NANOG 95

The North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) can trace its antecedents to the group of so-called “Mid Level” networks that acted as feeder networks for the NSFNET, the backbone of the North American Internet in the first part of the 1990’s. NANOG’S first meeting has held in June 1994, and…


A Second Look at Starlink and Geolocation

In September 2025 I wrote an article on Starlink and geolocation. This work was prompted by a question relating to the makeup of ISPs in the country of Yemen, where the data analysis point to a result where Starlink had some 6 million users in that country, or some 60%…


Some Notes from RIPE 91

The 91st meeting of the RIPE community was held in Bucharest in October this year. It was a busy week and, as usual, there were presentations on a wide variety of topics, including routing, the DNS, network operations, security, measurement and address policies. The following are some notes on presentations…


AUSNOG 2025

The Australian Network Operators’ Group, AUSNOG, just held its 19th meeting. Rather than simply relate the content of the presentations I’d like to take a few presentations and place them into a broader context to show how such topics fit today’s networked environment. Network Operations and Data Centres Perhaps unsurprisingly…


Resilience in the RPKI

I would like to look at the ways in which the operators of the number Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) have deployed this infrastructure in a way that maximises its available and performance and hardens it against potential service interruptions, or in other words, an examination of the resilience of…


Network Automation and AI at NANOG 93

I recently attended NANOG 93, in Atlanta in the first week of February (https://nanog.org/events/nanog-93/agenda/). The dominant theme of the presentations this time around was the combination of automation of network command and control and the application of Artificial Intelligence tools to this control function. The interest in AI appears to…


DNS Nameservers: Service Platforms and Resilience

Last year, in December, I looked at the behaviour of DNS recursive resolvers from the perspective of optimising performance and resilience of name resolution (). When given a choice of nameservers to use to query for a particular name within a domain will the resolver try to make an “optimal”…


A Transport Protocol’s View of Starlink

Digital communications systems always represent a collection of design trade-offs. Maximising one characteristic of a system may impair others, and various communications services may chose to optimise different performance parameters based on the intersection these design decisions with the physical characteristics of the communications medium. In this article I’ll look…


DNSSEC and .nz

I had the opportunity to participate in the New Zealand Network Operators Group meeting (NZNOG) in Nelson earlier this month. This article was prompted by a presentation from Josh Simpson on an .nz service outage incident in May 2023. I guess we’ve become used to reading evasive and vague outage…


DNS OARC 42

–> The DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (DNS-OARC) brings together DNS service operators, DNS software implementors, and researchers together to share concerns, information and learn together about the operation and evolution of the DNS. They meet between two to three times a year in a workshops format. The most…