Submarine Cable Resilience

I have on my desk a rather small tube. It’s a little under 2cm in diameter, 6 cm long, and looks like it’s made from a dull white polycarbonate material. At the end I can see a copper inner tube, and inside that another polycarbonate layer, and then a smaller…


An Economic Perspective on Digital Centrality

The IETF met in November 2022 in London. Among the many sessions that were held in that meeting was a session of the Decentralised Internet Infrastructure Research Group, (DINRG). The research group’s ambitions are lofty: DINRG will investigate open research issues in decentralizing infrastructure services such as trust management, identity…


OARC 40

OARC held a 2-day meeting in February, with a set of presentations on various DNS topics. Here’s some observations that I picked up from the presentations in that meeting. Cache Poisoning Protection Deployment Experience In a world where every DNS name is DNSSEC-signed and every DNS client validates all received…


To DNSSEC or Not?

The early days of the Internet were marked by a constant churn of technology. For example, routing protocols came and went in rapid succession, transmission technologies were in a state of constant flux, the devices we used to interact with the emerging digital environment were changing, and the applications we…


The Root Zone of the DNS Revisited

The DNS is a remarkably simple system. You send it queries and you get back answers. Within the system you see exactly the same simplicity: The DNS resolver that receives your query may not know the answer, so it, in turn, will send queries deeper into the system and collects…


IP Addresses through 2022

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. Back around 1992 the IETF gazed…


BGP in 2022 – BGP Updates

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…


BGP in 2022 – The Routing Table

At the start of each year, I’ve been reporting on the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system over the previous 12 months, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet.…


Is Secured Routing a Market Failure?

Author: Geoff Huston       The Internet represents a threshold moment for the communications realm in many ways. It altered the immediate end client of the network service from humans to computers. It changed the communications model from synchronized end-to-end service to asynchronous, and from virtual circuits to packet…


DNS in the IGF

I don’t normally make the effort to attend the Internet Governance Forum gatherings these days. It seems to me that this forum continues to struggle for relevance. In my view it has never been able to realize an effective engagement with the set of actors who make up the supply…