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Background The arrangements regarding the composition and organisation of the provision and operation of authoritative root servers are one of the more long-lasting aspects of the public Internet. In the late 1980’s, Jon Postel, as the IANA, worked with a small set of interested organisations to provide this service. It…
Early models of packet networking used a hop-by-hop paradigm of control. Each intermediate device (a “router” in Internet parlance) would use a control loop with its adjacent neighbour and retransmit any frame that was not explicitly acknowledged as received by the neighbour. Such models were used by the X.25 protocol,…
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meets three times a year to work on Internet Standards and related operational practice documents. In July of 2025 the IETF met in Madrid (finally, and only after a number of thwarted mis-starts!) with more than a thousand folk in attendance through the week.…
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meets three times a year to work on Internet Standards and related operational practice documents. In July of 2025 the IETF met in Madrid (finally, and after a number of thwarted mis-starts!) with more than a thousand folk in attendance through the week. The…
Last month, in June 2025, I reported on our progress with the adoption of the QUIC transport protocol. Here I would like to look at the mechanisms used to trigger a client application (typically a browser) to connect to the server using the QUIC transport protocol. A conventional way to…
Networks are typically built to provide certain services at an expected scale. The rationale for this focussed objective is entirely reasonable: to overachieve would be inefficient and costly. So, we build service infrastructure to a level of sufficient capability to meet expectations and no more. In ideal conditions this leads…
There has been a major change in the landscape of the internet over the past few years with the progressive introduction of the QUIC transport protocol. Here I’d like to look at where we are up to with the deployment of QUIC on the public Internet. But first, a review…
The Internet is, as its name suggests, a network of networks. The glue that holds this together is the inter-domain routing protocol, BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol. BGP is a flooding protocol whose objective is to ensure that all the BGP speakers across the Internet see the same picture of…
I would like to look at the ways in which the operators of the number Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) have deployed this infrastructure in a way that maximises its available and performance and hardens it against potential service interruptions, or in other words, an examination of the resilience of…
The interdomain routing fabric of the Internet is a somewhat chaotic space. It is not a “centrally managed” space by any means. There is no single entity that is responsible for the Internet’s routing environment. No permissions are required to join, and no notice required to leave. A network doesn’t…
