development

IPv6 guru predicts last-minute switch to protocol

In a new interview with Network World, Jim Bound, Chair of the North American IPv6 Task Force, talks about the status of IPv6 adoption in the United States. A federal mandate – that agencies switch to an IPv6 backbone by June 2008 – looms.

Jim notes that the current IPv4 address space will be exhausted by 2010, give or take a year. He predicts a last minute stampede. Continue reading

Flow Rate Fairness: Dismantling a Religion

Network engineer Richard Bennett’s new article for The Register: Dismantling a Religion: The EFF’s Faith-Based Internet explores the difference between the way the EFF wants to see the the Internet managed and current discussions under way in the IETF.

Bottom line: the Internet has never had a user-based fairness system, and it needs one. All networks need one. Continue reading

NY Times notes 20th Anniversary of NSFnet

An article –The Team That Put the Net in Orbit – in today’s NY Times notes the recent 20th anniversary of the launch of NSFnet, a precursor to the Internet. Originally constructed to tie together the nation’s five supercomputer centers, by the time the academic network was shut down in 1996, it connected 6.6 million host computers and extended to 93 countries.

A critical decision was to adopt the then as unproven TCP/IP protocol. TCP/IP served as a vital lingua franca between previously incompatible computer networks.
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Albany: Spitzer Names Broadband Panel

Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced the formation yesterday of a state panel to develop strategies to allow all New Yorkers to get access to high-speed Internet service. The panel, the New York State Council for Universal Broadband, will recommend ways to extend high-speed access beyond traditional methods and to extend broadband connections to underserved rural and urban areas, the governor said.

In his speech, Spitzer set targets: affordable universal access @ 20Mbps statewide, with 100Mbps in metro areas, by 2015.

One of the Council’s first actions will be to distribute $5 million in grants. Continue reading

Network World interviews Lynn St. Amour

Not deploying IPv6 threatens Internet, Lynn St. Amour warns

VANCOUVER, B.C. — The Internet has 1.3 billion users, but that’s not enough for Lynn St. Amour. As CEO of the Internet Society, she is expanding the nonprofit group, which promotes development of the Internet globally. St. Amour doubled the group’s staff in 2007 and beefed up its outreach activities in Africa, South America and Asia in her bid to add another billion Internet users worldwide. National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan sat down with St. Amour this week at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, an ISOC-funded standards group.

You can read the full article here Continue reading

Verizon dumps WiMax for Long Term Evolution (LTE)

Verizon_wireless Verizon announced last week that it plans to develop and deploy its fourth generation (4G) mobile broadband network using Long Term Evolution (LTE) – a technology developed within the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards organization.

LTE promises to deliver a significant performance boost even when compared to Verizon’s current (3-G) EV-DO network. Verizon claims customers will see as much as 100 and 50 megabits per second in download and upload speeds, respectively. Continue reading

User Centric Internet

The User Centric Internet (UCI) is a new ISOC Public Policy program designed to reassert, in debates and discussions related to the future of the Internet, the importance of the design values and fundamental principles that have underpinned the Internet’s success.

The Internet Society believes that principles such as openness, user choice and control, edge based intelligence, etc., are central to a thriving Internet and, we believe, will be so for the foreseeable future. In focusing on user-centricity the Internet Society is seeking to ensure that the primacy of the user is not forgotten when it comes to new architectures, commercial offerings and policy making. Continue reading