It is almost impossible to find a consumer broadband provider that gives you decent upload bandwidth wrt to the download bandwidth. Look around…all these offers of 512kbpx or 1.5mbps broadband access usually comes with 128kbps or even 64kbps upload!

“Why would consumers needs more then 128kbps upload bandwidth?” question comes from the perspective that consumers only consume information and have its origin from the “Consumers are Stupid” mentality of the typical ILEC. Such mentality is not only outdated but could potentially be fatal.
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The April statistics (via Adam Peake) shows FTTH in Japan is growing nearly at 100,000 new subscribers per month! While the FTTH is bearly 1M subscribers (out of 14M broadband subscribers), the grow rate is very significant.

I wonder why the sudden surge of interest in FTTH in Japan…something to check out when I am there next!

ICANN is seeking comments about the 10 new sponsored TLDs (via Paul Hoffman). Let me give my five cent worth:

First, the evaluation of sponsored TLDs should be based on the appropriateness of sponsors¹. Whether it is ‘useful’ or ‘useless’ to the Internet shouldn’t be a factor since one’s rubbish is another gem. This is one of the things I learnt working for an open-minded regulator, that one should not think they are smart enough to pick market winners.

Of course, the proposed TLD should not cause “harm” to the Internet. Any TLDs which fails this test should not be allowed to proceed. But it is easy to confuse “harmful” with “useless” so we must be careful.

1. .asia — ah, my fav, one that made me some enemies² because of my vocal opposition. The problem with this proposal is that it fails the “appropriateness of sponsors” test. The word ASIA is as significant as EU and it is unimagable that some NGOs, NPOs and commerical entities³ are sufficient to be the “sponsor” for .ASIA. This isn’t the same as .EU where it has EC behind it. There is no government representation and neither has this been discussed at any government-to-government meetings like APEC TEL or APT or AP MinTel etc. With the recent development at WSIS, I don’t think ICANN should setup a timebomb for itself. Recommendation: request more governmental support for this TLD.
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I have a very interesting dinner last night with Michael Robertson and Jeff Bonforte, CEO and President of SIPPhone.com respectively. Most people will know Michael as the founder of MP3.com and Lindows. They are in town for their big announcement with Singtel. (Yes, 1-747-xxx-xxxx will be routed from Singapore soon :-)

It is a social dinner hosted by Richard Tan (Singtel) and we talk about life, travel, lobsters, basketballs and kids¹. Of course, we also talk about cool SIP gadgets and ENUM. :-)

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A friend email me asking why ITU-T SG3 is not suitable to handle the issues of Internet Peering. He pointed out that while there are technology differences, the economics and policies should be fairly similar given they are both bilteral arrangement. I beg to differ.

Lets take a detour: When User 1 on carrier A (origination carrier) makes a phone call to User 2 on Carrier B (termination carrier), the usual financial arrangement is the A will pays a termination fee to the B. And in the case where A and B don’t have direct connection but are connected via Carrier C, then A will redirect its call to C (A pays C) and C will reroute the call to B (and then C will pay A B). This is how it works in a nutshell¹.

Fairly simple and striaght forward because we are dealing with one and only one application: Voice².
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Internet Peering is one of the stuff that has been on the back of my mind. I have several long conversations with many people, such as Bill Woodcock and Bill Norton, over the last year trying to get a grasp of the issues. The problem is easy to frame but the solution is not so simple.

In a paper published by ITU-T SG3¹ (via ITU Newsblog), it says:

Interconnection in telecommunications will continue to be an important and difficult problem facing policymakers and regulators. But like many difficult problems, the solutions are not simple and cannot be neatly summarized.

Remember that Internet is is a networks of networks. These networks are connected either transit or peering. If you are a small network (e.g. home or office), you are likely to buy transit from a service provider (e.g. subscribe to a broadband, or leaseline etc). Your service provider would buy transit from a larger service provider and so on. But as you reach the top with all the Tier-1 ISPs, who do they buy transit from? They aren’t going to buy transit from each another…so they peer. They exchange their routes so that their customers can reach each another but (usually) no money exchanged.
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In my previous entry, I discussed about the changes in the telecommunication industry to a world where data, IP Packets particularly, is the main revenue generator¹ and Voice would become just one of the many application/service provided on top of the data world.

Now, such radical change is extremely disruptive even though it is likely to span across many years. The fixed wired industry just barely started on the transition; In Singapore, you can find a pure IP access provider like Pacific Internet² who owns no infrastructure but carry their data over other infrastructure providers. But the mobile industry is still a happy family in their wall-garden with voice in the center.

Now imaging what happened on the fixed wired industry now been pushed onto the mobile industry. (In certain ways, it’s already started with 802.11 challenging 2.5/3G) and the havoc it will create, with mobile industry crying fouls (“I paid so much for the spectrum and spend billions on the infrastructure! You have to protect me!”) and the service providers and consumers on the other end demand open access!
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Skype secures $18.8m funding (via Dave Farber IPer).

Skype, a London-based company that is enjoying strong growth with software enabling free phone calls over the internet, has secured $18.8m (?11m) in second-round funding.

Okay, I am a happy user of Skype. But would I invest in them without bottomline? Sure, if it is a “sell to a greater fool” play.

Think you are safe if the site you visit have a “lock”? Think again (via Slashdot)

Scammers can also configure their web server so that deceptive SSL certificates won’t trigger an alert in the user’s browser. “One of the SSL encoding methods is ‘plain text’,” Neal Krawetz from Secure Science Corporation noted in the SANS post on the issue. “Most SSL servers have this disabled by default, but most browsers support it. When plain text is used, no central certificate authority is consulted and the user never sees a message asking if a certificate should be accepted (because ‘plain text’ doesn’t use certificates). Keeping that in mind, the little lock icon may not even indicate an encrypted channel. The little lock only indicates an SSL connection.

I fall off my chair when I saw this news today. Are they nuts!?

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has no authority to prevent VeriSign from rolling out a search engine for users who mistype Internet addressees, VeriSign said, as well as another feature that allows users to sign up for a waiting list for desirable domain names.

Well, Verisign has no authority to roll out search engine using the .com DNS server in the first place! They forget they don’t own .com!

ps: I have no comments on WLS. That has no impact to the technical operation of the Internet.