Mícheál Ó Foghlú's Weblog

The night the IETF turned off IPv4

This is a good summary of the experiment at a recent IETF to disable IPv4 for one hour to test the issues with using an IPv6-only network infrastructure.The night the IETF turned off IPv4

After working on the new Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) for a decade and a half, the Internet Engineering Task Force decided it was time to turn off the old protocol (IPv4 or just IP). So this is what they did for an hour on the network used at the IETF meeting in Philadelphia this week. Network traffic plummeted from some 30Mbps to around 3Mbps as the meeting attendees who had IPv6 enabled could now only get at IPv6-reachable destinations on the Internet. Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for the Internet Society, who coordinated the IPv4 outage, considers the outage a success.

Views on Network Management

This article links to a well argued draft paper Why Telcos Don’t Get Networks. Abstract:

If there is a sector of the economy that should embrace network-based thinking, it is telecommunications. Surprisingly, the opposite is the case. The leading firms building telecommunications and Internet infrastructure increasingly emphasize consolidation, hierarchy, and exclusive control, rather than collaboration and decentralization. Regulators are dismantling legal frameworks that once promoted openness and interconnection, in favor of misguided efforts to incent proprietary investment. And many scholars, even those challenging the current drift of policy and business models, embrace a static worldview that is a relic of earlier eras. Network-based strategies are thus hard to find today in the so-called "network industries," even as such ideas flourish in adjacent digital information markets. This chapter explores the origins of this paradox, describes its manifestations in the legal and business environment, and traces a more hopeful future.

Metcalfe’s Law: more misunderstood than wrong?

An interesting discussion of Metcalfe’s Law Metcalfe's Law: more misunderstood than wrong?

The industry is at it again–trying to figure out what to make of Metcalfe’s Law. This time it’s IEEE Spectrum with a controversially titled “Metcalfe’s Law is Wrong”. The main thrust of the argument is that the value of a network grows O(nlogn) as opposed to O(n2). Unfortunately, the authors’ O(nlogn) suggeston is no more accurate or insightful than the original proposal. ... The typical statement of the law is “the value of a network increases proportionately with the square of the number of its users.” ... The unit of measurement along the X-axis is “compatibly communicating devices”, not users. ... Title of graph: "The Systemic Value of Compatibly Communicating Devices Grows as the Square of Their Number"

The Network Neutrality Debate

This is a great rant that pokes holes in just about everyone's arguments: LXer: Network Neutrality and an Internet with Vision.

In recently-aired plans by telephone companies, content providers who are willing to pay extra would get their content delivered at a higher bandwidth. While it's easy to wax indignant over telephone companies' presumptuousness in deciding what packets should travel at what times, it's harder to step back and take in the economic issues driving the proposed change. And there are technical questions about it as well.

CAIDA IPv6 Topology Maps

I was interested to see that CAIDA had released an updated IPv6 topology map based on statistics gathered in January 2008. The graphs are a visualisation of ASs (Autonomous Systems) in the Internet based on the number of routes between them. ASs are usually controlled by a single owner, and thus this diagram tries to capture logical complexity of the network of networks that is the Internet.

These graphs create an interesting picture of the complexity of the Internet. For comparison have a look at the IPv4 topology map (multiple versions). If you look at these you'll see that the current IPv6 topology is as complex as the IPv4 Internet in 2000, at the height of the dot com boom. Of course the current IPv4 topology is more complex (latest shown currently is 2007).

Ever since I discovered these graphs I have thought that they were a great way to visualise the complexity of the Internet (IPv4 and IPv6).

More Undersea Cable Pictures

It’s 2008 — Do You Know Where Your Internet Cables Are? - GigaOM

Discussion of NAT (and IPv4 address deplation)

Nice to see that we are starting to think of the good things that NAt gave us, as well as planning the move to IPv6 where it will no longer be required. I think this post has it right, NAT served a purpose, now move on.

As IPv6 Deploys, Will We Look Back on NAT as the Ugly Step Sister or Unsung Hero?

Internet prediced to reach zettabyte (annual US traffic)

TDP - Estimating the Exaflood

From YouTube, IPTV, and high-definition images, to “cloud computing” and ubiquitous mobile cameras—to 3D games, virtual worlds, and photorealistic telepresence—the new wave is swelling into an exaflood of Internet and IP traffic. An exabyte is 10 to the 18th. We estimate that by 2015, U.S. IP traffic could reach an annual total of one zettabyte (1021 bytes), or one million million billion bytes.

Internet Undersea Cables (Guardian, UK)

SeaCableHi.jpg (JPEG Image, 1703x1037 pixels) - Scaled (92%)

Thanks to James Mernin.

IPv6 Address Added for Root Servers in the Root Zone

ICANN | IPv6 Address Added for Root Servers in the Root Zone

MARINA DEL REY, Calif.: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers today took another step along the path of deployment for the next-generation IPv6 Internet addressing system.

IPv6 addresses were added for six of the world’s 13 root server networks (A, F, H, J, K, M) to the appropriate files and databases. This move allows for the possibility of fuller IPv6 usage of the Domain Name System (DNS). Prior to today, those using IPv6 had needed to retain the older IPv4 addressing system in order to be able to use domain names.

"The ISP community welcomes this development as part of the continuing evolution of the public Internet,” said Tony Holmes, chair of ICANN’s Internet Service and Connectivity Provider Constituency. “IPv6 will be an essential part our future and support in the root servers is essential to the growth, stability, and reliability of the public Internet.”

Name server software relies on the root servers as a key part in translating domains like “icann.org” into the routing identifiers used by computers to connect to one another. In 2007 the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee concluded that ICANN should move forward with the enhancement of the DNS root service by adding IPv6 addresses for the root servers.

As more and more devices connect to the Internet they require unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. The remaining free pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses is being depleted by the growth of the Internet. IPv6 is the addressing protocol that increases the unique IP addresses from the 4 billion available in IPv4, to more than 340 trillion trillion trillion.

“Today’s addition of IPv6 addresses for the root servers enhances the end-to-end connectivity for IPv6 networks, and furthers the growth of the global interoperable Internet,” added David Conrad, ICANN’s Vice President of Research and IANA Strategy. “This is a major step forward for IPv6-only connectivity and the global migration to IPv6.”

Further technical information on the move is available at http://www.iana.org/reports/root-aaaa-announcement.html

Nework Neutrality arguments rumble on in the US

In this article David Isenberg critiques Scott Cleland's assertion that telcos need to disciminate against certain traffic for reasons of network management The Network Management Excuse.

Ireland has 2nd higest percentage of IPv6 DNS entries

In this interesting analysis of actual IPv6 deployment (for http - web servers, smtp - email server and dns - domain name servers) Examining Actual State of IPv6 Deployment it seems that Ireland is doing quite well in terms of DNS with 14% of our sites having an IPv6 address - not a high score but 2nd only to Lithuania. We have don't fare so well in have 4.1% of our mail servers IPv6 enabled - above the median in 35th place, and 38% of our web servers enabled - below the median around 80th.

IETF NSIS

I am here in Amsterdam speaking at a Marcus Evans conference on 9th Annual Signalling Systems for Future Telecoms (Exploring the Future of Networks and Interconnect for an All-IP World), quite a mouthful but a really good event.

The first talk today was from Martin Stiemerling (NEC) who co-chairs the IETF nsis activity: Next Steps in Signaling (nsis) Charter. This is a fascinating development allowing flexible in-band signalling and QoS (Quality of Service) negotiation over IP routed networks.

As usual the main problem with any inter-domain QoS across the Internet is a business issue, rather than a technical one of standards: why would any network operator give some other operator's customers priority on their networks, so most QoS systems are applied within a single network autonomous system only, administered by a single operator. So just because I think my VoIP is important, doesn't mean every operator in my path will agree, even if the standards allow them to.

Jim Bound on IPv6

An excellent interview with Jim Bound, CTO of the IPv6 Forum: IPv6 guru predicts last-minute switch to protocol - Network World

Summary of IPv6 Announcements

An excellent summary of major announcments about IPv6 this year: The Year IPv6 Made it to Major League

May 6th 2007: ARIN board of trustees passes a resolution advising the Internet community that migration to a new version of the internet protocol, IPv6, will be necessary to allow continued growth of the internet.

June 29th 2007, Puerto Rico: ICANN Board resolution states that: The Board further resolves to work with the Regional Internet Registries and other stakeholders to promote education and outreach, with the goal of supporting the future growth of the Internet by encouraging the timely deployment of IPv6.

Oct 26th 2007 at the RIPE 55 meeting in Amsterdam: “Growth and innovation on the Internet depends on the continued availability of IP address space. The remaining pool of unallocated IPv4 address space is likely to be fully allocated within two to four years...the deployment of IPv6 is necessary for the development of future IP networks”

Nov 15th 2007: IGF meeting, Rio de Janeiro, chairman’s report: “Panelists also discussed the eventual exhaustion of ICANN’s reserve of unassigned IPv4 addresses.”

It was made clear that this would not cause the Internet to fail, but this was used to indicate the importance of the effort to bring the IPv6 network on-line and the need for the full interoperability between the IPv4 and IPv6 networks.

This is but a small sample of the fast growing visibility IPv6 acquired this year, 2007.

The internet ecosystem, ranging from network Operator Groups (NOG) to peering forums to Regional Internet Registries (RIR) to ICANN, to IANA and even the United Nations sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF), had IPv6 quite high on its agenda this year. This rather sudden surge has taken at least some of us, amongst long term IPv6 proponents and advocates, by surprise, as it took close to a decade, lots of persistence, lots of convincing and periods of doubt, to get to this point. This is a period those involved in the early IPv6 experiments and deployment in the Research and Education Networks, the IPv6 Forum since its beginnings back in 1999, should savor and enjoy. Not to mention those who fathered RFC’s, spent time at IETF and late nights on numerous mailing lists and never ending e-mail strings.

