Articles By Todd Underwood

The Internet is in for interesting times. Previously, I wrote about the engineering issues and about the policy issues facing us over the next five years. But there is at least one large issue still lurking. Most of you will not be surprised to learn that almost all of these issues are outgrowths of a single factor: money. The core of the Internet still doesn't have a sustainable business model.

Many people are getting rich on the Internet, and almost none of them are spending money to keep the interconnection infrastructure (the "Inter" in "Internet") growing and expanding. Look at it from a massively oversimplified perspective: Google make their money from the advertising they sell to search audiences. Comcast make their money by offering TV and Internet access on their local cable infrastructure. Amazon make money selling books and other stuff (including servers and storage space). Most datacenter companies make their money selling space and power inside of their buildings. Spammers make money filling up your inbox with useless crap. Organized crime makes money by launching attacks against profitable companies if they don't pay extortion. DNS squatters make money registering thousands (or millions) of domain names and sitting on them until someone else is willing to pay. And almost none of this helps the core of the Internet.

Look to the wholesale carriers if you want to see an income statement wasteland. Level 3 lost $1.1b last year. They lost $120m in the most recent quarter alone. Cogent is thrilled because they reported a tiny, tiny positive net income last quarter on top of a yearly loss of $30m in 2007. Global crossing lost $300m in 2007 and $88m in the last quarter they're reporting, which doesn't include much of the recent downturn. Other wholesale networks are in the same boat. Dan Golding suggested that it's more important to look at net cash flows rather tha income, but the result is pretty much the same: almost no one is making any money. The only wholesalers who do make money make it on other service offerings: wireless service, metro Ethernet services, VPNs, local phone service, video services and so on. Are there sustainable Internet backbone business models? Does anyone have one?

An open market for buying and selling IPv4 Addresses is coming. Soon. As I wrote previously, IANA is running out of unallocated IPv4 addresses. Estimates vary, but by 2010 (or 2012 at the latest) the world will be out of unallocated IPv4 addresses.

Sometimes it is hard for the general public to understand what this might mean. Essentially, after 2010 or so, if you want to start a new company and get connected to the Internet or just are growing and have more devices that need to have IP addresses, things won't be the same as they are now. Right now what happens is that you go to ARIN, if you're in North America and document your need for IP addresses, you pay a modest administrative fee, and then they allocate them to you. If you grow and you need more, you document how you've used up the ones that you have, and they give you more of them.

All of this assumes that you want your own IP addresses that are not tied to any particular provider (this is an important point that we'll get back to). But even if you get your IP addresses from some provider, they have to get them from somewhere. If you want to be reachable from the Internet, you need an IP address—an IPv4 IP address in particular. And very shortly those are going to get much harder to get.

So let's talk about what happens after the IPv4 addresses are all "used up."

In a few weeks, I will be leaving Renesys, a company I have been associated with for over five years. I moved from New Hampshire (where Renesys is headquartered) to Pittsburgh, PA, over the summer, and I've decided to work a bit closer to my new home.

Before I go, there is work yet to be done. The Renesys blog has become an important place for Internet engineers, managers, developers and salespeople to seek unbiased information about what is happening on the backbones. I have enjoyed contributing to it over the years, and I have enjoyed watching some of my colleagues (most actively Earl Zmijewski and Martin Brown) take the helm more recently. Before I ride off into the sunset, there are at least two things I'd like to contribute to this forum:

1. A clear assessment of where we are with this whole Internet project
2. A good guess about where we're going

At the end of the next series of posts by me, you should either be very, very worried or convinced that I'm very, very wrong. The Internet is facing a confluence of engineering, financial and policy storms that have some small potential to completely derail it. These tempests have a high likelihood of marking a sharp departure from several characteristics once considered fundamental to the the Internet.

If we get through the next five years, I'm sure everything will be fine. Today, I'll tackle the technology and engineering issues. In my next post, I'll address financial issues, followed by policy issues. At the end of this torrent of pessimism, I'll try to point to some plausible ways out of the mess that we have gotten ourselves into.

