Sudan and, as we publish this blog, the Internet remains largely unavailable. By count of impacted networks, it is the largest national blackout since Egypt disconnected itself in January 2011. The massive outage came as the government began a violent crackdown on protests triggered by the government’s decision to end fuel subsidies." more
Verizon and AWS have deepened their collaboration to build dedicated fiber infrastructure, addressing the growing need for low-latency, high-capacity connectivity to support the rapid expansion of enterprise-scale artificial intelligence workloads. more
Grant Gross of IDG News report: "The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will launch an investigation into exclusive handset deals between mobile carriers and handset makers, acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps said. Copps has instructed FCC staff to open an inquiry into exclusive handset deals, he said during a speech at the Pike and Fischer Broadband Summit Thursday." more
Large Communication Service Providers (CSPs) that provide transit to their customers need to pay special attention to those network segments to ensure that the IPs associated to them are actually being used. What happens should that customer move on or require more (or less) IP real estate? What do communication and management processes look like to ensure that all the various departments are aligned for rapid and seamless network configuration changes with no downtime? more
Russian submarines and spy are reported to be aggressively operating near vital undersea cables that carry global Internet communications, according to a story in the New York Times. The issue is raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials regarding the possibility that Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of tension or conflict. more
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal discusses the possible contamination of copper telephone cables with outer lead sheathing. I'm not linking to the article because it is behind a paywall, but this is not a new topic, and it's been written about periodically for decades. The authors looked at locations around the country where lead cables are still present around bus stops, schools, and parks. more
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that antitrust enforcement in telecommunication is being ramped up by the Obama Administration, after relatively lax times. In a piece entitled Telecoms Face Antitrust Threat it indicates that investigators are weighing up the roles of the large carriers and whether they are abusing the market power amassed under the Bush Administration. more
"Such a meeting has been a long time coming, large operators have been losing revenue as the communication market has diversified, network optimization should lend to them finding new revenue streams as the level of service can expand" -- Nick York, NGT Summit Director Asia Pacific. more
The US government is gearing up to begin the 2020 census which will be administered starting next April 20. For the first time, the census is going to rely heavily on people answering the census questions online. Live census takers will then follow-up with those that don't submit the online response. This seems like an odd decision since there are still many people who don't have home broadband. more
While it might still be too early to make predictions, there are dozens of articles on the web predicting how the COVID-19 pandemic might change our long-term behavior. Here are some of the more interesting predictions I've seen that involve broadband and telecom... Millions of people were sent home for work or school to homes that didn't have good broadband. These folks have been telling the world for years that they don't have good broadband... more
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
Communication service providers around the world are about to embark on an epic journey. A journey which has the potential to be a major game changer for hardware and software vendors alike. The simple concept of decoupling software from hardware, referred to as network functions virtualization (NFV), promises to improve an operator's ability to differentiate themselves from the competition by moving network functions from dedicated appliances to generic commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. more
A recent quarterly report titled "State of the Internet" has been released by Akamai providing Internet statistics on the origin of Internet attack traffic, network outages and broadband connectivity levels around the world. According to the report, during the first quarter of 2008, attack traffic originated from 125 unique countries around the world. China and the United States were the two largest traffic sources, accounting for some 30% of traffic in total. The top 10 countries were the source of approximately three quarters (75%) of the attacks measured. Other observations include... more
As telecom networks grow more interconnected, local outages can now trigger regional or national disruptions. A recent article by Ookla outlines five critical steps operators must follow to prevent small faults from cascading into systemic failures. more