Cisco IPJ - lots of good IPv6 discussions

The most recent issue of the Cisco IPJ (Internet Protocol Journal), that is available for free on-line, has a number of very interesting articles on IPv6.

First Geoff Huston, APNIC updates us with his view of the big picture on IPv4 depletion, and the slow pace of IPv6 roll out. He is right to point out that a continued dual-stack strategy, that many seem to favour, will continue to require IPv4 addresses, and will thus become untenable when the IPv4 addresses themselves run out. There isn't much time to deploy IPv6 everywhere, within the IPv4 depletion timescale.

Then Iljitsch van Beijnum gives his views on IPv4 address consumption, trying to focus not just on the /8 block allocations from IANA to the RIRs, but on the subsequent allocation by the RIRs to ISPs and others.

Then Leo Vegoda talks about the use of unregistered IPv4 address space: "Many organizations have chosen to use unregistered IPv4 addresses in their internal networks and, in some cases, network equipment or software providers have chosen to use unregistered IPv4 addresses in their products or services." He discusses the potential problems that could ensue.

On a separate, but related theme, that of security for IP networks, Kunjal Trivedi, Cisco Systems and Damien Holloway, Juniper Networks discuss secure multivendor networks.

This issue of the IPJ could thus be seen as the definitive one in terms of summarising the key issues of IPv4 depletion, and IPv6 deployment. We have 2 years before the /8 IANA pool runs out, and a further 12-18 months before the RIRs then cannot comply with requests for new IPv4 addresses. I suggest everyone who is interested in the future of the Internet as it is now (not some abstract new network we haven't thought of yet) read these papers and become conversant with the arguments, and then start deploying IPv6 as quickly as possible.

IPv6 SHIM6 Interoperability Testing with Moonv6 in University of New Hampshire

Over the summer Irish National IPv6 Centre have conducted interoperability tests with Moonv6 in the InterOperabilty Lab (IOL) in the University of New Hampshire: UNH-IOL Tests IPv6 for the Enterprise.

The university lab partnered with the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland to extend the testing into less familiar territory. This portion of the testing focused on an innovation not possible with today’s Internet called Site Multihoming by IPv6 Intermediation, or SHIM6 for short. Of special interest in financial transactions, SHIM6 is an IPv6-only failover function that kicks in if one side of a link goes down, automatically rerouting the connection without affecting the download in progress.

IPv6 is the successor to the current IP infrastructure that underlies data in today’s Internet and enterprise networks. The new protocol greatly enlarges the pool of IP addresses needed to network new servers, laptops, phones, printers, etc. While some geographies have already run out of IP addresses, it has been predicted that North America will face IPv4 address space exhaustion between the years 2010-2012. IPv6’s increased address space is expected to make better use of emerging technology areas like VoIP, video and various interactive multimedia applications as well.

Other benefits touted for IPv6 include simplified network architecture, an increase in new services, and increased number of network nodes, built-in security, and the ability to "plug and play" devices that are IPv6 enabled. After first getting involved with the protocol in the late 1990s, the UNH-IOL has been actively testing and debugging IPv6 devices on the Moonv6 network since 2003.

This work is related to the EU FP6 IST project ENABLE that looks at many aspects of IPv6 mobility, and promotes suitable changes to the IETF standards.

Zimbie launches beta Instant Messaging client/server for automated IM-"bots"

Another TSSG spin-out company, Zimbie (not fully launched yet), has just released a public beta of their software that allows users to easily setup automated Instant Messaging "bots" (robots to automate tasks). The idea is that what appears to be another friend on your IM buddy list actually talks to a server that performs some task and returns the result as text in an IM chat. The Zimbie client itself can allow the bot to return more complex data than just text, but you don't have to use teh Zimbe client to access a bot, any IM reader will do. The aim of the beta release is to demonstrate the ease of setting up a bot without doing any programming.

The beta release has attracted some attion on the blogosphere: Blognation Conor O'Neill), Cloudlands (John Breslin), KillerStartups, and more.

Nubiq launches mobiseer

One of the TSSG spin-out companies, Nubiq, has recently launched a new product, mobiseer (mobiseer.mobi from your phone), to help mobile users bookmark and tag useful sites. The main advantage is that it is specifically targetted at mobile browsers. This product is in addition to Zinadoo that helps build mobile websites easily.

Here is a good review of the mobiseer beta release from Conor O'Neilmobiseer is ma.gnolia for mobiles.

Mapping the Internet

This is an interesting new approach to mapping the Internet Technology Review: Mapping the Internet. The work draws on the research project DIMES, and has some interesting interactive graphing tools, and a downloadable client to join in the mapping project.

It is interesting to compare this to the excellent work done at CAIDA, such as the AS-level topology maps of IPv6 and IPv4, using these tools (skitter probes, BGP table analysis, and ancillary tools).

Returning to the magazine article from Technology Review this extract gives a good flavour of the contents:

It's the first study to look at how the Internet is organized in terms of function, as well as how it's connected, says Shai Carmi, a physicist who took part in the research at the Bar Ilan University, in Israel. "This gives the most complete picture of the Internet available today," he says.

While efforts have been made previously to plot the topological structure in terms of the connections between Internet nodes--computer networks or Internet Service Providers that act as relay stations for carrying information about the Net--none have taken into account the role that these connections play. "Some nodes may not be as important as other nodes," says Carmi.

The researchers' results depict the Internet as consisting of a dense core of 80 or so critical nodes surrounded by an outer shell of 5,000 sparsely connected, isolated nodes that are very much dependent upon this core. Separating the core from the outer shell are approximately 15,000 peer-connected and self-sufficient nodes.

Take away the core, and an interesting thing happens: about 30 percent of the nodes from the outer shell become completely cut off. But the remaining 70 percent can continue communicating because the middle region has enough peer-connected nodes to bypass the core.

With the core connected, any node is able to communicate with any other node within about four links. "If the core is removed, it takes about seven or eight links," says Carmi. It's a slower trip, but the data still gets there. Carmi believes we should take advantage of these alternate pathways to try to stop the core of the Internet from clogging up. "It can improve the efficiency of the Internet because the core would be less congested," he says.

To build their map of the Internet, published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers enlisted the assistance of 5,000 online volunteers who downloaded a program to help identify the connections between the 20,000 known nodes.

The closest I can find to a full academic paper on this, rather than the magazine style article linked above, seems to be based on slightly earlier work very similar to CAIDA's, is an AS level topology analysis (paper).

@MISC{carmi-2006,
  author = {Shai Carmi and Shlomo Havlin and Scott Kirkpatrick and Yuval Shavitt and Eran Shir},
  title = {MEDUSA - New Model of Internet Topology Using k-shell Decomposition},
  url = {http://www.citebase.org/abstract?id=oai:arXiv.org:cond-mat/0601240},
  year = {2006}
}

Abstract

The k-shell decomposition of a random graph provides a different and more insightful separation of the roles of the different nodes in such a graph than does the usual analysis in terms of node degrees. We develop this approach in order to analyze the Internet's structure at a coarse level, that of the "Autonomous Systems" or ASes, the subnetworks out of which the Internet is assembled. We employ new data from DIMES (see this http URL), a distributed agent-based mapping effort which at present has attracted over 3800 volunteers running more than 7300 DIMES clients in over 85 countries. We combine this data with the AS graph information available from the RouteViews project at Univ. Oregon, and have obtained an Internet map with far more detail than any previous effort. The data suggests a new picture of the AS-graph structure, which distinguishes a relatively large, redundantly connected core of nearly 100 ASes and two components that flow data in and out from this core. One component is fractally interconnected through peer links; the second makes direct connections to the core only. The model which results has superficial similarities with and important differences from the "Jellyfish" structure proposed by Tauro et al., so we call it a "Medusa." We plan to use this picture as a framework for measuring and extrapolating changes in the Internet's physical structure. Our k-shell analysis may also be relevant for estimating the function of nodes in the "scale-free" graphs extracted from other naturally-occurring processes.

I am going to try and find out some more about this very interesting work, and I'll update this posting to reflect new information as I receive it.

IMS (3GPP and ETSI TISPAN)

Telecoms.com – News, Events and research for the telecoms industry

It is good to see emerging consensus in the telecommunications standardisation community on the use of IMS for Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC). Here it is reported that ETSI TISPAN and 3GPP have agreed how to proceed with the IMS Release 8 process.

ETSI TISPAN, the European standards body for the fixed-line half of the Next Generation Network world, this week agreed terms with mobile standards body, the 3GPP, on how to prevent the fixed and mobile versions of IMS from wandering apart.

IMS originated with TISPAN before being taken up by 3GPP for UMTS R99/5, but since then, the fixed-line and co-ax people have become more interested in the idea again. Both standards committees have been co-existing peacefully but perhaps not as happily as one might like.

The development of a Common IMS - common to fixed, cable and mobile networks - is going to go ahead in a 3GPP group, Services Specification SA-1, after a decision at last week's 3GPP plenary meeting in Busan, South Korea.

The job has to be done by the end of 2007 in order to be ready for the launch of UMTS Release 8, or "the IMS you can deploy" as some people call it.

Stephen Hayes, of Ericsson and 3GPP TSG-SA chair, said: "Over the next few months we must stabilise the Release 8 requirements and absorb the incoming Common IMS work."

IPv6 Alloactions to Enterprises in Europe - a problem?

In this excellent article Concerns grow over IPv6 migration - ZDNet UK the issues that effect the widespread adoption of IPv6 addressing within the enterprise networking community are addressed. It looks like the time has come to open up allocations more for enterprises and not just ISPs. I've worked with Tim Chown of the University of Southampton and the UK IPv6 Task Force on a number of activities, including the EU IPv6 Cluster -- a forum for interaction between various EU projects involved in IPv6. He has his finger on the pulse of the technical issues and has a good understanding of the business issues, so I respect his opinion on this matter. Note also the underlying message, as articulated here on a number of occasions, that even the conservative estimates of IPv4 exhaustion are converging on 2010 and 2011, not very far away.