Sprint re-enabled the connection between Sprint and Cogent at 21:00 UTC (16:00 EST) on Sunday, 2 Nov, 2008. Sprint issued a hastily prepared statement about the reconnection (the HTML is a cut-and-paste job from "IP/MPLS Products from Sprint"), explaining their position. Cogent hasn't commented yet.

The connection appears to be routed much as it was before Oct 30. Previously, we saw Sprint selecting 2700-2900 prefixes from Cogent (that is, picking Cogent as the best path for that many network prefixes). We saw Cogent selecting about 7500-8000 prefixes from Sprint. Now that they have reconnected, Sprint is selecting 2538 prefixes from Cogent and Cogent is selecting 7016 from Sprint. So down slightly, but not appreciably. The link is up.

The fact that Sprint has reconnected this indicates clearly that they intend to fight this battle in court rather than in the routing tables or in the court of public opinion. This fact alone makes this likely to be one of the more interesting peering disputes of the last few years. But the resolution may take months or years, given the speed with which the courts move.

A special Halloween edition of the Renesys Blog: That which was whole is now torn asunder, and cries of grief ring out throughout the land. Cogent (AS174) and Sprint (AS1239) are no longer connected to each other. Customers of each network who do not have other providers—namely single-homed customers—cannot reach each other. Two large portions of the Internet are separated.

Cogent is frequently involved in peering disputes. In the last three years, the only significant peering dispute (one that caused a temporary partition of the Internet) that did not involve Cogent was between Level 3 and XO. That one was settled very quickly. All of the others (Cogent depeering Telia, Level 3 depeers Cogent, and further disputes going back years involving Teleglobe (now Tata, AS6453), France Telecom (AS5511)) involved Cogent.

But in this case, Cogent may have picked the wrong sparring partner. In the past, Cogent won peering disputes simply because their customer base was less sensitive to the outage than the other party in the dispute. Ultimately, the one whose customers complain the loudest loses. This time it may be very different. Sprint hasn't paid any particular attention to its IP product and network at a senior management level for a very long time. They are clearly focused on wireline and wireless telecom services and Overland Park management seem to remain mostly unaware that they even operate an IP network. In other words, Cogent has picked a fight with a zombie here. They may even rip off a limb or two, but that doesn't mean the zombie will notice.

Sprint and Cogent only starting peering recently, back in November of 2006. Prior to that the two networks reached each other via NTT Communications (AS2914). Now, almost exactly two years later, it appears that Sprint has disconnected Cogent and chosen to divide the Internet. Cogent has stated that they will litigate this issue so this one is unlikely to get resolved quickly. In the mean time, over 200 downstream autonomous system customers of each organization cannot reach the networks in the other. This is ugly and will remain so.

Let's take a quick look at what we know so far and set the stage for a story that will likely continue for several days, if not weeks. I'll also try to set this in a larger context about the evolution of each of these networks and the evolution of Internet interconnection on the whole.

Cogent (AS174) has established a direct connection to the America Online Transit Data Network (ATDN) (AS1668). This long-awaited connection completes Cogent's effort to directly connect with every transit-free network in the world and qualifies them, for the first time, as being transit-free.

In one sense, this is an unsurprising event. ATDN has been shrinking its transit network for some time in order to focus on their revenue-producing ad business. AOL/Time Warner has been selling off their European access networks since 2006. At the same time, Cogent has been adding customers and growing and peering. So that these two networks would eventually connect (re-connect) is unsurprising.

But the history between these two organizations is textured and murky. This connection is particularly interesting in part because of this history. It's also interesting because of how different these two networks are, in almost every respect: history, revenues, business model, culture, brand. I'll take a look at where Cogent is, the history between Cogent and AOL, and what this all might mean for the Internet.

Randy Epstein of Host.net and WVFiber graciously (or perhaps maliciously, given the quality of the performance) filmed and did the post-production on the recent performance at the Global Peering Forum. If I had a virtual tip jar, I would set it out. Enjoy:

At the recent Global Peering Forum I performed a spoof song based on the recent YouTube hijacking. (I'm told that video will eventually be available, at which point I'm sure I'll have to go into hiding at an undisclosed location.)

