Networking

One of the men who laid the foundations of the internet died on Saturday at the age of 85.

US Scientist Paul Baran was one of the first to look into how telecommunication networks would work in the future. His work with packaging data in the 1960s has been credited with playing a key role in the later development of the internet.

Vinton Cerf is another founder of the internet and tells BBC Radio 5 live Up All Night's Giles Dilnot that Baran was a "prolific inventor".

It’s been a little more than 20 years since I designed my first from-scratch cable plant, but one basic fact hasn’t changed, no matter how much the physical media and the wire protocols have evolved. That eternal truth is really quite simple: The boss and the users don’t care about the network until it ceases to work. Then they care a lot.

I'm a consultant, so part of my job is to sit through meetings that hash over hardware specifications for IT projects -- most often network equipment and servers, and sometimes load-balancing and security gear, too.

Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt backed off his company's tough data capping trial in early 2009, but he still likes the idea of some sort of pay-by-usage Internet model—and he suspects you (secretly) agree.

There's maybe never been a better time to be a network engineer--that is, provided you have IPv6 experience. Businesses are crying out for individuals to help create next-generation networking circuits, and the heat has been turned up as World IPv6 Day approaches in June, during which many of the Internet’s most popular properties will open IPv6 entrances to give the technology the biggest test it’s ever had.

For 15 years, Internet engineers and policymakers have been publicizing the need to upgrade the 'Net's current addressing scheme -- known as IPv4 -- to handle the network-of-network's explosive growth.

Yet many U.S. CIOs and CTOs continue to harbour misinformation that they use to justify why they are not adopting the next-generation IPv6 standard.

You might have read about how the long-warned end of available IPv4 address space is a bit more imminent than it was, as the IANA, which governs IP address allocations on the Internet, has run out of IPv4 addresses to allocate. Simply stated: The IPocalypse is coming! It's not going to be the end of civilization, or even just the Internet, as we know it, but there will be some big problems. We're not prepared for them and we're not even working all that hard on preparing.

Skype has launched a partner program for WiFi hotspot operators, saying that operators presently providing access from 500,000 hotspots around the world have signed up.

However this has been the case since last December when Skype announced that it had struck an agreement with the world's largest hotspot operator, FON, adding 300,000 FON hotspots to the 200,000 already accessible to Skype users.

The pillar of the basic Web address - the trusty .com domain - is about to face vast new competition that will dramatically transform the Web as we know it. New Web sites, with more subject-specific, sometimes controversial suffixes, will soon populate the online galaxy, such as .eco, .love, .god, .sport, .gay or .kurd.

A press conference taking place on Thursday in Miami is expected to mark the last allocation of Internet Protocol, Version 4 addresses by the central authority that assigns them.