Enterprise Ireland IMS Workshop

On the 5th June Enterprise Ireland hosted a workshop on IMS (the IP Multimedia Subsystem that is the standard at the heart of emerging data and voice in Fixed-Mobile Convergence for the telecommunications industry). The main guest speaker was our colleague Professor Thomas Magedanz of Fraunhofer Institut für Offene Kommunikationssysteme FOKUS, Berlin; he's also a visiting professor in Waterford Institute of Technology working with the TSSG on a number of Irish and EU funded research projects. Amongst other things in his presentation he was promoting his Open IMS Playground, which we use as an integrated testbed between the TSSG and FOKUS.

The TSSG has started a website to track the Enterprise Ireland ILRP (Industry-Led Research Programme) IMS ARCS, in which FOKUS are a partner, and a recent posting on that site summarises the purpose of the workshop, and gives links to all the presentations made EI IMS Workshop | IMS ARCS Project.

In fact I was originally due to share the platform and speak at this Enterprise Ireland workshop covering some background on the TSSG, and giving some initial details of the new IMS ARCS programme. Robert Mullins of the TSSG deputised for me and gave this presentation.

So watch this space for future news on the TSSG's research in IMS, or track the IMS ARCS project directly on its own website. RSS feeds of the blogs are available as well.

IMS ARCS is an Industry Lead Research Programme (ILRP) lead by the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG) in Waterford. The IMS ARCS project is building a platform to facilitate the creation of IMS based services so that companies can tap into this market more quickly and easily, while ensuring consumers are not swamped by the resultant proliferation of services. As part of this work, a world class IMS Test Bed will be set up by TSSG.

The vision of the IMS ARCS project is an environment where end-users can be immersed in a world of diverse IP-based media, voice or data services that can be received off any number of network types. The IMS ARCS platform will allow services to be selected and personalised based on the everyday needs of the end-user and on their current context. Every user’s experience of the network and its services will be differentiated by the user’s defined requirements, their past usage and their current context.

These services will be supported by the provisioning of both existing and next generation network technology including both scalable and seamless integration of multiple heterogeneous networks, and ad-hoc and sensor networks. This will encourage and empower network and service operators to create new business opportunities and profitable services in an integrated mobile world.

IMS ARCS (EI ILRP) Partners:

• Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG), Waterford Institute of Technology
• Centre for Converged Communications Services (3CS), Waterford Institute of Technology
• Irish National IPv6 Centre, led by TSSG in Waterford Institute of Technology
• Hamilton Institute, NUI Maynooth
• Interaction Design Centre, University of Limerick
• Applied Software Research Centre, Athlone Institute of Technology
• Next Generation Network Infrastructures Competence Centre, Fraunhofer FOKUS

OMTP (Open Mobile Terminal Platform) Announces Requirements for IMS

The OMTP (Open Mobile Terminal Platform) announced on 12th June 2007 that it had completed its set of requirements that lay the foundations for the seamless deployment of IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) applications and services and pave the way for a more consistent end-user experience.

While many in the mobile industry believe that IMS will play a significant role in the future of data services, there are issues over the practicalities of deployment, which need addressing to enable IMS to truly deliver on its potential:

• The applications that will built on IMS must be able to consistently access any necessary services;
• The way in which applications respond upon receiving incoming IMS events must be defined;
• The end-user must have a consistent and coherent experience;
• Specifications must be consolidated and tiered for widespread uptake.

In its current form the IMS proposition fails to sufficiently address these four key areas and falls short of the full end-to-end experience that is required. OMTP’s requirements detail the steps needed to address these fundamental issues.

Tim Raby, OMTP CEO commented, “Despite the issues around its deployment, IMS delivers a host of potential benefits for operators, not least the ability to improve Quality of Service for end-users. For this to become a reality however there is a certain amount of ‘knitting’ needed to join up various elements. Our requirements give clear guidance to ensure IMS has the opportunity to deliver on its promises.”

Irish ENUM Launches

My colleague Miguel posts on the recent launch of the Irish ENUM service Miguel Ponce de Leon: ENUM Services launched in Ireland. His posting gives the high level overview of what public ENUM is supposed to be, and how close this offering in Ireland is to delivering on this. The downside seems to be the requirement for a validation every six months with a fee that makes it more expensive to maintain a public ENUM entry than an Internet domain name registration.
In essence the public ENUM service links a telephone number to an IP address allowing the integration of Internet voice services and telephony. It is like a top level domain (TLD) for +353 (the international code of Ireland) in the same way that there is a TLD for .ie (the Internet country code domain for Ireland).
Interesting I discovered a while ago that there is a parallel movement, championed by the GSMA (the GSM Association of mobile operators) to create a private "on net" ENUM as an alternative to this public ENUM infrastructure. Note that in telecommunications speak "on net" means on the operators' private networks, i.e. not on the public Internet; logical from their perspective if a bit confusing at first if you are coming from an Internet perspective (what we normally think of as "the net").
Linguistic niceties aside, the potential problem with the open ENUM as illustrated by this Irish launch is that it is in effect publishing your telephone number for the world to see via an open database, so that potentially it could lead to similar problems of spamming that we see when email addresses are publicly exchanged.
The promise of the private ENUM, as an alternative infrastructure using similar technologies, is that your mobile operator will protect your privacy and only give the information to other valid operators (that could include Internet-based VoIP providers who have paid to be part of the scheme. They have ample experience of this type of information exchange between operators through the use of the roaming agreements that allow us all to make and receive calls and SMS text messages anywhere in the world. Whilst there has been some criticism of expensive roaming changes, everyone agrees it is an invaluable service.
I have noted before that I feel that it it is no coincidence that this solutions to the business problem of information exchange between operators arose in the European Union, a strange political beast where independent nation states have agreed to sacrifice some of their sovereignty in exchange for lasting pace and economic stability. It means we are constantly debating where the line between sovereignty and shared rules lies, and it places us in a good position to develop models that work where international boundaries need to be crossed, and everyone's opinions and rights need to be given due credit. Alternatively US and Chinese solutions tend to assume one size fits all, and are less likely to sit well with smaller countries jealous of their own ways of doing things. It takes all sorts of course, but I feel the EU has a lot to offer in developing working solutions for cooperating countries, legal systems, and shared critical infrastructures, such as the Internet and the telephone network, that cross these boundaries.

The Grand Unifying Theory of Enterprise Computing: 2.0 (Sean McGrath, ITworld.com)

A provocative side-swipe from Sean McGrath on enterprise computing ITworld.com - The Grand Unifying Theory of Enterprise Computing: 2.0

The nub of his argument has some validity:

If the details of all of this do not interest you, here is the takeaway: you cannot design away the network - you can only hide it behind tall banks of dollars bills. There are those who do not believe this of course. Everything - including truth - appears to be relative to a given point of view.

More on IPv4 Addresses

An interview with John Curran, chairman of the American Registry for Internet Numbers Internet addresses drying up fast - CBRonline.com

This article is a bit easier to read than some of the more technical discussions, and agrees with my core argument that predictions of IPv4 address exhaustion are converging on late 2009 early 2010 (for the central IANA blocks).

ARIN Board Advises Internet Community on Migration to IPv6

Well the mood is really shifting towards IPv6 in May 2007. Within the one month we have revised predictions of the IANA /8 IPv4 address pool exhaustion (Dec 2009/Jan 2010) from Geof Houston, and an announcement from ARIN that they now encourage people to move to IPv6.

ARIN Board Advises Internet Community on Migration to IPv6.

On 7th May 2007, the ARIN Board of Trustees passed a resolution advising the Internet technical community that migration to a new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6, will be necessary to allow continued growth of the Internet.

Internet Protocol defines how computers communicate over a network. IP version 4 (IPv4), the currently prevalent version, contains just over four billion unique IP addresses, which is not enough to last indefinitely. IPv6 is a replacement for IPv4, offering far more IP addresses and enhanced security features. To date, ARIN has performed technical coordination of both versions and has not advocated one over the other.

Thanks to David Malone of The Hamilton Institute in NUI Maynooth for alerting me to the ARIN announcement.

WebCamp on Emerging Mobile Internet in UCD 17th May 2007

Well I went to the WebCamp on the Emerging Mobile Internet (UCD, 17th May 2007) and really enjoyed it.

Here are my slides PDF Slides.

My talk was Talk 6 and there's a linked blog discussion here: Talk 6 Blog.

I've posted a short summary of my talk there, and I'll cross post here.

The talk took the title of the WebCamp literally, and looked at issues of the "Emerging Mobile Internet".

For me the Internet is the TCP/IP suite of protocols, that includes application layer stuff like http, but is based on the underlying architecture of packet switching and naming at lower layers. For me the biggest issue here is the broken architecture of the Internet itself where NAT forces services and applications to try and get around the issue of machines not have real publicly addressable identities (IP addresses), and where every packet is changed en route by middle boxes to the detriment of efficiency. My slides showed that we'll run out of centrally assigned IANA /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses in 2009/2010 and then regional registries will have problems fulfilling requests within another year or two from then. IPv6 solves the address shortage issue, and also opens up the Internet architecture to again allow any device to offer a service to another device (the end-to-end principle), allowing innovate p2p services.

At the high service and application levels the main issues for me are: (i) how Internet telephony can be made to work without opening up telephony to spam (as email, blog comments, blog trackbacks, and all such are due to the open nature of identity on the Internet, and the low level of default/assumed security) and (ii) how the mobile web should ideally be designed to be the same as the real web, that there should just be one web, with different presentations on desktops and mobile phones, but the same back-end services.

Update 2007-06-03 My slides have been published on slideshare.

VPN and WiFi Security

This article gives a good summary of the security issues with WiFI and VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) and argues for using both - but the right tool for the job.
Why VPN can replace Wi-Fi security | George Ou | ZDNet.com

Geof Houston now predicts IPv4 IANA/8 exhaustion in December 2009

IPv4 Address Report Geof Houston has updated his model predicting IPv4 address space exhaustion. Now the projected IANA Unallocated Address Pool Exhaustion date is 18-Dec-2009. Last month this prediction was 06-Jul-2011 (c.f. my earlier blog post).

