Carriage vs Content

Does anyone remember the Internet before Google? And no, using Google to ask about the pre-Google Internet is not going to work all that well! For those of you who can recall the Internet of around 2000, do you also recall what debates were raging at the time? Let me…


Measuring IPv6 – Country by Country

Some years ago a report was published that ranked countries by the level of penetration of broadband data services. You can find the current version of that report at the OECD web site.This ranking of national economies had an electrifying impact on this industry and upon public policies for broadband…


Occam’s ITRs

It’s been a quarter of a century since the world’s governments convened to draft up a common set of regulations about the conduct of international telecommunications. In December of 2012 the world’s governments will convene to reconsider these regulations, to hopefully sign an updated set of regulations. This time around,…


The QoS Emperor’s Wardrobe

Back in 1997, with Paul Ferguson, I wrote a book on “Quality of Service” (QoS) in IP networks. A couple of years later I pushed out a revision of the book (“Internet Performance Survival Guide”) that looked more generally at service performance in IP networks, and examined in voluminous detail…


Measuring IPv6 by Networks and End Users

by George Michaleson This article is looking at different measurements at the network level and at the end user level and examines the results seen by these measurements and some discussion of the variations between the two approaches.


Bemused Eyeballs: Tailoring Dual Stack Applications for a CGN Environment

How do you create a really robust service on the Internet? How can we maximise speed, responsiveness, and resiliency? How can we set up an application service environment in today’s network that can still deliver service quality and performance, even in the most adverse of conditions? And how can we…


A Quick Primer on Internet Peering and Settlements

The business world today features many complex global service activities which involve multiple interconnected service providers. Customers normally expect to execute a single paid transaction with one service provider, but many service providers may assist in the delivery of the service. These contributory service providers seek compensation for their efforts…


Some Further Thoughts on Securing Routing

It seems that the discussion about route leaks and securing BGP continues. Here, I’d like to quickly explore the issues related to the distinction between routing protocols, routing policies, routing and packet forwarding, and look at why securing the routing protocol does not necessarily ensure that you have secured packet…


It’s just not Cricket: Number Misuse, WCIT and ITRs

Another twenty five years has just zoomed by, and before you know it, it’s all on again. The last time the global communications sector did this was at the WATTC in 1988, when “the Internet” was just a relatively obscure experiment in protocol engineering for data communications. At that time…


Leaking Routes

Its happened again. We’ve just had yet another major routing leak, this time bringing down the Internet for most of an entire country. Maybe twenty years ago no one would’ve noticed, let alone comment, but now of course its headline material in the media. What happened? And how could this…