Consumers will pay for Internet connectivity in a much wider range of ways by 2025, according to a new report by Cisco and the Monitor Group's Global Business Network. The report titled 'The Evolving Internet' examines the driving forces and uncertainties that will shape the path of the Internet over the next 15 years.
We need it soon. The supply of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses is dwindling, spurring interest in the transition to IPv6, with its exponentially larger address space. Since the IPv6 standard was established in 1999, operating systems and network equipment have steadily added support, says John Curran, president and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers. But the transition got started so early that it has since faded into the background.
An experiment run by Duke University and a European group responsible for managing internet resources went wrong on Friday, disrupting a small percentage of net traffic.
The damage could have been far worse however, and the incident shows just how fragile one of the internet's core protocols really is, security experts say.
Security practitioners for decades have advised people to limit DNS queries against their DNS servers to only use UDP port 53. The reality is that DNS queries can also use TCP port 53 if UDP port 53 is not accepted. Now with the impending deployment of DNSSEC and the eventual addition of IPv6 we will need to allow our firewalls for forward both TCP and UDP port 53 packets.
ISPs sometimes complain about "data hogs," often in the service of ridiculously tight-fisted data caps on Internet service. But there are users who deserve the porcine label, and Belgian ISP Telenet recently offered a rare picture of them. Can you imagine downloading 2,680GB of data in a single month?
The few blocks of Internet addresses yet to be allocated under the old IPv4 protocol seem to be home to some "hotspots" of unwanted traffic that anyone who gets the addresses would have to pay for, a researcher said at the North American Network Operators Group conference on Monday.
The volume of new domain name registrations grew by some 6 per cent last quarter, according to a report from VeriSign.
The web management company said that over 193 million top level domain (TLD) registrations were logged by the end of the first quarter of 2010 with new registrations seeing an increase of 6 per cent from the same period last year and almost 1 per cent over the previous quarter.
Within 18 months it is estimated that the number of new devices able to connect to the world wide web will plummet as we run out of "IP addresses" -- the unique codes that provide access to the internet for everything from PCs to smart phones.
"The internet as we know it will no longer be able to grow," Daniel Karrenberg, chief scientist at RIPE NCC, the organization that issues IP addresses in Europe, told CNN.
Tracking and cracking network performance problems is no easy task. More than a matter of identifying often mystifying bottlenecks, ensuring network efficiency requires an almost preternatural understanding of your organization's IT operations, as well as a thick skin for withstanding the heat when problems inevitably arise.
Sky Broadband user Mike Brunning received a nasty shock on his last monthly broadband statement, when he was quoted for millions of hours of data usage that he had never used.
According to the Sunderland Echo, the 64-year-old from Moorside, Sunderland, received an email from the broadband provider informing him he had exceeded his £10-per-month 10GB allowance. However, for the usage Mr Brunning was claimed to have used (a staggering 770,383,489 GB) he estimates he would have had to use his PC "non-stop for 2,000 years".