He notes:

(Note: 8 May 2007) Frequent visitors to this page would see that the projected data of IANA unallocated pool exhaustion has moved by some months as of the 8th May. The reason for this change of the projection is the use of a different mathematical model as of this date. Previous reports used a best fit of an exponential model to the most recent 1000 days of data in order to generate the predictive model. As indicated in Figure 22 of this report, this exponential model now deviates from the recent data, and the predictive model is based on a quadratic equation.

Interview with Bob Metcalfe (co-inventor of Ethernet)

I learned a lot reading this interview with Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, including the fact that he first used the term "best-effort" Ethernet papa makes Invent Now Hall of Fame | Newsmakers | CNET News.com. He comments on the net neutrality debate and on his view of the problems with the Internet in general.

WebCamp on Emerging Mobile Internet in UCD 17th May 2007

WebCamp on Emerging Mobile Internet in UCD approaches (May 17th) at Cloudlands

Thanks to John Breslin for publicising the event on his blog, I'm prompted to do the same, as I should as I will be speaking at the event.

The second WebCamp event on Emerging Mobile Internet is approaching. The event will be held in UCD Dublin on 17th May 2007, it's free, and you can signup now on the WebCamp wiki here.

The speakers include:
* Keith Bradley - Changing Worlds
* Frederic Herrera - The National Digital Research Centre (NDRC)
* TBC - NewBay Software
* Hélène Haughney - Nubiq Ltd.
* Steven Strachen - Hamilton Institute, NUI Maynooth
* Mícheál Ó Foghlú - TSSG, Waterford IT
* Kieran Mahon - Vodafone Ireland
* Karen Church - Adaptive Information Cluster, UCD

If you're interested in any of the following topics, it sounds like it's going to be a very interesting day.
* Mobile Internet applications
* Mobile search and browsing
* Behavioural studies / analysis of mobile Web usage
* Challenges of the mobile Internet
* HCI on the mobile Internet
* Usability of mobile devices and services
* User interfaces for mobile devices
* Improving / enhancing content, infrastructure and billing models
* Mobile Web 2.0
* Content authoring/user generated content from mobile devices

IPv4 Address Space Exhaustion

This blog entry on the ICANN site shows some interesting maps of the assigned IPv4 address space and some links to discussions on IPv4 address space exhaustion: ICANN Blog: Blog Archive: Mapping the Internet, one node at a time

I have recently noted to my work colleagues in the TSSG that Geof Houston's (of APNIC) predictions are now converging with Tony Hain's (of Cisco) predictions at around late 2010 - mid 2011 for the last IANA/8 to be allocated, that's less than 1 year divergence. This means that there is broad agreement on this prediction.

Geof Houston's prediction is updated regularly. As of yesterday he predicts no IANA/8 left after 06-Jul-2011.

UPDATE 2007-05-08 Geof's prediction revised to December 2009!

Tony Hain's prediction, published in September 2005 in the Cisco IPv6 protocol Journal, and well worth a read both for the article itself and for the discussion printed at the end of the article. His predictions are summarised in these two statements:

"So this view of the sustained trend in allocation growth rate suggests that the lifetime of the remaining central IPv4 pool is 4 years +/-1." [i.e. Sep 2009 +/-1]

and

"The various projections in Figures 5 and 6 show different mathematical models applied to the same raw data. Depending on the model chosen, the nonlinear historical trends in Figure 6 covering the last 5- and 10-year data show that the remaining 64 /8s will be allocated somewhere between 2009 and 2016, with no change in policy or demand (though as discussed previously there are already reasons to err toward 5-year based nonlinear models)."

His model graph is updated quarterly.

In fact it is worth quote the concluding few sections of Ton Hain's original article in full as they address a number of other possible issues that may arise:

"Reserved Space
There are occasionally arguments that the 16 /8s reserved in the experimental space could be used. Although this is likely to be possible for some IP stack implementations, for others it is not. At a minimum, some quick tests show that Windows 95 through Windows 2003 Server systems consider that block to be a configuration error and refuse to accept it. The operational ability to restrict the space to a select stack implementation is limited, and the amount of space there does not really help even if deployment and operations were trivial. Assuming the sustained growth trend in allocations continues, by the time the remaining 64 /8s in the IANA pool are finished the rate would be approaching 3 /8 allocations per month, so the entirety of the old Class E space would amount to about 6 months of run rate.

Reclaiming Allocations
Another debate occasionally resurfaces about reclaiming some of the early allocations to further extend the lifetime of IPv4. Hopefully this article has shown that the ROI for that approach is going to be extremely low. Discussions around the Internet community show there is an expectation that it will take several years of substantive negotiation (in multiple court systems around the globe) to retrieve any /8s. Then following that effort and expense, the likelihood of even getting back more than a few /8 blocks is very low. Following the allocation growth trend, after several years of litigation the result is likely to be just a few months of additional resource added to the pool - and possibly not even a whole month. All this assumes IANA does not completely run out before getting any back, because running out would result in pentup demand that could immediately exhaust any returns.

Summary
Network Address Translation (NAT) and CIDR did their jobs and bought the 10 years needed to get IPv6 standards and products developed. Now is the time to recognize the end to sustainable growth of the IPv4-based Internet has arrived and that it is time to move on. IPv6 is ready as the successor, so the gating issue is attitude. When CIOs make firm decisions to deploy IPv6, the process is fairly straightforward. Staff will need to be trained, management tools will need to be enhanced, routers and operating systems will need to be updated, and IPv6-enabled versions of applications will need to be deployed. All these steps will take time - in many cases multiple years. The point of this article has been to show that the recent consumption rates of IPv4 will not be sustainable from the central pool beyond this decade, so organizations would be wise to start the process of planning for an IPv6 deployment now. Those who delay may find that the IANA pool for IPv4 has run dry before they have completed their move to IPv6. Although that may not be a problem for most, organizations that need to acquire additional IPv4 space to continue growing during the transition could be out of luck."

So it is clear to me that IPv4 addresses are running out, and IPv6 is the only viable alternative. Whilst the TSSG do engage in "post-IP" research, looking at potential alternatives, there is no question that IPv6 will need to be deployed to meet IPv4 exhaustion, and any post-IP research will require 10-15 years to be ready for deployment, and that's simply too late for IPv4 exhaustion.

This is why I am Director of the Irish National IPv6 Centre and Chair of the Irish IPv6 Task Force and Ireland's representative on the European IPv6 Task Force and the world-wide IPv6 Forum. When we started the Irish National IPv6 Centre in September 2005 there were 64 IANA/8 blocks left, last month this was down to 47. The waiting game is over, it is time to start planning IPv6 deployment today.

Open Source Telephony

A comprehensive list of open source telephony projects VoIP Now: 74 Open Source VoIP Apps & Resources. Many, but not all, use SIP.

Open Source IP Router (XORP)

XORP (eXtensible Open Source Router Platform) provides a good basis for network research and for deployment. We will be investigating it. The latest release (1.4) adds OSPFv3, the IPv6-compatible version of the Open Shortest Path First protocol, to the set of routing protocols that XORP supports.

Nokia Siemens Networks launches itself as a new company today

Nokia Siemens Networks launches itself as a new company today. The firm represents the merger of the telecommunications network organizations from the two companies, with annual revenues in the order of $20B and positioned in the top three global share in each of wireless networks, telecommunications services and wireline networks.

The venture begins with 60,000 employees, including 20,000 professionals working on the services side of the house.

The new company will officially begin operating on 1st April 2007 and will have its headquarters in Espoo, Greater Helsinki, Finland, while the European headquarters and three of its five divisions will be based in Munich, Germany. It will have operations in all major regions of the world.

Thanks to Mark Goldberg in Canada and Wikipedia.

Mail Transfer Agent Comparison (exim, postfix, qmail, sendmail)

Here is an excellent on-line article comparing the four main open source Mail Transfer Agents (or email servers in common, though slightly incorrect, parlance) MTA Comparison - Granizada. The bottom line is that it recommends exim as the best general purpose solution for most people.

Network Neutrality

Wendy M. Grossman argues, in an interesting way, that we have two network neutrality debates in parallel: net.wars: Double the networks, double the neutralities

The upshot is that because the two markets - wireless phones and the Internet - have developed from opposite directions, we have two network neutrality debates, not one. The wonder is that it took us so long to notice.

Umm, interesting, you could substitute two NGNs "next generation networks" for this and would read just as well.

WIT TSSG SIP IPv6 Project

One of my colleagues in the TSSG, Jonathan Brazil, has just posted a summary of his experiences getting client SIP software to work with IPv6 Jonathan Brazil's Weblog: IPv6 - How I got there.... Great that we got there, and great for him to share these details via his blog for us all to read!

IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) is a big deal in modern telecommunications, and is a core (but not the only) part of the TSSG's approach to converged communications services. On principle we try to develop everything we do as dual stack IPv4/IPv6 to be really ready for the next generation internet. This project is one example of this approach in practice.

Are We Slowly Losing Control of the Internet (Karl Auerbach)

In this short article Are We Slowly Losing Control of the Internet? Karl Auerbach bemoans the lack of simple standards, as options proliferate, and standards bodies try and please all the stakeholders. A common problem. He sets his sights on SIP as an example of what can go wrong. Perhaps most interesting he links to a good set of slides From Barnstorming to Boeing - Transforming the Internet Into a Lifeline Utility that has speaker notes. Hey many this guy is trying to help out on my MSc (taught) module on SIP after all - though they're a bit high level. In any case I agree with the main message - we need to plan how to manage this stuff.

IPv6 BGP Geopolitical Analysis

A good analysis of the distribution of IPv4 and IPv6 AS (autonomous systems), prefixes and addresses across the world CAIDA : analysis : geopolitical : bgp2country. Interesting that IPv6 is still dominated by wealthier countries, but as there are so many addresses, they won't be able to hoard them; in contrast the USA dominates Ipv4 address allocations and has - it could be argued - hoarded them.

