ITU has a good summary of the WTSA including the several Internet issues discussed in my previous entry. (via ITU SPU)
The two main topic of the whole assembly could be summaries as (1) NGN (aka the move to packet-switch network) and (2) Internet issues (aka Spam, ENUM, IDN and ccTLD).
Who “Manages” the Internet by Michael Nelson. (via Internet Policy)
“Phone governance”
Who makes choices about the Net?
FCC conducted a Global Roundtable discussion on IP-based services (basically just VoIP) 2 days ago (30th July) and the webcast is available online. (via Jeff Pulver).
Yes, I sit infront of the computer for 2 hours and listen the whole webcast and here are some of my thoughts:
1. (Obvious) Take away: Regulation certainity is important for industry to invest billions/trillions to upgrade their infrastructure.
2. Jeff took the opportunity to bash some bad policies. :-) Well done! We need someone to say outloud the most obvious especially when there are lobbies on the other side.
3. The open-access issues raised by Tom Vest is a potential future problem. At this moment, we are aware of ISPs doing it, either block or ban the services outright or muffling the packets sufficient to make the quality very poor. But it is too early to say if regulators should step in on this ‘market-failure’ because (1) the outrage isn’t very big yet and (2) the industry haven’t got a chance at self-regulation yet. Given a choice, I prefer industry self-regulation.
4. Alcatel made their usual speech Internet Protocol is good but “Wild Wild West” Internet is bad. (Yes, my jaw dropped too when I first saw their ITU-NGN slides). Here is a clue: NGN wont be a brand-new network1. IPv6 couldn’t move people to move to a new network and “Quality” & “Security” arent disruptive enough for people to build a new one. Sorry, any network that doesn’t connect to the current “Wild Wild West” isn’t going to fly.
1 This is not to say I dont think the future wont have a new network. On the controdictory, I believe we will have a new network in future, within my lifetime. But it will be some radically different offering something the current Internet couldnt provide. It is probably hard to imaging why, how and what it is going to be like right now as it is difficult to imaging Internet in the 1970s.
Jonathan Schwartz points out that video over IP will stress today’s network infrastucture (via Kevin Werbach)
“When it’s put onto DVD, the movie will size up to something like 5 Gigabytes. Requested by 250,000 technology executives (or more likely, their kids) on a quiet evening – for display on their new IP TV’s or mobile handsets, or through their set top boxes – that’s going to put some burden on the network. Big data (5 Gb), relatively small compute (decode, check for authorization, etc.). Caches will help, but it’s a classic parallel throughput problem.”
But you know, we are already doing it. This is why we have distributed p2p file transfer like BitTorrent and site like suprnova.org. In fact, latest statistics shows that P2P traffic account for 50% 66%1 of the Internet traffic and we haven’t witness any breakdown…yet.
1 See http://www.isp-planet.com/research/2004/cachelogic_data.html (Thanks Dewayne for the correction :-)
Just concluded a successful APEET meeting in Singapore (thanks you!) and I am getting to leave for Kuala Lumpur in 10mins time. But before I leave, I thought of leaving two interesting news I saw today.
First, is a report of Verisign SiteFinder by Steve Crocker (a representive of Security and Stability Advisory Committee of ICANN) titled Redirection in the COM and NET Domains, A Report from the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC). An executive summary of the report can be found at CircleID. Bravo! Bravo! I taken the same position which you can read here, here and here.
The second is this excellent contribution from SaudiNIC on their experiences in deploying Arabic Domain Names (via ITU-SPU). It is the best written report I seen from Arabic world..well-written, well-thought and technically strong. I actually learn a lot reading from the report. I am really encouraged at this work…and there might be hope for Arabic Domain Names after all. (Is it the same guy that show me the Etisalat Arabic Domain Name … I will know soon :-)
I probably should blog about this earlier but forgotten until this reminded me: PostOne.com is shutting down.
PostOne.com started as a project (Pobox, which is why I have pobox.org.sg) I did for fun back in 1994. The idea comes from a discussion I have with Markus Ranum (of Firewall-1 fame). There was this cool thing called Mosaic and we were discussing what we can do with this new stuff called World-Wide-Web. Markus suggested ‘Why not merge WWW with Email?’1. So 3 days of no-sleep hacking2 later, PObox was borned.
PObox started as as Email forwarding service with the tagline ‘Email for Life’3. But it is because of a more selfish reason: Back then, the university issues us with a new account (and thus email address) every freaking year. Later, I added ability to read email and also netnews directly from PObox.
Read the rest of this entry »
[Update 7th July: A modified version of this article is publish on CircleID.]
I receive some email from friends asking me if I know of the recent IPv9 news from China. I thought I should just blog about it and point them to this entry.
I heard of them first time back in 2001. The technology is developed by 十进制网 called “数字域名” which translate roughly to ‘Numerical Domain Name”. They call it ADDA (All Digital Domain Address) and then later IPv9. (Okay, I laughed back then too so don’t hold back yourself ;-)
The technology1 as I understand can be summarise as follows: The 10 digits they refer to are phone numbers (China uses 10 digit local phone number). The idea is that you can navigate the web by using phone numbers in the browser. The technology is basically a modified DNS and the business model is to get you to registered your phone numbers with them.
So it isn’t really IP as you would think. But despite these, they seem pretty well connected in China and have support from Ministry of Information Industry (MII) among others. However, I have not seen any actual deployment anywhere. Lots of press release but thats about it.
1 There is a article in Sina.com explaining the technology pretty well but it is written in Chinese.
2 The whole hype maybe dying out on its own soon.
The next few weeks would be pretty hectic and exciting for me. We invited Dave Farber1 to Singapore for CommunicAsia 2004. Yeah!
The week after, I will be flying to the Bay Area on 21st to attend Supernova 2004. I have been looking forward to Supernova and meeting all the cool people. I will be speaking at the “Telecom Transformation: Voice as a Data Application” session, together with Jeff Ganek (CEO of Neustar) and Niklas Zennstrom (CEO of Skype). It is going to be exciting. Joi is also planning a Supernova dinner although he won’t be able to make it this year.
Then I will stay over the weekend in San Francisco to attend the Apple World Wide Developer Conference 2004 (I am invited as an VIP) to hear Steve Job’s keynote before heading back to Singapore on the 29th.
My only regret is not being able to attend Supercomm 2004 in Chicago as I am already engaged on 22nd and 23rd. Nevertheless, the next few weeks is going to be fun!
1 Just got news Dave may have some trouble getting here. I hope everything is okay with him.
Saw this on Straits Times paper today:
NO MENTION OF UPLOAD SPEEDS: Singapore’s Internet broadband providers are offering access speeds of 1,500 kbps and 3,000 kbps. However, one thing their advertisements fail to mention is the upload speed (data speed from user to Internet).
When I signed up for a 1,500 kbps connection last year, I thought both the download and upload speeds were the same. It was only later that I realised the upload speed was only 96-112 kbps. And worse, the connection is one-way – when I hit a maximum upload speed, my download speed is potentially 0 kbps. Is this the way to conduct business?
My friends in the United States and Canada tell me it is standard practice in both countries to mention both the download and upload speeds in ads. I hope the Consumers Association of Singapore will look into the matter.
SENTOSA GANI
Yoohoo, your customer is asking for more upload bandwidth, as I said in my previous entry.
Reuter is providing video clips of news via RSS (via Loic). Yoo, finally. I discussed the idea (RSS + BT) sometime last year and really happy to see this happening :-)