Walking the Policy Tightrope

In policy work nothing is ever truly simply black and white. The means to achieve one outcome may well act to impair the work to achieve different outcomes, and the resultant effort often requires some difficult decisions to balance what appears to be some fundamental tensions between various policy objectives.…


IPv4 Address Markets

Something odd happened through 2021 in the market for IPv4 addresses. Across 2021 the reported market price for the transfer of IPv4 addresses has doubled, from approximately USD27 per IPv4 individual address at the end of 2020 to around USD55 per address in December 2021. It has taken 7 years…


Stuffing the Camel into the Bikeshed

“Bikeshedding” Parkinson’s Law of Triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that members of an organisation give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. He provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant. He postulates that they would spend the majority…


Up!

Far from being a vibrant environment with an array of competitive offerings, the activity of providing so-called “last mile” Internet access appears to have been reduced to an environment where, in many markets, a small number of access providers appear to operate in a manner that resembles a cosy cartel,…


Addressing 2015

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. What happened in 2015 and what is likely to happen in 2016? This is an update to the reports prepared at the same time in previous years, so let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in…


RIPE 71 Meeting Report

The RIPE 71 meeting took place in Bucharest, Romania in November. Here are my impressions from a number of the sessions I attended that I thought were of interest. It was a relatively packed meeting held over 5 days so this is by no means all that was presented through…


NANOG 62

NANOG 62 was held at Baltimore from the 6th to the 9th October. These are my observations on some of the presentations that occurred at this meeting. The presentations are available at https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog62/home.


NANOG 61

The recent NANOG 61 meeting was a pretty typical NANOG meeting, with a plenary stream, some interest group sessions, and an ARIN Public Policy session. The meeting attracted some 898 registered attendees, which was the biggest NANOG to date. No doubt the 70 registrations from Microsoft helped in this number,…


Protocol Basics – The Network Time Protocol

Back at the end of June 2012[0] there was a brief IT hiccup as the world adjusted the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard by adding an extra second to the last minute of the 31st of June. Normally such an adjustment would pass unnoticed by all but a small dedicated…


NANOG 56

NANOG held its 56th meeting in Dallas on October 21 through 24. I found the two and a half day program to be once more quite diverse and interesting. The following are my impressions of the presentations of this meeting.