Note from source:

Last Modified: Thurs Mar-2-2006 23:24:59 PDT; Maintained by: Bradley Huffaker

DatCat: Internet Measurement Data Catalogue

Reminder to myself and my students that this site offer access to Internet data that may be very useful for populating simulations or direct use for analysis DatCat: Home.

In contrast it is very hard to get good quality telecommunications data for analysis, mainly for commercial and legal reasons the operators are reluctant to release, even "anonymized", data.

Good science need good data, so it's good to see this type of Internet data being made available.

IE TLD domain registration

Michele Neylon comments on issues facing top level domain registrars IE Namespace: We Need Personal Domains!

Circle ID says of him: "Michele Neylon is MD of an Irish hosting and domain registration company.
He is also involved with the Irish Internet Association (http://www.iia.ie ) and the ISP Association or Ireland (http://www.ispai.ie ).
He currently sits on the enum353 policy advisory board where he acts as the Irish Internet Association's representative."

I have tended to avoid .ie domains myself (and for my work) as the process was too cumbersome, and paper-bound, and also more expensive than ".net",".org" or even ".com" if you could find a free name. Perhaps these initiatives in the IEDR will make it easier for us to use ".ie" for our domains in future... Good luck with it!

WiFi standards

In this interesting post George Ou laments the lack of 802.11a uptake, and blames optimistic hype around 802.11n - it's a very good summary of the history of unlicensed bandwidth WiFi.

802.11n - The consequences of abandoning the 5 GHz frontier by ZDNet's George Ou -- When 802.11b first started getting popular in late 2000, no one imagined that it would still be the most dominant standard 6 years later and continue to dictate the design of the latest wireless LAN products because it is the lowest common denominator. As with any technology that is first to reach critical mass, it [...]

IPv6 and Security and QoS

Here's a good ComputerWeekly article on IP Security: IPv6 offers data packet security and quality of service - but so does IPv4 - 17/Jan/2007 - ComputerWeekly.com

They're right to point out that IPsec can be used with IPv4 as well as IPv6.

iPhone

ｻ Why does the iPhone get so much hype when more capable devices are already available? | The Mobile Gadgeteer | ZDNet.com

I'll hold my fire on the iPhone hype to see how it all works out in practice. I'm a big Apple fan, and a MacBook Pro user, but I'm very happy with my Sony Ericsson P990i for now, and I'll decide whether to move to a new handset or not as the occasion arises. What is strangest for me is the move to using the finger as the pointing decice. On the P990i I use the stylus for writing letters as input, and I can do this very quickly, I cannot see the finger replacing the pen (whilst not as old as the finger, it certainly has a venerable history as a human interface tool) any time soon!

Podcasts of Manweek 2006 keynotes and Panel Discussions Published

We have published on-line MP3 versions of the keynote addresses and the main discussion sessions at the 5 conferences that were co-located in the Herbert Park Hotel in Dublin on the week of 23rd October 2006 as Manweek 2006 (i.e. network management) Manweek Podcasts

(Hey I know they're not really podcasts without an RSS feed with enclosures, give us a chance :-)

Comments on EU Research Funding Policy

It isn't often I read comments on EU research funding policy on the web, this post by Haydn Shaughnessy of "What Will You See Next?" has piqued my interest: Future of the Internet, it comments on an event in Brussels on 15th December Information Day.

The idea of the EU Technology Platforms (EUTPs), such as NESSI and eMobility that are mentioned, and NEM, ARTEMIS and Photonics 21 that are not, is that industrial entities based in the EU (including multinationals with a base here), with a minor role for associated academic groups, can help to set part of the strategic research agenda (SRA) for future investment in research by the EU - the world's biggest publicly funded research programme. The Commission doesn't directly control these EUTPs, so if they fail to come up with a sensible research agenda, it is fault of the EU industrial sector for either not being able or not being willing to do this job!

Of course, with respects to the next generation of the Internet, one problem for us in Europe is that the epicentre of the industrial strength of the existing software industry, the Internet and the Web lies in the USA, with perhaps SAP being the only EU success in modern software!

Instead, in Europe we have a strong solutions provider marketplace with companies like Siemens and ATOS Origin (who are present in these EUTPs). It is argued that Siemens employ more software developers than anyone else in Europe.

Of course, in contrast, the big EU success has been GSM and the mobile industry including the equipment vendors such as Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens and the operators (Telefonica, Vodafone, and so on). The EU Commission often argues that the research and development investment in earlier framework programmes (especially in ACTS in FP4) helped make GSM the success it is today.

As these two worlds merge into the converged communications environment, where all these Internet, telephone and multimedia services run over TCP/IP (and I would argue should run over IPv6) it will be interesting to see how the EU research community engages with these challenges.

As we speak the EU is launching the Framework 6 Programme in Helsinki (as Finland currently has the Presidency of the EU) at the IST Event 2006. The next 7 years of the research programme will have to deliver on some of the promises of convergence, of of European technological leadership to justify the investment in R&D that has been and will be made.

As the Irish group with the most EU FP6 IST funding (more than any other university or company) the TSSG has a strong delegation at the IST Event, and is engaged in a number of the EUTPs, and is helping shape the strategic research agenda in other areas such as security (c.f. the recent invitation-only high level EU-US Security Summit hosted in Dublin organised by us on 15th and 16th November 2006). So we're certainly trying our best to make sure that the EU does get things right, and that Ireland plays a part in this.

Call for Comments on IPv6 Multi-homing Solutions

"This document attempts to address all the IPv6 Multi-homing Solutions and their Pro's and Con's, put forward by the Internet Community as a collective. The use of this document is intended for the sole purpose of providing clarification of the IPv6 Multi-homing Solutions and their pro's and con's, in order to assist the Internet Community on deciding what solution are currently available to use Globally as a United Internet Community. The ultimate solution may or may not be as written in this document. However, these are the suggested solutions put forward to date and the ones we have to work with and adjust as needed. Additional suggested solutions and pro's and con's will be added to this document as members in the Internet Community bring them forward."
Number Resource Organization Document Store - RIR Comparative Policy Overview

Call for Comments on IPv6 Multi-homing Solutions

Geoff Huston on "Whither Routing?"

Geoff Huston has just published an interesting high level commentary on issues in routing, and inter-domain routing in particular ISP Column - November 2006

IFUP ICT (Hosted by ICU in Korea)

I am speaking next week at IFUP ICT 2006 on the success in the TSSG in harnassing basic, applied and commercialisation research funding to support research into next generation services harnassing next generation networking infrastructures - IPv6 with security and mobility.

Telecoms Signalling World Forum

I spoke this week at the IIR Telecoms Signalling World Forum. It was an excellent event organised by IIR, professional conference organisers. The theme of my talk was the potential for new flexible next generation networking services enabled by open SIP stacks on mobile handsets, whether fully IMS integrated, or lighter weight Internet-style.

ITU Releases: World Information Society Report 2006

You can download the whole report as a PDF or access it by chapter: World information Society Report 2006

Strong gains have been achieved in digital opportunity around the world, according to a new report from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The World Information Society Report is part of ITU's contribution to the 2006 session of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which is meeting in Geneva from 3rd to 28th.
The Asian economies of the Republic of Korea and Japan continue to lead in digital opportunity, due to their pioneering take-up of broadband and 3G mobile services. Nearly all Internet subscribers in the Republic of Korea are broadband subscribers, whilst Japan is the only market where Internet subscribers are most likely to access Internet over their mobile. Dramatic progress has been achieved by developing countries, however, which made the greatest progress in digital opportunity - notably India, where digital opportunity nearly doubled between 2001 and 2005, and China, which experienced remarkably strong gains in infrastructure. Different countries are following their own paths in telecommunication development, with some countries leveraging their investments in infrastructure more successfully than others.
In response to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) goals, the report tracks the changing dynamics driving the Information Society worldwide, with a new tool - the Digital Opportunity Index (DOI) - that evaluates the opportunity, infrastructure and utilization of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for 180 economies worldwide. The Index monitors the mobile communications that promise to bridge the digital divide in many parts of the world, as well as more recent technologies such as broadband and mobile Internet access. The price of broadband continues to fall worldwide, by as much as twenty per cent a year over the last two years according to ITU's analysis, while broadband speeds continue to increase. These trends are not restricted to developed countries, however, with broadband now commercially available in 166 countries worldwide.
As part of the ITU's work in follow-up to the WSIS, the report is addressed to policy-makers and regulators. It shows how this new Index can inform the policy-making process in the critical areas of the digital divide, universal access, gender, and the development of broadband networks. The Report gives practical examples of how the DOI can be used, and highlights projects around the world that are working to meet the commitments made at the WSIS.
The DOI has been developed by a multi-stakeholder partnership (the Digital Opportunity Platform) comprising ITU, UNCTAD and the KADO (Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity and Promotion) and which is open to other partners. It will be reported annually in order to track progress in reaching the WSIS targets, and building a diverse and inclusive Information Society, by 2015.

Mediaangler on IPTV

Just subscribed to this blog today and I'm impressed by the good qulaity of the postings.... here's one on how aggregatioin of video content will be key to IPTV Podcasts Lining up for the IPTV Future But It's Still The Corner Shop Bet

Rent elastic computing from Amazon

Amazon seem to be blazing a trail with their flexible computing (Elastic Compute Cloud - Amazon EC2) and flexible storage (Simple Storage Service - Amazon S3) products that allow anyone to deploy scalable Internet services easily, see Jon Udell's experiences documented here Amazon.com's rent-a-grid | InfoWorld | Column | 2006-08-30 | By Jon Udell

He notes this may not be the best option if you need a dedicated machine with continuous demand:

As the blogosphere quickly noted, the EC2 rate of a dime per instance-hour works out to $72 per month for the equivalent of a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU with 1.75GB of RAM and 160GB of local disk. And that doesn稚 include bandwidth, billed separately at the S3 rate of 20 cents per gigabyte. So for now, if you want to park one box on the Internet and leave it running indefinitely, better deals can be had from dedicated hosting providers. As the service痴 name suggests, though, if you need an elastic capability that can nimbly grow or shrink, EC2 is the only game in town.

