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“Where are you?” is not an easy question to answer on the Internet. The telephone system’s address plan embedded a certain amount of physical location information in the fixed line network, and a full E.164 telephone number indicated your location in terms of your country, and your area within that…
The Australian Network Operators’ Group, AUSNOG, just held its 19th meeting. Rather than simply relate the content of the presentations I’d like to take a few presentations and place them into a broader context to show how such topics fit today’s networked environment. Network Operations and Data Centres Perhaps unsurprisingly…
Most of today’s transport on the public Internet still uses TCP (and in this admittedly sweeping generalization I’ll include QUIC, as QUIC can be seen as an updated form of TCP that happens to use UDP as an encapsulation protocol). TCP does not operate at a fixed transmission rate and…
Background The arrangements regarding the composition and organisation of the provision and operation of authoritative root servers are one of the more long-lasting aspects of the public Internet. In the late 1980’s, Jon Postel, as the IANA, worked with a small set of interested organisations to provide this service. It…
Early models of packet networking used a hop-by-hop paradigm of control. Each intermediate device (a “router” in Internet parlance) would use a control loop with its adjacent neighbour and retransmit any frame that was not explicitly acknowledged as received by the neighbour. Such models were used by the X.25 protocol,…
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meets three times a year to work on Internet Standards and related operational practice documents. In July of 2025 the IETF met in Madrid (finally, and only after a number of thwarted mis-starts!) with more than a thousand folk in attendance through the week.…
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meets three times a year to work on Internet Standards and related operational practice documents. In July of 2025 the IETF met in Madrid (finally, and after a number of thwarted mis-starts!) with more than a thousand folk in attendance through the week. The…
Last month, in June 2025, I reported on our progress with the adoption of the QUIC transport protocol. Here I would like to look at the mechanisms used to trigger a client application (typically a browser) to connect to the server using the QUIC transport protocol. A conventional way to…
Networks are typically built to provide certain services at an expected scale. The rationale for this focussed objective is entirely reasonable: to overachieve would be inefficient and costly. So, we build service infrastructure to a level of sufficient capability to meet expectations and no more. In ideal conditions this leads…
There has been a major change in the landscape of the internet over the past few years with the progressive introduction of the QUIC transport protocol. Here I’d like to look at where we are up to with the deployment of QUIC on the public Internet. But first, a review…
