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Ethernet has been the mainstay of much of the networking environment for almost 50 years now, but that doesn’t mean that it’s remained unchanged over that period. The evolution of this technology has featured continual increases in the scale of Ethernet networks, increasing in capacity, reach and connections. I’d like…
AUSNOG, the Australian Network Operator’s Group meetings, have always managed to assemble a program that represents a fascinating window into the diversity of activities in the Australian communications environment. This year the program included the use of femtocells raised to a useful height by tethered drones to provide fast response…
The IEPG meets each Sunday at the start of the IETF week. The intended theme of these meetings is essentially one of operational relevance in some form or fashion – although the chairs will readily admit that they will run with an agenda of whatever is on offer at the…
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…
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 Thomas Weible of Flexoptix at NZNOG on the topic of Coherent Optical Transcievers. The first generation of optical transmission systems used simple…
The IETF met in Prague in the first week of November 2023. I attended the meeting of the Measurement and Analysis of Protocols Research Group, and here are my impressions from that meeting. QUIC Topics QUIC is essentially a variant of TCP, but at the same time it also represents…
This is part of a personal commentary on the meetings at the July 2023 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF 117). If you want to know what was presented and the comments at the mic see the IETF 117 meeting archive. The ACM/IRTF Applied Network Research Workshop is…
Some 50 years ago, at the Palo Alto Research Centre of that renowned photocopier company Xerox, a revolutionary approach to local digital networks was born. On the 22nd of May 1973 Bob Metcalf authored a memo that described “X-Wire”, a 3Mbps common bus office network system developed at Xerox’s Palo…
RIPE held a community meeting in May in Rotterdam. There were a number of presentations that sparked my interest, but rather than write my impressions in a single lengthy note, I thought I would just take a couple of topics and use a shorter, and hopefully more readable bite-sized format.…
In a recent workshop I attended, reflecting on the evolution of the Internet over the past 40 years, one of the takeaways for me is how we’ve managed to surprise ourselves in both the unanticipated successes we’ve encountered and in the instances of failure when technology has stubbornly resisted to…