Other alternatives include 3tera.

IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) Overview

A good overview of IMS posed by Telecordi on the IEC site: IEC Newsletter: IMS – Putting Value Back into the Network and Increasing the Revenues Flowing Out

NAT Traversal or IPv6?

This posting argues for NAT TRaversal (if available) _ I say bite the bullet and go IPv6 PBS | I, Cringely . August 11, 2006 - Through a Metal Detector, Darkly

Vint Cerf interviewed on net neutrality

As a Google employee Vint Cerf clearly has an agenda on net neutrality, but he's certainly earned the right to have a strong opinion on this given his involvement in the Internet John Battelle's Searchblog: Cerf, Part 1: Excuse me, but we don't get a free ride at all

The Network Neutrality Debate

The recent flurry of activity in the USA on legistlation to determine whether network operators can prioritise certain types of Internet traffic over others in order to use this ability to leverage funding for the service providers who use the Internet to deliver Internet-based services has raised amany interesting issues. The debate has revolved around the new term Network Neutrality. This article by By Robert X. Cringely
PBS | I, Cringely . June 29, 2006 - If we build it they will come (subtitled "It's time to own our own last mile") is a thoughtful contribution to the debate. The argument is at a high level over whether the system of networking infrastructure ownership itself is wrong for the next generation of Internet-based services. This links to one of my hoby horses, the concept of the StockholmOpen community owned network infrastructure model (for wireless and broadband). It will be interesting to see how these models develop over the next twenty years.

IPv6 Forum Roadmap & Vision

The IPv6 Forum has released its IPv6 Forum Roadmap & Vision document.

Ladid, Latif and Bound, Jim and Pouffary, Yanick and Rich, Yurie and Green, David (2006) IPv6 Forum Vision 2010 Roadmap. In: The IPv6 Forum World Congress, 21-22 February 2006, Las Vegas.

This document was based on discussions at the IPv6 World Congress in February 2006, Las Vegas, and on subsequent discussions.

The document combines a technical perspective and overview (drawing on the core expertise of the IETF members who specified the RFCs that make up IPv6, and related industrial and academic research expertise), and a business case overview. The report places these perspectives within the context of models predicting when IPv4 address shortage will start to happen, and when this shortage have a major impact on the Internet as we know it (e.g. Tony Hain's IANA IPv4 Pool Depletion Model Internet protocol Journal article and Updates to model).

IPv6 Day: IPv6 Comes of Age

From the IPv6 Portal

Today 6Bone Operators and Users say bye to the experimental network which allowed, already some years ago, to turn IPv6 into the production space.

With the occasion of this virtual celebration, we have a couple of quotes from two key people on this subject:

• Bob Fink (6Bone Project): "After more than ten years of planning, development and experience with IPv6, with efforts from all around the world, it is gratifying for me to see the 6Bone phase-out on the 6th of June 2006, having served it's purpose to stimulate IPv6 deployment and experience, leaving IPv6 a healthy ongoing component of the future of the Internet!"
• Brian Carpenter (IBM, co-author of multiple IPv6 RFCs and IETF chair): "It's very encouraging to see IPv6 moving forward both technically and commercially, with its address assignments now routinely managed by the same registries that look after the rapidly diminishing IPv4 address pool. I look forward to the day the Internet reaches ten billion active nodes with public addresses, which will only be possible with IPv6."

Users can learn how to enable IPv6, enjoy free IPv6 production connectivity and use some trial services at the IPv6 Day web site (in several languages).

How top level domains are decided

Jothan Frakes on GG, IM, and JE: Welcome (officially) to ISO3166, Good Bye GB. That's got me reeling.....

Juniper try to define "IPv6 Capable"

Juniper Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: JNPR) today announced the launch of its report, IPv6 Capable: A Guide for Federal Agencies, to provide technical guidance for the transition to IPv6 by June 2008, as mandated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). This report will assist federal agencies in understanding and meeting technical goals based on their unique requirements and missions, while achieving high-level objectives outlined by OMB.

Wireless Networks for the Developing World

The need for wireless connectivity is increasing. This is especially true in developing countries that are lacking in infrastructure. Rob Flickenger, former O'Reilly editor, is currently publishing books to assist with this need. His first can be found at WNDW.net and is entitled “Wireless Networks for the Developing World”. It’s available as a free PDF (40K downloads so far). It leads its readers through the design and security of a network to building low cost hardware. Work on the book has continued on the site's wiki where the community has been adding case studies and links to other online wireless resources.
His next book is being funded by an NGO. The book will be about bandwidth consumption. Commonly sysadmins in developing countries do not know how to manage their assets efficiently. They have satelite connections and they run their entire network through them. This book aims to teach them what to run locally and help them save on their bandwidth bills.

Your Mobile Phone is Watching You

Phil Windley on Phil Windley's Technometria | Your Cell Phone Is Watching You ...

Your Cell Phone Is Watching You

One of my favorite programs from last week was Nathan Eagle’s Where 2.0 presentation on using cell phones to predict user behavior. Using only publicly available data, Eagle was able to deduce relationships between pairs and groups of individuals.

There are privacy concerns to be sure. Your cell provider already has much of this data. Every time two cell providers merge, what little protection we get from disparate carriers is broken down.

What interested me most though it not the privacy concerns, but the potential to infer and enhance social interactions using the wearable computers each of us carries around everyday.

What’s needed to make this not only more private, but also more useful is real user-centric identity that trasfers across carriers and domains. People often move past identity to get to the fun stuff, but it’s the identity infrastructure that makes it all useful and practical.

DNS and ENUM

In an interview with Cricket Liu, the author of the DNS and BIND book (that deals with managing the DNS servers that allow the resolution of names used, for example in URIs such as this website's address, into the underlying IPv4 and/or IPv6 addresses), the discussion addresses many interesting issues including the use of ENUM to map telephone numbers into the DNS and how this can be supported to deliver integrated VoIP services Cricket Liu Interviewed: DNS and BIND, 5th Edition

Internet Identifer Consumption (CAIDA)

In this interesting report on Internet Identifer Consumption CAIDA (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis), perhaps most famous for their excellent graphs of the Internet topology, present an overview of the issues around the depletion of IPv4 addresses, referencing studies by Geoff Huston and Tony Hain. This is a very succinct and complete description of the problem.

Irish Broadband

The good news: my local exchange in rural Ireland has been upgraded and I have ordered broadband.

The bad news: Damien Mulley ｻ Blog Archive ｻ Broadband in Ireland - Coverage Map

The discussion: Atoin on Sweeping broadband woes under the carpet.

Ho hum, the good news is really good for me as I've been asking about it since 1999 and now it's here!

Nokia 770 Internet Tablet EUR355

A review of the Nokia 770 from the Silicon Republic: SiliconRepublic.com: Ireland's technology news service providing Irish tech news & analysis

IPv6 in the USA

A Federal Times article on IPv6 deployment in the USA FederalTimes.com

Estimates of cost for IPv6 deployment in the USA

This article describes a report from the RTI of the Research Triangle in NC, USA that evaluates the costs of IPv6 transitioning.Don't look for rapid ROI from IPv6
The conclusion is that it is hard to predict the ROI at present, but that the roll out cost is relatively cheap for its potential.

US lags in IPv6 Adoption

A Washington Times article on US IPv6 adoption: U.S. slow to switch to new Web protocol - Business - The Washington Times, America's Newspaper

The federal government must move to the new Internet protocol by 2008, and the Defense Department started its transition in 2003. But since then, the U.S. has slipped behind many Asian and European nations in making the switch, said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, Virginia Republican and chairman of the House Government Reform Committee.
....
Of the 8,000 Internet service providers worldwide, about 10 percent offer IPv6, Mr. Ladid said. Consumers can get the necessary connections now in the U.S., but it takes hours to set up and only a few companies sell them.
Consumers can expect to see IPv6 benefits in "three to four years, if we implement correctly," but that depends on who does it, Mr. Davis said. "If we don't, we'll be buying products from Europe and China."
The next 24 months will be a "very interesting, chaotic period," said Marine Corps Lt. Col. James Bacchus, strategic planner in the office of the assistants to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for National Guard and Reserve Matters. No one knows which will be first large program or user group to take advantage of IPv6, but he said the Defense Department will be first at doing IPv6 best.

Glad to see the start of mainstream press coverage for the debate on IPv6 deployment.

Analysis of Skype

Here's a reference to an interesting analysis of the technology used in Skype, and a discussion of "Edge-connectivity" as a concept SATN.org: Comments from Bob Frankston, David Reed, Dan Bricklin, and others

It is useful to be able to understand how Skype works in detail in order to trust the code. I'm glad to see that the authors noted that it is difficult to block Skype traffic.
The more important result is to understand Skype's Edge-connectivity. It's an example of how communities can stay connected independent on the accidental properties of the Internet and the gatekeepers. Because the relationships are maintained at the edge mobility is fundamental. You don't need the network to do meshing when the applications maintain their own relationships. Meshing then becomes a low level technique for pooling routers rather than a way to make applications mobile.

Telecomns Terms

A good overview of telecommunications terminology for people with an Internet background: O'Reilly Network -- Telecom Terms and Concepts. This sort of open exchange of information could help the so-called "Bell-heads" (telecoms guys) and "net heads" (Internet guys) get along (c.f. Frieden 2001). They kind of have to if everythings is going to be over TCP/IP (and as I would argue IPv6).

The Future Ends at the Firewall

O'Reilly Radar > The Future Ends at the Firewall

I like the catch phrase of this article blogged by Tom O'Reilly referring to this Financial Times article The Future Ends at the Firewall

The idea is the enterprise networks are stifling innovation with restrictive internal security management. An interesting debate. One of the most powerful things about Internet technologies is the way they lower the cost on entry for new services, but if everyone has to tunnel through firewalls and NAT gateways to get them to work, it isn't so easy. One solution is to move towards IPv6 which obviates the need for NAT gateways to preserve scarce IPv3 address space. This may usher in a new era of distributed management rather than choke point firewalls, we'll see.

