Networking

After delaying its plan to test capping subscriber bandwidth usage, Time Warner has opted to retreat from the approach altogether.

In a statement today, Chief Executive Office Glenn Britt said, "It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met."

Internet traffic dropped sharply in Sweden this week after a law cracking down on online copyright violation went into force, Industry sources said on Friday.

The new law under the European Union's Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, makes it easier to prosecute file-sharers because it requires internet service providers to disclose the internet protocol addresses of suspected violators to copyright owners.

The latest quarterly ‘State of the Internet’ report brought out by the Nasdaq-listed Akamai (NSDQ: AKAM) Technologies, Inc., ranks India at 115 among the 223 countries measured in terms of average connection speeds. India’s average connection speed is 772Kbps while the global average is 1.5Mbps. South Korea, which ranks No.1, had average speeds of 15 Mbps.

The number of unique IPs from India grew 42.91% year-on-year, to 2.63 million, a figure that puts India at No. 20 globally. Globally, the number of unique IPs grew 20%. The US is ranked No. 1, with 114.1 million unique IPs.

Having recently gone on trial, the founders of the world's largest BitTorrent file sharing site, ThePirateBay.Org, are soon to launch a network service that'll allow file sharers to become even harder for copyright police to detect.

ThePirateBay aims to make the online activities of subscribers as anonymous as possible using Virtual Private Network (VPN) technologies, which provide a secure and encrypted point to point connection that only authorised users can access, making downloaded data and IP addresses difficult to intercept.

Virgin Media has announced it will be offering internet access speeds off up to 150Mbps in just two years time.

The announcement comes as BT pledged to roll out super-fast broadband to six UK cities by 2010 and expected to offer 40 percent of the country high-speed broadband access by 2012. Virgin Media's chief executive Neil Berkett told the BBC: "We have an opportunity with our network to provide significantly higher speeds".

Hackers have managed to get up to speeds of 50Mbps using old Virgin Media modems.

The internet crooks are taking advantage of the provider's new fibre-optic broadband service, which was rolled out at the end of last years. Firmware was updated on the old modems using a cloning technique, which allowed the broadband users to gain fraudulent access to the new super-fast offering.

In a statement published in the Register, the ISP said: 'Virgin Media takes the issue of fraud on its network very seriously and, where appropriate, will prosecute.

Networks today are blind. As analyst firms such as Gartner have pointed out, IT doesn't really know which users are on the network. Similarly, IT knows very little about the application traffic on the LAN.

IT relies on cryptic tools to stand in for user and application data, but these tools can rarely be used to tie the information back to real-time traffic.

Ever wonder what the oldest registered .com domain is on the Internet? After all, they haven't always existed. In fact, it was just 24 years ago this month that the oldest domain was registered.

It was www.symbolics.com, owned by the Symbolics, Inc. company who, back in the day, was a leading software development firm with software projects designed back in the 1980s which appear very much like modern software designs seen today.

While simple in concept, network baselining is often misunderstood.

Baselining involves recording network traffic and performance, saving it for future reference and/or reviewing it to see traffic patterns. Once baselines are saved, they can be used as a benchmark with which to compare other traffic patterns.

A highly unusual network-configuration update by an inexperienced administrator at a small DSL provider in the Czech Republic last Monday choked Cisco Systems Inc. routers around the globe, slowing worldwide Internet performance for about an hour.