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This article resulted from a request by The Internet Protocol Journal (IPJ), which will celebrate its 25th anniversary in June 2023. Another version of this article will appear in the June edition of IPJ. The Internet not quite as young and spritely as you might’ve thought. Apple’s iPhone, released in…
There is a common view out there that the QUIC transport protocol (RFC 9000) is just another refinement to the original TCP transport protocol [1] [2]. I find it hard to agree with this sentiment, and for me QUIC represents a significant shift in the set of transport capabilities available…
One of the discussion topics at the recent ICANN 75 meeting was an old favourite of mine, namely the topic of Internet Fragmentation. Here, I’d like to explore this topic in a little more detail and look behind the kneejerk response of declaiming fragmentation as bad under any and all…
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…
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…
Once you head away from the areas that are serviced by modern terrestrial cable infrastructure, the available digital communications options are somewhat limited. Some remote areas are served using High Frequency radio systems, using radio signals that bounce off the ionosphere to provide a long distance, but limited bandwidth, service.…
When did the Internet begin? It all gets a bit hazy after so many years, but by the early 1970’s research work in packet switched networks was well underway and while it wasn’t running TCP at the time (the flag day when the ARPANET switched over to use TCP was…
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…
One of the basic tools in network design is the so-called “stacked” protocol model. This model was developed in the late 1970s as part of a broader effort to develop general standards and methods of networking. In 1983, the efforts of the CCITT and ISO were merged to form The…
The Australian Domain Name Administration, AUDA, has recently published its quarterly report for the last quarter of 2020. The report contained the interesting snippet: “The rapid digitisation of our lives and economy – necessitated by COVID-19 – continued to underpin strong growth in .au registrations. New .au domains created in…