American Pie was previously parodied at a RIPE meeting and now is practically a tradition, much to Mike Hughes's chagrin, as he thinks it's overdone already. The great thing about the original song is that it's choc full of references in the music industry. I tried to pepper several more into my version (and I have a few additional verses in progress that I just didn't finish).

What links would you provide to these references? What additional references do you think are important and missing (given the history of the Internet theme)?

The Day the YouTube Died

A long long time ago
I can still remember how the videos used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance,
I'd watch the prison thriller dance
and maybe I'd be happy for a while.
But February made me shiver with every packet I'd deliver
bad routes in the tables, the paths they were not stable.
I can't remember if I cried when I saw my request was denied
but boredom welled up deep inside
the day the YouTube died.

We're doing something dangerous, here. We're messing with the order of the universe. We're changing things up on you. I think it'll work out fine, though.

Many of you have been reading this blog since 2005 have become used to my acerbic wit and charming observations on the state of the Internet. OK, maybe you've just slogged through some boring posts for the few gems buried in among all of the garbage. I hope it has been worth it.

Now I'd like to introduce a new contributor. Earl Zmijewski (I dare you to ask him, repeatedly, how the heck he pronounces his name) has been with Renesys since last year. Many of the readers of this blog who are Renesys customers have already interacted with Earl in the context of a professional support engagement or when you've asked questions about the Market Intelligence or Routing Intelligence products. Earl has a background in large-scale enterprise networking and systems before coming to Renesys. He has been living and breathing interdomain routing since he joined us last year.

Earl is stepping up into a significantly expanded role at Renesys. He's going to be responsible for all of our Internet intelligence data products and services. He will begin posting some of the interesting findings and anecdotes here, for your enjoyment. I encourage you to welcome him with the same critical skepticism and general crankiness that most of you offer to me on a regular basis. :-)

I look forward to Earl's first post.

Cogent (AS174) sells IP transit and they sell it cheap. Everyone knows this. It is how they position themselves. It's their competitive advantage. It's why they think they will take over the world. They plan to undercut the prices and margins of all of the bigger carriers, combine that with strategic (cut-rate) acquisitions, and wait for everyone else to go broke. So far they're doing a pretty good job of executing on that plan.

However, I recently learned that "Cheap" isn't actually Cogent's secret market advantage at all. I'm not denying price matters to people who buy from Cogent. Heck, that's why Renesys decided to buy from Cogent for a development installation for Babbledog. (There will be more about Babbledog here shortly, as I'm sure it's something that many of Renesys's network-centric customers will have some questions about.)

This is a tale of a network-clueful small company trying to get connectivity at a well-connected building in Boston at a reasonable price. This is a tale of sorrow and woe, misery and despair. I'd like to say it has a happy ending, but on review, I believe that many of you will conclude, at least for the IP transit industry, that the ending is not happy at all.

So after the massive, content-free debate about network neutrality, there is finally something concrete to discuss. Recently, several people have been writing about ESPN360: a website that attempts to block subscribers arriving from an ISP who is not a subscriber. Essentially, they are trying to replicate the cable subscription model (get your ISP to pony up money so that you can see this stuff) only on the web.

It would be hard to overstate just how foolish (and wrongheaded) this is. But the entire escapade makes some very important points in the debate about net neutrality. That debate was never about some mythically "neutral" network, but was rather about the ever-shifting balance of power between content and eyeballs. Content providers (Google, Yahoo, BBC, and evidently ESPN) believe that users want their content more than their content wants the users. And so, a new battle is begun. Who has more leverage: the pretty pictures or the glassy eyeballs?

As promised last week here's part two of the story about a rough week at Cogent last week. When last we left our intrepid, optical network, it was depeering wee little British autonomous systems in an effort to gussy itself up for future suitors (we guessed; although there were several other interesting guesses as well. More on that shortly). Well, things went downhill from there.

