The Politics of Submarine Cables in the Pacific

I must admit that I’m a keen follower of the analysis work done by Jon Brewer. He manages to pull together excellent research with valuable insights, and I look forward to his presentations. Jon can be found at Telco2. The second half of this article, looking at the inventory of…


AUSNOG ’21

ISP Column – April 2022 AUSNOG was held in September 2021 December 2021 April 2022 in Sydney over two days. Here are a few notes from presentations at the meeting that I found interesting. Automating Network Management Network management was never the “sexy” part of the Internet. For decades network…


Some Notes from RIPE 83

The RIPE community held a meeting in November. Like most community meetings in these Covid-blighted times it was a virtual meeting. Here’s my notes from a few presentations that piqued my interest. All the material presented at the meeting can be found at https://ripe83.ripe.net/. Vulnerability Disclosure Responsible Disclosure is a…


NANOG 83

The network operations community is cautiously heading back into a mode of in person meetings and the NANOG meeting at the start of November was a hybrid affair with a mix of in-person and virtual participation, both by the presenters and the attendees. I was one of the virtual mob,…


Learning from Facebook’s Mistakes

It was only a few weeks back, in July of this year, where I remarked that an Akamai report of an outage was unusual for this industry. It was unusual in that it was informative in detailing their understanding of the root cause of the problem, describing the response that…


IAB Workshop on Measuring Network Quality for End Users

The telephone network had a remarkably clear overriding service objective: It had to sustain a human conversation. Now this must be able to carry a signal which is a human voice. To be discernible to human listeners, its necessary to carry audio frequencies of between 300 and 3,500 Hz. Most…


Outage Reporting

Much has been said about the criticality of the small coterie of large-scale content distribution platforms and their critical role in today’s Internet. These days when one of the small set of core content platforms experiences a service outage then it’s mainstream news, as we saw in June of this…


Notes from NANOG 81

As the pandemic continues, the network operational community continues to meet online. NANOG held its 81st meeting on February 8 and 9, and these are my notes from some of the presentations at that meeting. A Brief History of Router Architecture Ethernet, developed in 1973 at Xerox PARC, was a…


Deep Sea Diving

Last month I attended the New Zealand Network Operators’ Group meeting (NZNOG’20). One of the more interesting talks for me was given by Cisco’s Beatty Lane-Davis on the current state of subsea cable technology. There is something quite compelling about engineering a piece of state-of-the-art technology that is intended to…


BGP in 2019 – Part 2

The first part of this report looked at the size of the routing table and looked at some projections of its growth for both IPv4 and IPv6. However, the scalability of BGP as the Internet’s routing protocol is not just dependant on the number of prefixes carried in the routing…