Telecom

The FttH Versus Cable Debate Misses the Point

I recently followed an interesting international discussion on FttH vs. cable. With the fiber to the home (FttH) debate hotting up, driven by the possibility of using FttH as the new infrastructure for the digital economy, the cable companies are putting up a stiff fight, both in Europe (Netherlands) and the USA, claiming FttH is not necessary, and that DOCSIS 3.0 can do the job just as well. In these debates the longer-term national interest is often disregarded. The debate is confined to the technology -- what it can and cannot do -- and it also concentrates on a rather short-term timeframe, say of the next five years. more

Managing Internet as a Shared Resource: Reasonable Technical Constraints?

The internet is a shared resource. Different access providers begin mixing traffic at different places, but sooner or later, my internet gets mixed into yours. The Canadian Association of Internet Providers (CAIP) application to the Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) seems to acknowledge this shared nature with its reference (at paragraph 50 of its application) to the description of the Gateway Access Service its members resell, a description complete with a graphic of a cloud -- a sign that the resource is being shared... more

Computing Clouds in Orbit – A Possible Roadmap

Last week, I predicted that much of the Internet and most cloud datacenters would launch into space in the next ten years. Today the only part of the Internet in space is a very small amount of "bent-pipe" access: signals which go from a user to a satellite and bounce back down to a ground station which feeds them into the terrestrial internet where all processing is done and all queries answered by internet-connected servers, many of them in cloud data centers. more

Will Harding’s Mistakes in International Telecommunication Cooperation be Repeated?

The International Telecommunication Union recently began a well-deserved celebration of one of the real success stories in international cooperation -- the 110th anniversary of the Radio Regulations as a treaty instrument. An ITU publication describes the historical highlights. Global cooperation among governments in managing radio spectrum via the Radio Regulations has been generally regarded as essential from the outset in the early years of the 20th Century and remains so today. more

Centralizing the Net, Monetizing DNS, Getting Trendy?

In a Red Herring Conference held last week in California, Mitch Ratcliffe's offers an analytical overview of an interview held with Stratton Scalovs, VerisSign's CEO..."He then goes on to say that we need to move the complexity back into the center of the Net! He says the edge can't be so complex. Get David Isenberg in here! Ross Mayfield, sitting in front of me, laughs out loud. I am dumbfounded. According to VeriSign, the Net should not be open to any type of application, only applications that rely on single providers of services, like VeriSign. This is troglodyte talk." more

100 Years of Monopoly Phone Service

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Kingsbury Commitment which effectively established AT&T, a.k.a. The Bell System, as a government sanctioned monopoly. It was on December 19, 1913 that AT&T agreed to an out-of-court settlement of a US Government's anti-trust challenge. In return for the government agreeing not to pursue its case, AT&T agreed to sell its controlling interest in Western Union telegraph company... more

Cable Trounces the Telcos

Yesterday, Netflix posted graphs of how well various ISPs deal with Netflix video streams. The results are striking. All the cable companies easily beat all the phone companies with the exception of Verizon where we're seeing a mix of DSL and FiOS results. more

Crawford Likes Aussie Utility Network

Susan Crawford, special assistant to the president for science, technology and innovation policy and a member of the National Economic Council, is reported to be favorably inclined towards a U.S. network much like Australia's recently announced $33B broadband plan. Of course, the U.S. is some 15 times bigger than Australia, and that'd make the price tag closer to $500B by straight multiplication. But the U.S. would get a fiber network done right... more

The Network Management Excuse

Telco front-man Scott Cleland, in a recent blog post, thumbs his nose at the Four Internet Freedoms and says that the FCC should too. Under current leadership, it probably will. Referring to the recent submissions to the FCC by Free Press and Public Knowledge and Vuze complaining about Comcast's use of reset packets to block applications that compete with Comcast's own proprietary video entertainment offering, Cleland says "Network management trumps net neutrality." There are lots of reasons for, ahem, managing. Cleland neglects to observe that controlling congestion the way Comcast does it is like scattering nails in the road for traffic control. more

FCC Proposes Framework for Direct Satellite Access to Cell Phones - Setting the stage for ‘Single Network’ Connectivity

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed rules and guidelines to enable satellite companies like SpaceX, T-Mobile, AST Spacemobile, and Lynk to offer satellite services directly to cell phones. more

Nortel… The Good News: Web.Alive

Ok, ok - it's pretty hard to ignore the bombshell news that's on front pages everywhere today in Canada. It looks like Nortel is going to seek bankruptcy protection, perhaps as early as today. This may be a minor story in the U.S. business press, but it's a big story in tech/telecom, and a HUGE story here in Canada. You don't need me to tell you what Nortel means to Canada in terms of pride and joy, although that's more of a distant memory these days... more

SPIT is in Everyone’s Mouth, Though Not Yet in Everyone’s Ears

Spam over Internet Telephony (SPIT) is viewed by many as a daunting threat. SPIT is much more fatal than email spam, for the annoyance and disturbance factor is much higher. Various academic groups and the industry have made some efforts to find ways to mitigate SPIT. Most ideas in that field are leaning on classical IT security concepts such as intrusion detection systems, black-/white-/greylists, Turing tests/computational puzzles, reputation systems, gatekeeper solutions, etc... We identified the lack of a benchmark testbed for SPIT as a serious gap in the current research on the matter, and this motivated us at the to start working on a first tool for that. more

Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellite Internet Service Developments for 2020

I posted reviews of important LEO-satellite Internet service developments during 2017, 2018 and 2019. I've updated those posts during the years and have 18 new posts for 2020. In 2020 we saw increased effort from China, OneWeb's bankruptcy and restructuring with new ownership and prospects, Amazon investng in space-related infrastructure, Telesat making steady progress, SpaceX making rapid progress and satellite and debris tracking and collision-avoidsnce service startups. The following are brief summaries of and links to the 2020 posts. more

Blocking BitTorrent in Britain

Virgin Media announced its intention of restricting BitTorrent traffic on its new 50Mbps service according to an article by Chris Williams in The Register. Does this mean that net neutrality is endangered in the UK? The question is important because advocates of an open Internet like me hold the UK up as a positive example of net neutrality achieved through competition rather than through regulation. more

Important New Jersey Supreme Court Decision in Internet Privacy

The New Jersey Supreme Court has issued an important decision on Internet users' right to privacy. The case involves a dispute about whether an ISP violated a user's privacy rights by turning over subscriber information (name, address, billing details) associated with a particular IP address. It ends up that the subpoena served on the ISP was invalid for a variety of reasons. As the user had a 'reasonable expectation of privacy' in her Internet activities and identifying information, and because the subpoena served on the ISP was invalid, the New Jersey court determined that the ISP should not have turned over the personal data... more