Part of my interest in these events is personal: Renesys (AS34135) is single homed to Cogent at a development site in Boston. These two outages happened to both hit during the middle of user testing for a new application we're working on (more on that in the coming weeks). So that was pretty embarassing and frustrating. We're shopping around for other providers at 1 Summer now, but (as usual) providers are unclear on whether they can offer service in the building and what they might charge to do so. So we're waiting. Additionally, two of Renesys's three other service providers in New Hampshire, Worldpath (AS3770) and SEGNet (AS11524) both use Cogent as one of their upstreams as well. So we were impacted by the problems. But being a customer of, or a provider to someone who has a network problem isn't enough to raise my interest (we have a lot of customers who run networks, strangely enough).

My main interest in the Cogent outage is that it was large enough to be felt across the Internet and gives me an opportunity to look at some of the ways to understand and analyze such events after the fact. So let's take a look at what happened, not just from the RFO (Reason For Outage) issued by Cogent, but rather what the whole Internet thought of the event.

These are the signs of the apocalypse: A worldwide earthquake, the sun ceasing to emit visible light, cats and dogs living together in harmony, and Cogent (AS174) depeering another AS. At least one of these happened earlier this week.

At about 10:00 UTC on Tuesday (6am EDT), Cogent depeered a couple of smaller, UK-based ISPs without notice. This was apparently intentional and due to a review of existing peers and whether they meet peering policies. Does this mean that Cogent is becoming more like its larger competitors that it so enjoys taunting? I'll take a look at who was depeered and speculate on why.

This is the first in a two-part post about what happened to Cogent on Tuesday, April 24, 2007. Later that day, Cogent suffered what appeared to be a fairly widespread serious routing problem. Looking at that in a bit more detail will be a subject for part 2.

I've written about IPv6 in the past—mostly to point out how little traction it has been getting and how unlikely it has become that IPv6 will be the next network layer protocol. A new project hopes to change all that. A hint of how they intend to accomplish this is available by noting that the same content can be found at http://www.ipv6porn.com/. The project describes it as follows:

We're taking 10 gigabytes of the most popular "adult entertainment" videos from one of the largest subscription websites on the Internet, and giving away access to anyone who can connect to it via IPv6. No advertising, no subscriptions, no registration. If you access the site via IPv4, you get a primer on IPv6, instructions on how to set up IPv6 through your ISP, a list of ISPs that support IPv6 natively, and a discussion forum to share tips and troubleshooting. If you access the site via IPv6 you get instant access to "the goods".

The founders of the project acknowledge one key IPv6 adoption barrier: the lack of content. There's a chicken-and-egg cycle between content and users. Users want content to consume, but content wants users to consume it. As long as their is neither (in any numbers worth talking about) on any IPv6 network, there's no reason for either users or content providers to migrate there. IPv6 is a network-equivalent of the Bridge to Nowhere (another doozy from Alaska Senator Ted "The Internet is a series of tubes" Stevens). It's expensive, goes nowhere and no one needs to use it. This project is an attempt to fix that.

But there are two big things missing from IPv6, and content is only one of them.

Network Outages Caused By Taiwan Earthquakes

The quakes that damaged seven undersea cables last month got me thinking about disasters in general and they way they look to the network routing around them. Much has already been written about the quakes and the damage that they did to telecommunications infrastructure to Asia. But two perspectives have been missing. The first is the understanding of the event from a network (Internet) perspective. Renesys data and tools are obviously good at providing that.

The second is the comparison of this event to other events of equal scale. What did this event look like compared to large-scale power outages? Compared to hurricane Katrina? Compared to global routing events (mass route leaks, high-rate network scanning, etc.)? Put another way, is there a consistent "shape" that disaster takes on the Internet and were the Taiwan quakes disaster-shaped?

Cringely is at it again. As I have written previously, sometimes Robert X. Cringely seems to write well beyond his knowledge-base. Unfortunately, it seems to be getting more common. The recent bizarre googanoia column is like that. And in this most recent column, he makes several boneheaded mistakes and misstatements in the process of trying to make an otherwise interesting point about bit torrent and network economics.

Cringely badly misstates a number of facts in the process of making an argument about the notional value of bit torrent (the portion of the market for distribution of media that is already controlled by peer to peer bit torrent networks). In fact, on review, he may get every single important fact wrong. Which doesn't mean that the idea that he presents is invalid or useless (although in this case it probably is). It simply means that we can't get there from here. We cannot reach the speculative world that Cringely describes from the poor, fact-inhabited world we are stuck in.

