ISP Operations and Communications Development – Selected Weekend Reading

Our selection of materials about old and new standards: from IPv6 to New IP, as well as factors affecting traffic in the networks of mobile operators and Internet providers.

/ Pexels / Brett sayles

Work of providers

• “Accessible Internet”: interim results and opinions… A pilot project, within the framework of which socially significant Internet resources – from social networks to search engines [всего более 370 площадок] – together with providers and telecom operators, they provide the audience with “lightweight” versions of sites free of charge, decided to extend before the end of this year. Therefore, we took a look at the current results, experience and feedback from the participants in the “experiment”:
  • talked about the difficulties of implementing the project – for example, the problem of tariffing sites by IP addresses on the side of telecom operators and alternative solutions;
  • provided expert assessments of the already held and projected financial losses of providers of various levels based on the results of the trial period of this program;
  • considered the experience of TV channels – for example, many simply publish a TV program on lightweight versions of sites, in others they completely refuse to comply with the requirements of the regulator;
  • discussed the negative perception of the program by netizens and official data on the first two months of Accessible Internet operation.

• Background: what does ESNI blocking mean in China… We tell you who was the first to report the next update of the Golden Shield, and what can be considered the reason for its update from a technological point of view [почему Китай активизировался именно сейчас]… Also, in simple words, we analyze the principle of operation SNI and Encrypted SNI, plus – we look at how blocking is organized on the “border” routers and note possible bypass options.

Infrastructure development

• What is hindering global plans to modernize network infrastructure in the United States… Spoiler alert: These are outdated analytical standards and methodologies for collecting statistics. In the first case, we are talking about the “4/1” rule, its update to “25/3”, the situation in other countries and what EFF experts and individual members of the US government propose to do in order to move from analytics to business. … In the second, we discuss how broadband maps are formed and why the census blocks do not allow the FCC and telecom companies to detail plans to modernize American communications networks.

/ Pexels / NASA

• How India plans to develop network infrastructure… Another “release” of our global overview of broadband network development programs. This time we are talking about grandiose plans – to provide 650 thousand villages with optics in just 1000 days. The “fork” of the cost of a kilometer of such lines, their main “opponents” from the animal world and a compact overview of similar initiatives, but from other countries, are in this habratopic.

IT Legislation

• Why are the initiatives of the British Internet regulators criticized?… We are discussing the sensational “Online Harms White Paper” – a large-scale program to improve the regulation of online media, social networks and content to which the local audience gets access. During the year of discussions, the text of the document has not undergone significant changes, but it has not become a full-fledged draft law. The process is impeded by a difficult epidemiological situation, but it is this that can force the government to reject any criticism of the initiative. Understanding how the expert community is trying to influence the situation.

/ Unsplash / Fábio Lucas

• MITM at the provider level: the European option… In Germany, they are considering a bill according to which special services will be able to install software to spy on citizens using the infrastructure of telecom providers. Such practices have been known since 2011 – software and the methods themselves have been publicly discussed for five years, but the process continues to move towards the official status of such “attacks”. We tell and understand what’s what.

Bonus: open Wi-Fi

• Openwifi – what an open Wi-Fi chip looks like… This is one of the most popular habraposts in our blog recently (+32). In it, we analyzed a pilot project for the implementation of open Wi-Fi on FPGA – we studied the schemes from the developers’ repository, shared links and opinions on the prospects for this initiative.