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internet

A collection of 6 issues

Why a South African ISP Just Cut Off Its Transit Provider

Some bold moves deserve attention, and South African ISP MWEB has made one. They’ve severed their transit connections with Vodacom and Telkom South Africa, citing high costs and congestion as major barriers to delivering quality internet services. For those unfamiliar with the South African market, Telkom South Africa (AS5713)

Lessons from the Middle East IP Market

At MENOG 7, I had the pleasure of listening to James Cowie from Renesys explain the state of the Middle Eastern IP market. His presentation laid out a compelling case: deregulated markets outperform controlled ones, often by a staggering margin. For network operators and policymakers, the takeaway is simple—sometimes

The 21st Century Window Tax for the Internet

In 1696, King William III imposed a tax on glass. Homes with more than ten windows were charged a levy. In reality, the tax was seen as deeply unfair—and, more importantly, entirely avoidable. Homeowners simply bricked up their windows to dodge it, leaving houses dark and gloomy for generations.

ASN32 is still broken

In December 2008, I complained that the internet was broken for 4-byte ASN speakers. Together with Rob Shakir and Jonathan Oddy, we've been meticulously dissecting a vulnerability that could bring global networking to its knees. Some brutally technical context: Every network on the internet needs a unique identifier.

Internet telly is ace

Not so long ago, I was a committed sceptic. Delivering video via unicast IP felt as efficient as trying to water a garden with a teaspoon. The technical challenges were formidable: TCP's delivery guarantees, the bandwidth requirements for high-definition content, and the huge infrastructure needed to handle mass

Internet broken for ASN32 speakers today

A BGP vulnerability emerged when an autonomous system network (AS196629) announced a routing update that triggered unexpected behaviour in OpenBGPd. The update contained a path attribute that violated the specifications of RFC4893, a technical standard governing four-byte autonomous system numbers. When routers receive network updates, they rely on defined protocols