And that is the problem: when smart, creative people speculate beyond their knowledgebase, they tend to arrive at fantastical, implausible but nonetheless fascinating places. We may be tempted to give such thinkers more credence than they merit, simply because their speculation is so fantastical and therefore so interesting? It's the intellectual equivalent of a car wreck: we know it's not good but we somehow can't look away. Maybe this time we should.

In an effort to sort this out, let's review the "facts" that Cringely cites and then ask the good people at AMS-IX to help us clarify them.

Google is building a Fiber Backbone in order to take over the world (we're not sure how that works, but you should be worried). Google is digitizing libraries violating copyright! Google is spying on your email! Your email, man! Your private email! Google is watching every click you make! Google is in league with China! Google is building a free, ad-powered wireless network to spy on good people everywhere! Good God! Look Out Geek: Google Power Gonna Get Yer Mama! [1]

This is the post promised by a previous entry about Google and AT&T peering. It seems that no matter what Google does, they catch endless raftloads of criticism from the masses (and pundits) about the nature of each project and its nefarious implications. Of course, there's nothing wrong with individuals being concerned about the way in which multi-billion-dollar corporations treat them. It's healthy and part of a competitive, free society. But the knee-jerk reactions to Google's every move stray beyond the normal, rational vigilance. So whence the Googanoia? Where does the fear come from?

Today, for the first time, the Amsterdam Internet Exchange surpassed 200 Gigabits per second across its switch fabric. AMS-IX was already the biggest public Internet exchange on the planet, but this is impressive growth.

While AMS-IX hits 200 Gb/s on a single Internet Exchange in a single city, Tier 1 Research pointed out a few weeks ago that it was a big deal that Equinix recently hit an aggregate of 100Gb/s across all of their exchanges—including Ashburn, San Jose, Chicago, Dallas, Singapore and so on. So why is AMS-IX so much bigger than everyone else?

Many of the recent great tales of peering, depeering and and repeering involve Cogent (AS174) eventually. This one starts there. Cogent and Sprint (AS1239) established a direct adjacency this week. You may be able to see the little "1239" next to directly connected to the "174" in the picture off to the side. This is big news for a number of reasons, among them:

• Both are big networks
• Sprint is tremendously exclusive in its peering and would almost certainly not offer Settlement Free Interconnection to a network of Cogent's ilk.
• Cogent is a tremendously cheap (let's say "cost conscious") network that would never pay a cent more than they had to for anything

What remains are a whole lot of questions, some of which we have ready answers for and others of which require moles and informants inside the relevant networks. Among the questions are: What kind of peering is it? For what prefixes? In what geographies? Is anyone paying anyone else? Who lost the traffic? Why did Sprint and Cogent do this?

After just spending a month of virtually non-stop travelling for work, I began to reminisce about the last actual vacation I took, and to wonder just how different it was.

Cast your thoughts back to the late-summer. The afternoon was finally cooling off, two-year-old Agatha was blissfully asleep in the bedroom, people were enjoying themselves at the pool right next to our cabin and on water skis down on the lake, and I was catching up on email. Sigh.

Such are the joys of the Internet. As network connectivity marches steadily towards ubiquity, there is a palpable loss. I suffer less from this than most people in that I enjoy my work and manage to integrate it (mostly) successfully into my daily life and even my vacations. But I have to admit that it was with mixed feelings that I saw the "Wifi now available" on the office door at Gobblers Mountain Resort. One more connection made. One more refuge lost. There are definitely down sides to all of this networking stuff.

What makes modern Internetworking hard to cover is that you have to actually understand a fair bit about the underlying technology and economics to make sense of it. This turns out to be difficult for the press, public and politicians. A recent Light Reading article includes an amusing quote attributed to Chris Sacca, Google's head of special initiatives:

"We have one peering point in San Francisco and some journalists say that we're trying to take over the world," Sacca says. "That's the thing that a lot of journalists don't get," he says, "is that one peering point does not a telecommunications network make."