Irish Broadband: An Embarassment

Having just come back from eChallenges 2005 (Slovenia) the most embarassing thing for me as an Irish delegate is how far down the table of broadband penetration Ireland lies. It really does show us to be the laggards of Europe and not the leaders.

"This time the survey comes courtesy of ECTA, the European association of alternative telecom service providers, which positioned Ireland 14th out of the 15 European Union Member States. Embarrassingly, the report shows that Ireland has been overtaken in terms of broadband penetration by some of the new EU member states, like Hungary, Slovenia and Lithuania."

From: ElectricNews.net:News:Ireland gets poor marks for broadband

This poor performance doesn't surprise me as I am more than willing to pay for ADSL but it still is not available in my town in rural Co. Waterford.

Irish National IPv6 Centre Launch Event

Waterford Institute of Technology hosted the launch of the Irish National IPv6 Centre on Friday 30th September 2005.

This centre is a consortium led by the Telecommunications Software & Systems Group (TSSG) in Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT), with partners in the Hamilton Institute (NUI Maynooth), HEAnet (Ireland's national research network) and BT Ireland (with their links to the BT Exact research laboraties in Ipswich).

The centre was designated by the Irish DCMNR (Department of the Communications, the Marine, and Natural Resources) and opened by Martin Cullen TD, Minister of Transport. The Director of WIT, Prof. Kieran Byrne, and the Chair of WIT's Governing Body, Redmond O'Donoghue welcomed the Minister. The Head of Research in WIT, Dr. Willie Donnelly gave a short address on the importance of the TSSG within the context of WIT's research strategy. As part of the programme of talks for the launch event Mario Campolargo, Head of Unit DG-INFSO F3 Research Infrastructures in the European Commission, gave a presentation via video-link from Brussels.

Each of the partners gave a presentation: Mícheál Ó Foghlú (TSSG, WIT), Dr. David Malone (Hamilton Institute, NUI Maynooth), Mike Norris and David Wilson (HEAnet) and William McAuliffe (BT Ireland). In addition short presentations were given by a number of supporters of the initiative: Dr. Mark Keane (Science Foundation Ireland, who have funded the TSSG and the Hamilton Institute in ways that support the centre), Nick Hilliard (INEX) and Latif Ladid (President of the global IPv6 Forum).

The afternoon included demonstrations of active research projects involving IPv6 in which the partners in the Irish National IPv6 Centre are engaged including Daidalos, and SEINIT.

The Irish National IPv6 Centre is committed to continuing to research infrastructural and service-related issues linked to the use of the IPv6 protcol as the key element of the next generation Internet. In this, the centre will support the on-going mission of the Irish National IPv6 Task Force to encourage and lobby for the deployment of IPv6 in Ireland in the public and private sectors.

Vinct Cerf Joins Google

O'Reilly Radar >Vint Cerf Joins Google. The times they are a changin'.

3 Announces Irish Price Plans

At last 3 have announced their price plans for Ireland: ElectricNews.net:News:Three rattles Ireland's 'stale' market

You can order handsets on-line at their Irish home page: 3 Ireland.

Rebutting IPv6 Myths

Twenty Myths and Truths About IPv6 and the US IPv6 Transition
Sensible set of home truths about IPv6 from Alex Lightman.... in the form of rebuttals for 20 myths of IPv6 and the USA:

1. Myth: There is no need for IPv6.


2. Myth: IPv4 works well enough. Everything that can be done in v6 can be done with v4.


3. Myth: The market will take care of IPv6, if IPv6 is useful.


4. Myth: No, really, the market will take care of IPv6! The Dept. of Commerce says so!


5. Myth: The U.S. federal government has a vision, mission, and a plan for IPv6.


6. Myth: The Dept. of Defense will be implementing IPv6 by 2008, and the DoD invented the Internet, so it's going to happen just like last time around.


7. Myth: Federal agencies are taking IPv6 into consideration already.


8. Myth: Federal agencies don't need to know about IPv6 yet. It doesn't matter.


9. Myth: Classified networks require air gap separation between them and non-classified networks, so if they aren't hardwired together, there shouldn't be a problem.


10. Myth: OK, so what's the problem if hackers use IPv6 to access confidential or classified information? If no one has IPv6 plans, then I can't be held responsible.


11. Myth: The U.S. is not behind Japan or other countries. All they've done is put IPv6 in some buildings, dorm rooms, and taxis. Big deal.


12. Myth: No one is keeping track of who is leading in IPv6.


13. Myth: The U.S. government doesn't have a good track record in leading technology


14. Myth: IPv6 doesn't impact the economy or international trade in any significant way.


15. Myth: US companies are always the leaders in technology.


16. Myth: China is a third world country, and their use of IPv6 is irrelevant.


17. Myth: If the U.S. federal government spends money on the Internet, it benefits everyone, and the U.S. doesn't get any special advantage, or return on investment.


18. Myth: IPv6 doesn't impact the lives of ordinary people or "Joe Six Pack."


19. Myth: IPv6 is already completed, so the U.S. government has nothing to say.


20. Myth: IPv6 is boring. Even the name is boring, and hard to remember.

IM2005

"The TeleManagement Forum was founded in 1988 as the OSI/Network Management Forum with the goal of accelerating the availability of interoperable network management products. Founding members included AT&T and BT on the service provider side, and suppliers such as Northern Telecom and Hewlett-Packard on the equipment side. By early 1989 it had approved its first OSI/NM Forum Protocol Specification and by 1990 it had 85 members from 13 countries.
The Forum has continued to adapt as the technological and business landscape has developed. Today, the TeleManagement Forum has more than 400 members, runs the industry痴 leading OSS/BSs Conference and Exposition, and its standards are being adopted by the UN body, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).".

Who invented the Internet?

In this article Future of the Internet Ian Peter discusses the way that Internet history has been simplified into the triumph of Arpanet. He presents a more complex origin in which Arpanet does play a part.

1. There are a number of valid claims to origins of the Internet.
2. Although an original date and place might be obtainable for the first networked transmission that could be called an Internet, the result would need by definition to include more than one party or network, and is unlikely to be a satisfactory or useful conclusion.
3. Not only US projects were involved in the beginnings of the Internet.
4. Not only government funded US research programs were involved in the beginnings of the Internet.
5. Not only telcos and the commercial sector were involved in the beginnings of the Internet.
6. Neither Arpanet nor TCP/IP is present in all valid theories.

Posted by mofoghlu at 5:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Udell Argues that WS-* may be a combination of smart networks and smart nodes

Jon Udell: Are smart networks always a dumb idea? In this short posting Udell challenges the traditional Internet-centric idea that Internet services imply smart machines and a dumb network (in contrast to traditional telecommunications networks with dumb terminals - phones - and an intelligent network).

If Udell's hunch is right, this could mean that there is more going on in convergence than people thought. Don't forget that the telecommunications world was service-centric long before the Internet world. Maybe we still do have more to learn from each other.

Udell was focused on the WS-* technologies. Moving the argument slightly, into another sphere where Udell is an elegant spokesperson for emerging technologies, I still like the metaphor that HTTP and SIP are both protocols with a very small set of primatives that potentially enable a huge diversity of useful interoperability.... I hope that SIP can do the same for computer-telephony as HTTP has done for distributed computing: revolutionise by lowering the barrier to entry for innovative new services. Personally I'm not so hung up on where the intelligence lies as long as we all enabled to do more interesting stuff more easily....

Ireland 15th in e-Readiness Survey

Electric News notes ElectricNews.net:News:Broadband leads Ireland to 'e-readiness'. Ireland has moved up one place in the rankings produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit rating countries on their "e-Readiness".

Vint Cerf on Internet Chalenges

Phil Windley reports on a lecture by Vint Cerf (one of the inventors of the protocols that created the Internet, and recently awarded an ACM Turing Award in recognition of his contribution to Internet architectures) on the challenges for the Internet: Phil Windley's Technometria | Vint Cerf on Internet Challenges.

The comments range for high level critiques of Computer Science fundamental research to lower level practical issues facing Internet service developers.

Computer Scientists oppose anti-P2P law suit

This posting Computing Research Policy Blog: Seventeen Computer Scientists File Amicus in Grokster links to an interesting discussion on the submission by a number of computer scientists to the legal debate on p2p networks. Waht's interesting for me is the link to the end-to-end arguent in systems design, and the security implications of this. The summary and comments on the website are informative.....

T-Mobile Hack

Schneier is at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, as is Karlin Lillington (her post). It is funny that I can tell where may favourite bloggers are more easily than some of my work colleagues. One of the strange aspects of the blogsphere....

Study: 2004 was 'turnaround' year for telecom industry

InfoWorld: Study: 2004 was 'turnaround' year for telecom industry: February 01, 2005: By : NETWORKING : TELECOM This article on InfoWorld highlights what a lot of us are feeling, that things are on the up again for Telcos. I hope this leads to progress in convergence and some real penetration of value-added services into the Telcos' networks.

Independent telecom analyst Jeff Kagan called the report good news for the telecom industry. "Telecom was growing until it hit a brick wall a few years ago," Kagan said in an e-mail. "By late 2004 it seemed obvious that telecom was getting hot again. I think 2004 was the turn-around year and 2005 will hit the ground running, both domestically and worldwide. Phone companies and wireless companies and cable companies are spending again and investing in their networks and getting ready for a new level of competition with each other."

Walled Gardens and Network Effects

Phil Windley's newly named Technometria blog has an interesting repost Walled Gardens and Network Effects.
I originally linked to a posting by him in an earlier post on my own blog.

