I found this interesting augmented world map today. It shows the population of the Internet in a modified projection. The countries are also colored by the density of Internet users as a function of population.
Oxford Internet Institute: Internet Population and Penetration
News reports have been circulating over the past couple of days that various service providers have hit the 512k route mark in their BGP tables on their routers and switches causing outages and other problems. A number of hardware platforms, notably older Cisco hardware, have default limits in their configurations which limit route tables sizes to 512k routes. When these limits are breached the older hardware slows down or otherwise stop functioning as expected. Cisco issued a bulletin in May to providers with workaround procedures for some platforms.
The growth in the global route table has been fairly stable over the past couple of years and this is growth has been expected for a long time and yet still Internet service providers were not prepared in time for this event.
Internet Touches Half Million Routes: Outages Possible Next Week
Internet routers hitting 512K limit, some become unreliable
The end of the internet predicted, news at 11
Echoes of Y2K: Engineers Buzz That Internet Is Outgrowing Its Gear
A number of talks at NANOG 61 this week included some updates on IPv6 deployments. The links below will take you to presentations and also video of the speakers.
Akamai produces a security report annually and in their report this year they noted have seen a 10x increase in IPv6 traffic compared with the year before.
2013 Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report
T-mobile described their IPv6 deployment for handsets particularly noting how all of their Android 4.3+ handsets are now IPv6 only using 464XLAT as the transition technology back to the IPv4 Internet. 8 million of their 49 million subscribers are now largely using IPv6 only. Furthermore, they report that 27% of their traffic is IPv6 and that 50% of the traffic from these 8 million handsets is completely IPv6 without any translation to the IPv4 world.
464XLAT: Breaking Free of IPv4
I also found these talks quite interesting, but aren’t related directly to addressing issues.
This post is a little off topic from the normal posts here, but I thought this was a worthwhile diversion.
Recently, a new book “Tubes: A journey to the Center of the Internet” by Andrew Blum was released which took an in depth look into the physical infrastructure that makes the Internet work. For many people what happens on the Internet to get data and information from some “remote” location to our computers and mobile phones is just magic. This book highlights some of the lesser known aspects of the ‘physical Internet.’ I recently had a chance to read the book and was excited about how accurately the infrastructure was described. Sometimes, when I read technical articles written by journalists about the Internet industry I’m amazed at the way certain aspects get confused. I was delighted that this didn’t happen to me as I read. While the detail in the book wasn’t necessarily news to me it was fun to read about another person’s perspective on the industry that I’ve been working in.
The book is a little technical and geeky at times, but if you are curious about how the Internet works and is instantiated at a physical level pick up a copy or find one at your local library and give it a read.