June 2006 Archives

Sealand, the odd semi-independent "nation" off to coast of Britain caught fire. The home page of the principality mentions the fire and is asking for donations to rebuild.

Sealand has an extremely odd history. Essentially, it is a platform dating from the WWII era seven nautical miles off the coast of Britain. It claims independence from Britain as a country, although in practice no one really cares enough to push the point and they clearly rely on British services and protection (which is obvious from the response to the fire). The real questions are: is Sealand still needed, and if it is, what happens to its customers now?

According to the Wall Street Journal, Boeing is considering selling it's Connexion in-flight Internet service. I recently told the story of watching my flight cross the Atlantic by watching global routing (bgp) alarms in the Renesys Routing Intelligence service. It was most decidedly cool. It was not a particularly practical use of our routing alerts technology, but it was a well-executed and incredibly useful Internet service offering. It would be a mistake for Boeing to pull this now.

Light Reading are claiming that Level (3) are in talks to buy either XO (AS2828) or AboveNet (AS6461) (or both!). I previously commented about various mergers going on in the industry affecting the Internet. The story here seems to all about metro fiber, as with the other recent Level (3) acquisitions.