Exctract:

"Walled garden" is the term that industry uses for online communities that capture users inside a Web that is anything but world-wide. The services inside the walled garden are the ones the service provider chooses and they almost always involve increased revenue for the service provider. When I was at Excite@Home, we had a project to build set-top boxes for our cable partners that included a cable modem, but kept subscribers who didn't sign on for broadband services inside a walled garden of for-pay services. The idea of walled gardens is far from dead. You live with them everyday on your cell phone. I hardly ever use the network services on my ATT cell phone because it's all about shoving ringtones and wallpaper down my throat rather than letting me easily get to the information that I need.

In the Sept 16 issue of the Gillmor Gang (see www.gillmorgang.com), Ray Ozzie, of Notes and Groove fame, talks about how hard it is to create collaborative environments for portable devices. As noted by Ozzie, the operating systems on portable devices are too fractured and the interactions too limited to support network effects. By network effects, Ozzie is referring to the phenomenon that we frequently notice with social systems where the network of users grows geometrically because of user interaction. The applications being built for mobile devices are mostly used for personal productivity, not collaboration. The problem is that each mobile provider is trying to capture customers and create lock-in for their network instead of maximizing utility for users.

Mobile Solutions Forum

Yesterday I was a guest speaker at the Mobile Solutions Forum in Dublin. It was an interesting mix of enterprise IT providers, telecommunications operators, Irish software houses and businesses with a common interest in mobile solutions. Thanks to PC Cubed for organising the event.

Top Five Home Networking Annoyances

Kathy Ivens posted this article O'Reilly Network: Top Five Home Networking Annoyances on the O'Reilly Network site. It summarises the key problems faced by people with home networks using Microsoft OS machines, and the some simple solutions to these problems.

Waterford MAN - e-net take over management

Last Wed evening I went with a number of TSSG colleagues to a meeting about Waterford's MAN (Metropolitan Area Network). The official launch of the network itself was last September: Waterford MAN launch.

This is an OAN (Open Access Network) owned by the public body (in this case Waterford Corporation), but leased out to competing operators. Where e-net come into it is as the neutral administrators of this network. It is part of regional and national network of such MANs. Service providers can pay standard rates to e-net to get rackspace in the co-location facility in each city/town. This then means that businesses connected can buy services from any of the service providers who have set up like this. The idea is that this reduces the infrastructural investment costs that each service provider has to put up before being able to start offering broadband to customers.

The TSSG has been instrumental in laying the groundwork for these developments. Willie Donnelly, the Director of the TSSG, co-founded the SEISS (South East Information Society Strategy) initiative. The original SERPANT proposal, coming from SEISS, for funding from the Irish Department of Communications, the Marine and Natutal Resources (DCMNR) is what led to the investment in the regional WANs in the South East of Ireland: Clonmel, Dungarvan, Carlow, Kilkenny, Wexford and Waterford.

As yet this the MAN service is primarily targetted at business and large public sector customers, rather than individual end users, but with new wireless standards with wide area coverage we could see the MANs being used as a core network for a much wider service offering to consumers.

I have been very interested in the concept of open access networks for a few years now, both in terms of core optical networks, and in terms of wireless access networks. I have been very impressed by KTH (Technical Unioversity of Stockholm) and their involvment in Stockholm Open. This currently allows multiple operators to share both a core optical network and a WiFi access network in Stockhom and its suburbs (such as Kista where KTH and Ericsson are based). I hope that the MANs can deviver a pan-Irish open access network based on on these same principles.

MUCS 2004

I am attending MUCS2004 | 2nd International Workshop on Managing Ubiquitous Communications and Services.

This workshop is sponsored by the M-Zones HEA PRTLI Cycle 3 programme.

The partners include WIT, CIT and TCD.

The keynote speakers are:

• John Strassner, TeleManagement Forum, USA: "Next Generation Management Challenges for Ubiquitous Computing"
  
• Prof Lajos Hanzo, Southhampton University, UK: "In pursuit of Interference-free Wireless Communications"
  
• Prof Morris Sloman, Imperial College London, UK: "Adaptive Management and Security for Ubiquitous Systems"
  

Switch over to IPv6 Day proposed

This article Thoughts on IPv6 Day (By James Seng) discusses the proposal to have a national IPv6 Flag Day where all Internet machines switch over to mandated support of IPv6. It is a good summary of the arguments of why this is not such a good idea just now. However, James is still advocating the deployment of IPv6 especially to enable p2p end-to-end applications and services. If we can demonstrate a certain level of IPv6 penetration, and good hardware support in routers, the switch over could be closer than we think.

IST Event 2004

A group of six of us TSSG folks (Willie Donnelly, Mícheál Ó Foghlú, Miguel ponce de Leon, Kevin Doolin, Chris Chedgey, John Ronan, and Micheál Crotty) are here in The Hauge at the IST Event 2004 (Mon 15th November to Wednesday 17th November 2004) .

The TSSG have three demonstrations on two stands in the exhibition, and a number of contributions to Networking Sessions as well as planned formal and informal meetings:

F4.3 Touching Mobile Research
TSSG & Testbed Botnia

W4.1 Towards matching e-Europe 2005: IPv6, Broadband and 3G' IPv6 Cluster & 6POWER [6POWER]
IPv6 Cluster: SEINIT & Daidalos project controbutions from the TSSG

N16
Towards a global dependability and security framework in WP 2005-2006: paving the way for FP7

N26
Emerging security technologies

N70
LivingLabs - making technology relevant!

Mobile Scenario

John Battelle presents an excellent scenarion for how mobile devices and shopping can be integrated: John Battelle's Searchblog: The Transparent (Shopping) Society. The article also highlights what appraoches are addressing different aspects of the problem of developing solution for this scenario.

Convergence: BT and Deutsche Telekom

In an interesting article on InfoWorld Telcos' convergence strategies diverge Peter Sayer argues that BT has more flexibility in their approach as they do not have a mobile arm to support, and this may lead to innovative new services. He describes the idea of a mobile handset that can make calls via a wireline connection in preference to GSM (using bluetooth to create a local network) and thus save the customer money. They call this a "Bluephone".

P910i

This is a test entry from Sony Ericsson P910i on Waterford to Dublin train. Getting the hang of handwriting input.

Network services and walled gardens

On Phil Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog he has a positing talking about Walled Gardens vs. Networked Effects
. This neatly summarises the problems relating to trying to limit your customers on a network to the services that you have direct control over (wall garden); telecommunications services are usually seen as being in the category. This is contrasted with open networks where it is easy for anyone to offer services over the network; the Internet and the Web are usually seen as being like this. He concludes that many broadband networks are actually inbetween, where it is easy to consume services, but not easy to create them yourself.

Siemens merges Enterprise Networking and Mobile Telephony divisions

InfoWorld reports that: InfoWorld: Siemens launches new unit to focus on end-to-end systems : October 01, 2004: By : NETWORKING : TELECOM. They had previously split these divisions up in order to allow for focus, now they've decided there's more milage in combining them. This is a good metaphor for the so-called "convergence" that we've been promised where traditional telecommunications and Internet technologies merge, enabling a the mobile phone as one of the new platforms for this convergence. The new unit is called "Siemens Communications Group" and it merges the previous: "Information and Communication Networks (ICN)" and "Information and Communication Mobile (ICM)" units.

Siemens are now one of the largest software companies in Europe, despite traditionally having had a very hardware/engineering focused reputation. They started as a telegraph company in the 19th century, and built the world's first electric railway. They are proud of their long history of excellence in engineering, and rightly so, see their corporate website Siemens' history for full details with images.
Siemens have had a huge influence in Ireland because they won the contract to construct the Shannon hydroelectric power plant, the first major project in the independent Irish Free State.
Siemens are very active in research networks, including telecommunications, and the TSSG work with them on a number of EU funded projects.

The mobile phone is a new platform

People are defintely starting to realise that the mobile phone is a new technology platform that will be able to access many types of services over multiple types of wireless networks InfoWorld: Mobility's Mayflower sets sail: October 01, 2004: By Tom Yager : NETWORKING : TELECOM : WIRELESS.

UN ICT Task Force publishes "Internet Governance: A Grand Collaboration"

This CircleID posting Fifth Publication of the UN ICT Task Force Series links to the UN ICT Task Force publication Internet Governance: A Grand Collaboration (this page has a link to the PDF itself). This is good source material for grounded debate on issues like the digital divide and other issues about the use of Internet throughout the world.

QoS for IPv4 and IPv6

The TSSG has been involved in a number of projects that relate to Quality of Service (QoS) for IP networks (both IPv4 and IPv6). The EU FP5 IST Intermon project focused on inter-domain monitoring of QoS. In fact, our contribution to this project was mainly in the software for the measurement and monitoring, and the visualiation of the results. The Irish TSR Strand III funded Converge project looked at QoS, security and accounting for IP networks.

One of the research students on the second of these projects, Jesse Kielthy, published an overview of our approach An initial investigation into QoS provisioning in a DiffServ Network.
It is interesting to see that other research groups have cited this paper as part of the context for QoS in IP e.g. Quality of Service Aspects in an IPv6 Domain (Bouras, Gkamas, Primpas, Stamos) of Research Academic Computer Technology Institute, Patras, Greece.

WiFi access points in light fittings?

An interesting posting on O'Reilly's website The NoCat Night Light
How many cats does it take to screw in a light bulb? shows how it is possible to fit a WiFi access piint into a light fitting and use the powerline for data and power. Though this was posted last May, I only recently noted it.

IM Bots

IM bots are software entities that can talk over Instat Messaging protcols, not a new concept but a new distribution mechanism RunABot.com - Create a AIM, ICQ, Yahoo or MSN Bot

IPv6 gateway

Shane Dempsey (of the TSSG) recently pointed out to me that you can now access many IPv4 web sites (e.g. Slashdot over IPv6) over IPv6 by using this SixXS IPv6 to IPv4 Website Gateway. The website servers need to not already be IPv6 enabled, and the web clients need to be IPv6 capable.

Projection Keyboards

This is an overview article on the current state of Projection Keyboards. It describes four products, gives links to their websites, and describes the companies and lists patents. All very interesting.