A Second Look at QUIC Use

A couple of months ago, in July 2022, I wrote about our work in measuring the level of use of QUIC in the Internet (https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2022-07/quic.html). Getting this measurement “right” has been an interesting exercise, and it’s been a learning experience that I’d like to relate here. We’ll start from the…


DoH, DoT and Plain old DNS

The evolution of the DNS name resolution environment has seen the DNS recursive resolver moving further away from the end client, with an Internet segment often being interposed between the client and the recursive resolver. The combination of an open DNS protocol and a public Internet segment between the client…


Bigger, Faster, Better (and Cheaper!)

Let’s take a second to look back some 50 years to the world of 1972, and the technology and telecommunications environment at that time. The world of 1972 was one populated by a relatively small collection of massive (and eye-wateringly expensive) mainframe computers that were tended by a set of…


Notes from IETF 114

IETF 114 was held in the last week of July 2022 as a hybrid meeting, with the physical meeting being held in Philadelphia. Here’s my notes on topics that attracted my interest from the week. IEPG The IEPG meetings are held each Sunday prior to the IETF week. These days…


Notes from DNS-OARC-38

As I see it, the DNS is the last remaining piece of glue that binds the Internet together. We lost IP address coherency within the Internet many years ago and the DNS is all that’s left. Consequently, the DNS is vital for the Internet. Perhaps the most critical question to…


A look at QUIC Use

Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) is a network protocol initially developed and deployed by Google, and recently (May 2021) standardized in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) (RFC 9000). In this article we’ll take a quick tour of QUIC and then look at the extent to which QUIC is being…


Content vs Carriage – Who Pays?

There was a common catch cry in the early 1990’s that “the Internet must be free!” Some thought this was a policy stance relating to rejection of imposed control over content. Others took this proposition more literally as in “free, like free beer!” It might sound naive today but there…


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…


The Path to Resolverless DNS

There is an intriguing mention of “Server Push” in the specification of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) (RFC 8484). The RFC is somewhat vague in the description of server push, apart from noting a caveat that “extra care must be taken to ensure that the pushed URI is one that the…


Are we there yet?

The saga of the IPv6 transition continues to surprise us all. RFC 2460, the first complete effort at a specification of the IPv6 protocol was published in December 1998, more than twenty years ago. The entire point of IPv6 was to specify a successor protocol to IPv4 due to the…