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With an eye toward updating the World Wide Web to better accommodate complex and bandwidth-hungry applications, the Internet Engineering Task Force has started work on the next generation of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), the underlying protocol for the Web. more»
Internet Society has released a paper today highlighting the importance of understanding what is important and unchanging about the Internet. more»
Five leading group of global organizations - IEEE, Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Society and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - today announced that they have signed a statement affirming the importance of a jointly developed set of principles establishing a modern paradigm for global, open standards. The group have invited other standards organizations, governments, corporations and technology innovators globally to endorse the principles. more»
"Internet protocols simply aren't adequate for the changes in hardware and network use that will come up in a decade or so," says Professor Dave Farber who was recently interviewed by Andy Oram. "Dave predicts that computers will be equipped with optical connections instead of pins for networking, and the volume of data transmitted will overwhelm routers, which at best have mixed optical/electrical switching," writes Oram. more»
As part of its efforts to speed up the delivery of web content, Google has proposed changes to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), "the workhorse of the Internet." Yuchung Cheng who works on the transport layer at Google wrties: "To deliver content effectively, Web browsers typically open several dozen parallel TCP connections ahead of making actual requests. This strategy overcomes inherent TCP limitations but results in high latency in many situations and is not scalable. Our research shows that the key to reducing latency is saving round trips. We’re experimenting with several improvements to TCP." more»
Doug Madory reporting in Renesys Blog: "Packet latency is a big issue in Internet-based applications (i.e. the stuff in the cloud). In conducting analysis on Internet infrastructure over the years, we have seen many patterns of connectivity. One such pattern that can wreak havoc on latency is 'hair-pinning', a phenomenon where traffic takes an unnecessarily long physical path between two points on the Internet due to suboptimal routing. The increased distance results in increased latency, and the 'lag' or 'sluggishness' that users experience as a result can hinder latency-sensitive online applications whether they are financial trading applications or MS SharePoint." more»
With the recent passing of Paul Baran, IFTF is releasing an excerpt of a 1971 report in tribute, entitled "Brief descriptions of potential home information services." The excerpts are from the report titled, Toward a Study of Future Urban High-Capacity Telecommunications Systems, which included a handbook of forecasts for what was then called "broadband telecommunication and information services," later known as the Internet. more»
Vinton Cerf has been elected and Paul Vixie has been re-elected to the ARIN Board of Trustees. Each will serve a three-year term commencing 1 January 2011. The ARIN Board of Trustees congratulates Vinton and Paul. The Board thanks Aaron Hughes and Lee Howard for their participation as candidates in the election and encourages their continued participation in the ARIN community. The Board would also like to thank Lee Howard for his service and contributions during his tenure on the Board. more»
In his keynote yesterday at the RSA Security Conference, former U.S. top chief counter-terrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarke, said cyberwar defence efforts need to focus on re-architecting networks not buying more technology. more»
Larry Seltzer writes: Politico? Comcast's PR gets an 'A' for this article, an upbeat tech-lite description of the impending depletion of the IPv4 space and efforts to adopt IPv6. It also seems that the Obama administration is behind this, and that the Federal government has had "remarkable foresight on this issue." I feel better already. more»
John Curran writes: Verizon has announced today that its "month-long trial of IPv6 involves FiOS-enabled customer homes with customized CPE -- provided by Verizon -- that can support both IPv6 and IPv4. The dual protocol setup will also be implemented on Verizon's edge gateway routers. Verizon employs 6PE technology, which uses IPv6-provider edge routers to connect across the company's IPv4 MPLS core. The IPv6 traffic is then sent over IPv6-capable peering connections." more»
In a recent blog post, Google engineers have revealed information about an early stage project called SPDY (pronounced "SPeeDY"), aimed at significantly boosting Web download speeds. According to the post, SPDY is an application-layer based protocol designed for minimizing latency. It says: "So far we have only tested SPDY in lab conditions. The initial results are very encouraging: when we download the top 25 websites over simulated home network connections, we see a significant improvement in performance - pages loaded up to 55% faster. There is still a lot of work we need to do to evaluate the performance of SPDY in real-world conditions." more»
Carolyn Duffy Marsan of Network World writes: "Could Smart Grid, the Obama Administration's effort to modernize the nation's electric grid, be the killer app for IPv6? That's what Internet engineers are asking as they see billions of dollars in stimulus funds pumped into smart electric meters, automated utility substations and new sensors networks -- all of which could take advantage of the abundant address space and built-in security offered by IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol..." more»
Earlier this year, ICANN began to seriously consider the various effects of adding DNS protocol features and new entries into the Root Zone. With the NTIA announcement that the Root Zone would be signed this year, a root scaling study team was formed to assess the scalability of the processes used to create and publish the Root Zone. Properly considered, this study should have lasted longer than the 120 days -- but the results suggest that scaling up the root zone is not without risk -- and these risks should be considered before "green-lighting" any significant changes to the root zone or its processes. I, for one, would be interested in any comments, observations, etc. (The caveats: This was, by most measures, a rush job. My spin: This is or should be a risk assessment tool.) Full report available here [PDF]. more»
Annual global IP traffic will pass two-thirds of a zettabyte in four years according the Cisco's Visual Networking Index report. The economic downturn has only slightly tempered traffic growth and the global IP traffic is expected to quintuple from 2008 to 2013. Cisco predicts IP traffic to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40%. more»