This was said in the context of a story about Google's use (or not) of dark fiber and the relationship between Google and AT&T. Now, either the GOOG has a much smaller network infrastructure than just about everyone thinks it does, or this quote isn't saying what it appears to be saying. I'm not blaming Mark Sullivan, the intrepid Lightreading reporter who wrote the story, for getting it wrong. I do think it's inconceivable that Sacca said and meant this, so there must have been some serious miscommunication. Topics about wide-area networking and peering are sophisticated and hard to talk about in plain language, both for the interviewee and for the reporter. But the confusion and misunderstandings are doing nothing to help the current national debate about net-neutrality, which is obviously an important topic that many people in the US care about.

You may be asking yourself: what does this story about Google and AT&T have to do with net-neutrality? I'll take a stab at an answer.

Panasonic (who has an aviation division - who knew?) is planning to restore Internet service on planes that was previously offered under the Connexion by Boeing brand.

As previously reported, Boeing has been planning to shut down the service because they couldn't make money on it. Panasonic plans to offer a faster service for cheaper and still make money. Wonder how that's possible?

Apparently, Boeing is shutting down their in-flight Internet Service due to lack of a market. Astute readers may remember a cool post about this subject from a few months ago when I was returning from RIPE in Turkey. It was fun to watch the updates to the global routing table cascade across the Internet as my plane crossed the Atlantic.

At the time, I was impressed with the service and the value. It was a great way to get a bunch of work (and a blog posting) done while stuck on an airplane. According to Boeing, I guess not enough people agreed. But I think there were ways that this service could have succeeded.

The normally reliable and interesting (if not always technical or incredibly detailed) Robert X. Cringely allowed a recent column to be marred by painful errors and misconceptions. Which is really too bad, because the point he was trying to make about net neutrality is pretty much exactly the point that I made in a previous blog.

Essentially, both Cringely and I (although he is much more famous, of course) are saying that this issue is substantially more complicated than the foolish politicians commenting on it are saying. As I wrote: "So is a two-tier Internet coming? From a performance perspective, it's already here. Any carrier can offer a "normal" quality of service (speed, latency, jitter, whatever) to everything and an "enhanced" quality of service to some special things." As Cringely writes: "Last week's column pointed out how shallow are the current arguments, which ignore many of the technical and operational realities of the Internet, especially the fact that there have long been tiers of service and that ISPs have probably been treating different kinds of packets differently for years and we simply didn't know it." So there you go. So what's my beef? It all boils down to one paragraph.

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.

I have been getting a lot of press attention for the recent fiasco regarding the denial of service attack suffered by anti-spam company Bluesecurity. Now bluesecurity have issued a purported timeline to describe what happened from their point of view. (You can tell someone is hostile or annoyed when they use words like 'purported' :-).

The timeline from bluesecurity (BS, as it's such a great acronym in American English) is frustratingly vague. It uses phrases like 'tampering with the Internet backbone using a technique called "Blackhole Filtering".' As Thomas Pogge, a philosophy professor of mine, used to say: that's not even wrong yet. There is no "Internet backbone", there is no technique known as "Blackhole Filtering", and blackhole routing is not normally described as tampering. So the whole explanation is nonsense. It is literally non-sense: cannot be made to refer or mean anything. I don't actually care whether BS knowingly redirected a DOS at the Six Apart sites or not (Although I'm sure that BS and its lawyers do). What I care about is that millions of angry netizens are being miseducated about how the Internet works. In the following, I'll try to correct some of that miseducation.

I just saw my plane cross the mid-Atlantic, not by looking out the window, but by watching routing updates cascade across the Internet. I'm writing from a Lufthansa jet right now, travelling from Munich to Boston. This plane offers the (relatively) new Connexion by Boeing wifi + satellite Internet service. It's seriously cool stuff - high latency, but absolutely functional. I've been aware of it for a while since the Boeing folks did a NANOG presentation about it last year. But this is the first time I've been able to use it.

Renesys has been tracking Internet updates for a very long time. We set realtime routing alerts to tell us when changes in the Internet's structure are a violation of someone's routing or security policy. We have known that due to satellite connectivity, the Internet routing tables could be used for tracking aircraft and the like. But this is the first time I've been on an Internet-connected vehicle, travelling 950kph, that changed its connection to the Internet. If this interconnection architecture is used by others, this could signal the rise of all kinds of interesting uses of the global Internet for monitoring.

