RIPE 74

RIPE 74 was held in May in Budapest, and as usual it was a meeting that mixed a diverse set of conversations and topics into a very busy week. Here are my impressions of the meeting drawn from a number of presentations that I found to be of personal interest.…


BBR TCP

The Internet was built using an architectural principle of a simple network and agile edges. The basic approach was to assume that the network is a simple collection of buffered switches and circuits. As packets traverse the network they are effectively passed from switch to switch. The switch selects the…


IETF 98 Report

The IETF meetings are relatively packed events lasting over a week, and it’s just not possible to attend every session. Inevitably each attendee follows their own interests and participates in Working Group sessions that are relevant and interesting to them. I do much the same when I attend IETF meetings.…


ARIN 39 Report

Having just spent two and a half days at an ARIN Public Policy Meeting, I’d like to share some of my impressions of the meeting, and the state of address policy in the region served by ARIN. It’s clear that ARIN has largely undertaken its mission with careful and considered…


Up!

Far from being a vibrant environment with an array of competitive offerings, the activity of providing so-called “last mile” Internet access appears to have been reduced to an environment where, in many markets, a small number of access providers appear to operate in a manner that resembles a cosy cartel,…


The Internet’s Gilded Age

The rise of the Internet has heralded rapid changes in our society. The opportunities presented by a capable and ubiquitous communications system and a global transportation network have taken some corporations from the multinational to the status of truly global mega-corporation. Good examples of these new corporations include Google, Apple,…


The Root of the DNS

Few parts of the Domain Name System are filled with such levels of mythology as its root server system. Here I’d like to try and explain what it is all about and ask the question whether the system we have is still adequate, or if it’s time to think about…


NANOG 69

NANOG 69 was held in Washington DC in early February. Here’s my notes from the meeting. It would not be Washington without a keynote opening talk about the broader political landscape and NANOG certainly ticked this box with a talk on international politics and cyberspace. I did learn a new…


Addressing 2016

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. The process of exhausting the remaining…


BGP in 2016

It has become either a tradition, or a habit, each January for me to report on the experience with the inter-domain routing system over the past year, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection…