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The network operations community is cautiously heading back into a mode of in person meetings and the NANOG meeting at the start of November was a hybrid affair with a mix of in-person and virtual participation, both by the presenters and the attendees. I was one of the virtual mob,…
When we deregulated the telephone industry, we replaced these national monopolies and their vertically bundled structures with a collection of separate enterprises whose actions are orchestrated by market forces rather than by the dictates of the incumbent monopoly telco. This was a comprehensive upheaval to the telecommunications industry, and one…
United States President Biden has recently commented: “But let me be very clear: Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation. Without healthy competition, big players can change and charge whatever they want and treat you however they want. […] So, we know we’ve got a problem — a major problem.”…
Much has been said about the criticality of the small coterie of large-scale content distribution platforms and their critical role in today’s Internet. These days when one of the small set of core content platforms experiences a service outage then it’s mainstream news, as we saw in June of this…
The Swedish carrier group Telia has recently announced the sale of its international wholesale business to Polhelm Infra, an infrastructure investment manager jointly owned by a number of Swedish pension funds. Why would a telco operator sell off what was a core part of its operation to a pension fund?…
On the afternoon June 17 of this year there was a widespread outage of online services. In Australia it impacted three of the country’s largest banks, the national postal service, the country’s reserve bank, and one airline operator. Further afield from Australia the outage impacted the Hong Kong Stock Exchange,…
The IRTF is a research-oriented part of the larger IETF structure. It has a number of research groups, one of which, DINRG, is looking at decentralized Internet Infrastructure. That’s a big topic, and one could certainly look at distributed decentralized blockchain frameworks applied to ledgers, used by Bitcoin and similar,…
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…
It’s often a clear signal that we’re in in deep trouble when politicians believe that they need to lend a hand and help out with regulations. A bill has been passed by the US Congress, and now signed into law, that requires the National Institute of Science and Technology to…
When a service is constructed using diverse components, then the way in which service revenues are distributed to the various suppliers of the components of the service can follow a number of quite distinct models. There are various forms of revenue redistribution models where the revenue per transaction is distributed…