Level (3) is buying ICG. This is the latest in a series of acquisitions that seems likely to continue. I previously wrote about the mergers going on among the largest 4 carriers and this is just a continuation of that story.

IPv6 is dead, and I think pretty much everyone already knows it. I gave a presentation about IPv6 at TelecomNEXT in Las Vegas last week (full presentation archived here) entitled "Realities of IPv6 as the Future Network Layer". I regard it as a largely straightforward presentation of the facts: IPv6 is used by virtually no one, is not seeing significant adoption and has lost in the marketplace of new ideas. Since we will, in fact, run out of IPv4 address space eventually, and since IPv6 is obviously not the solution that people want for this problem, let's start working on a better one right away. Of course, the presentation contains juicy quotes like:

• "The market has spoken: IPv6 is the wrong technology at the wrong time and most organizations will profit from simply ignoring it"
• "NAT and IPv6 are both evil, but IPv6 is the more dangerous of the two."
• "IPv6 was designed with no migration strategy from the real Internet."

This perspective has been making a lot of people angry, since it implies (or rather, bluntly states) that those who have made significant investments in IPv6 have wasted their money, since we will obviously have to replace it with something else. I think that this conclusion is painfully obvious, but I guess lots of people are still deluding themselves. So who will win and who will lose in the ultimate failure of IPv6?

According to the intrepid reporters over at The Register, Level (3) suffered a significant outage at their London Braham Street Facility due to a leak.

More specifically: Do these acquisitions really have anything to do with the Internet at all? What will be the size and scope of these networks when combined? Who will be the winners? We can offer some pretty convincing answers to all of these as well as some wild speculation about the next acquisition to come.

Tom Scholl has put up a hilarious parody of a peering cruise.

It's meant to poke fun at the real peering cruise sponsored by Terremark, Equinix, Switch and Data, AMS-IX and DE-CIX. All of these companies operate infrastructure used by major networks to locate equipment and exchange traffic. Also kicking in sponsorship dollars is Force 10 who makes switches used by many of these organizations to connect up their networking customers.

It's Groundhog Day and everything old is new again. Dave Rand at Trend Micro (from the Kelkea acquisition which was MAPS before that), is making noise about spammers hijacking BGP announcements. He describes a technique where spammers inject a route for a short period of time, source a bunch of spam from it and then withdraw the route. This means that the actual IP addresses used to send the spam are routed to someone other than their registered owner at the time the spam is sent. Nasty stuff.

BGP hijacking (unauthorized route injection) has been discussed (and mitigated) for many years now. The fact that Trend Micro appears to be just discovering it and that they're "working on a protection scheme" without any reference to the existing work (and commercially available protection schemes that are already deployed) is not encouraging.

Since the major outage to Panix and others caused this past weekend by Con Edison Communications, a number of people have been asking what was the root cause?. That is to say, what were the circumstances underlying Con Edison Communications's error in announcing the networks that they announced? In the intervening days, we have learned something about what happened, and there is room to reflect on what it all means for the future stability of the Internet.

Well, not the whole Internet, but Con Edison (AS27506) "stole" several important prefixes on the Internet earlier today, probably by mistake. Earlier this afternoon, I saw a message on the NANOG mailing list claiming that Con Ed was "stealing" routes to Panix, the venerable New York ISP, who had previously been hit with another outage beyond their control. Looking quickly into this with Renesys Routing Intelligence, it's far worse than that.

Con Edison apparently spent the better part of last night and today pretending to be a fair number of other people's networks ranging from Martha Stewart Living to NYFIX, from The New York Daily News to Walrus Internet. This is bad. While some of these networks were customers of Con Edison, many were not. Did anyone else notice or care that all of their traffic was being misrouted or is Panix the only one of these people who isn't asleep at the switch? Read on for significantly more detail about what we saw happen and who was affected.

The SJ Mercury News (and lots of other people) are reporting that the US Justice department is trying to get Google to disclose massive amounts of search index data. What's unique and troubling about this is that Justice aren't claiming that Google have done anything wrong or that the Google information directly relates to any crime: they just want use Google's index as a way to save themselves the hassle of indexing the web for themselves.

There's a good interview at ACM with Phil Smoot, an engineer on the Hotmail project and a product manager for MSN. The interview attempts to address issues of operations and systems scaling on an Internet-scale service and as such is interesting to me. It's also full of some silly platitudes: comparing hotmail to the Everest of "megaservices" even though it is several orders of magnitude smaller than some competing services and applications like Google Search or Yahoo! Search, for example.

Sprint (AS1239) had a pretty big outage yesterday. It took out voice and data services to a big chunk of the Southwest and California. The problem was that Sprint was doing maintenance on one part of their SONET ring and took a failure on the other part. That happens sometimes (hopefully not very often). So Sprint took some heat for it, and rightfully so.

This is a graph of the unreachable networks during the period. The sharp spike on the left is the Sprint event, from about 20:30 UTC (15:30 EST) to about 23:30 UTC (18:30 EST). From the scale, we can see that about 300 networks were affected. Sharp rise, sharp fall. Definitely a specific event that impacted the affected networks. But the event probably raises more questions than answers: Why are there even more outages later that night into the next day? Is an outage that affects 300 networks a big deal or a non-event?

A few days ago Om Malik suggested that consumers don't need any more bandwidth. He made a couple of interesting claims about the new round of speed upgrades being offered by networks in the US (and being mirrored by adsl2+ rollouts in Europe). Does anyone really need 6Mb/s (or 30 Mb/s) at their house, or is it just a big ruse by the communications companies to rip off your money?

In an interview back in November, SBC (now AT&T) CEO Edward Whitacre started a firestorm. He implied that since SBC owned the fast pipes into people's homes, they could control the Internet access that those people received. The networking public and media immediately began worrying about a "two-tier" Internet or "partial" Internet access where SBC customers could not access some content (or not access them quickly or effectively) unless that content provider paid SBC.

The Internet has succeeded largely because of its end-to-end nature (making it possible to deploy new, interesting applications without reconfiguring the network) and because of it's universality. Whitacre's comments seem to affect both principles, although it's tough to say. Since the firestorm about this is still brewing, it seems worth walking through the arguments more carefully to figure out: is Whitacre proposing a two-tier Internet, and is that a problem?

Peering matters. Earlier in the year, Cogent and Level (3) had a wee tiff over peering. Level (3) turned off its connections to Cogent for a few days as part of a strategy of negotiating new terms of interconnections. Politicians clamored to offer new, and ill-considered regulation of large-carrier interconnection. In the process, politicians and much of the media revealed the depths of their ignorance about how the Internet works.

One year ago today TTNet in Turkey (AS9121) pretended to be the entire Internet. And unfortunately for the rest of the Internet, many large network providers believed them (or at least believed them in part). As far as anyone knows, it was a mistake, not a malicious act. But the consequences were far from benign: for several hours a large number of Internet users were unable to reach a large number of Internet sites. Twelve months later we can take a look at what happened, and whether we've learned much in the intervening time.

So Earthlink is buying New Edge Networks for $144m (lots of references, but this should give you the basics). Most people have heard of Earthlink, once a dialup provider who has been trying to get a solid high-speed strategy since about 2000. But many haven't heard of New Edge. Let's take a look at what we know about both players.

This is my first blog, so you'll have to bear with me. Of course, like everyone even vaguely connected to the Internet, I've been aware of blogs for a very long time. I've got lots of friends with blogs and I've even thought about starting one, but never managed to. I think I even read a blog once; or maybe not.

I admire the Net for the way in which it allows ordinary people (and a few extraordinary people) to produce content and to directly deliver that content to an audience. "Disintermediation" was what we used to call that--a long word for "cutting out the middle man". Blogs can certainly do that. But they also have a tendency to be self-centered, myopic and frequently boring. I'll try to keep those normal, human characteristics out of these posts. Blogs worth reading are typically blogs worth writing. I'm hoping that this will be one of those.