Ripe 75

RIPE held its 75th meeting in Dubai in mid-October. As usual there was a diverse set of presentations covering a broad range of activities that are taking place on today’s Internet. The topics include issues relating to network operations, regulatory policies, peering and interconnection, communications practices within data centres, IPv6,…


An Opinion in Defence of NATs

Network Address Translation has often been described as an unfortunate aberration in the evolution of the Internet, and one that will be expunged with the completion of the transition of IPv6. I think that this view, which appears to form part of today’s conventional wisdom about the Internet unnecessarily vilifies…


Notes from IETF 99 – The Other Bits

After pulling out the notes from the IEPG meeting and aspects of the DNS, here are the rest of the items that I personally found to be of interest at IETF 99 last week. IPv6 Operations – Apple’s Happier Eyeballs? The way in which browsers leverage the potential opportunities offered…


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.…


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…


RIPE 73

RIPE held its 73rd meeting in Madrid in the last week of October. Here are a few of my takeaways from that meeting. What’s behind all those NATs? We suspect that there are at least 10 billion devices connected to today’s Internet, and we know that less than two billion…


The Death of Transit?

I was struck at a recent NANOG meeting just how few presentations looked at the ISP space and the issues relating to ISP operations and how many were looking at the data centre environment. If the topics that we use to talk to each other are any guide, then this…


Labs retires the old ipv6-measurement graphs

As the stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6 code has reached a stable service, we’ve decided to retire the old labs.apnic.net/ipv6-measurement/ tree of graphs. For people with saved URLs, it should redirect to the new service, and should map an ASN or Economy to the right dataset. For people who are farming the site for…