Last week the UN’s Broadband Commission held its fifth meeting to discuss how to extend the broadband Internet to the almost six billion people on the planet who have yet to connect at broadband speeds. A critical component to extending the Internet is the work done by the multi-stakeholder technical community, especially the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

From March 25th through the 30th, the IETF held its 83rd meeting and Cisco was honored to be the host sponsor. Over fourteen hundred attendees, from 56 countries, participated in the meeting which gathered a large open multi-stakeholder community of network designers, engineers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution and smooth operation of the Internet. Technologies previously defined by the IETF, such as IPv6 and DNSSEC, are now at the forefront of efforts to ensure the Internet’s continued growth as a trusted platform of communications and innovation for billions of people around the world. As a result, the Internet has now grown to be essential to the 21st century global economy and a key driver of social development due in large part to the work of the IETF.

As the IETF nears its 30th year, challenges still remain Read More »

Tags: Cisco, dnssec, ietf, Internet freedom, IPv6, mobile internet, Robert Pepper, Service Provider, United Nations Broadband Commission

Earlier this week, I attended the UN’s Broadband Commission meeting in Ohrid, Macedonia, where we discussed initiatives to reach the Commission’s goals by 2015:

1) All countries have national broadband plans;

2) Broadband is affordable in developing countries so that entry-level broadband services cost less than 5% of average month income;

3) Broadband is adopted by 40% of households in developing countries; and that

4) Broadband penetration reaches 60% of the worldwide population and 50% in developing countries

To support this vision of an ever expanding Internet that people see as essential, Cisco sponsored the 83rd Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting last week in Paris. At the IETF, more than 1,400 of the leading Internet engineers and technologists from around the world gathered to further develop the standards which provide the foundation for Internet services such as domain names, email, the Web, and instant messaging.

The IETF is nearing its 30^th year of developing standards that have contributed to an Internet that is now utilized by over two billion people, fostered by a governance model that is largely self-regulatory and multi-stakeholder.

The Internet has grown up and is now essential to the 21st century global economy and a key driver of social development. But current challenges remain, such as extending the Internet to under-served areas and people, especially through wireless technology, and addressing issues of trust.

To achieve the UN Broadband Commission’s goal, and to expand the use of the Internet to the next billion, and the four billion people after that, the IETF and the Internet’s multi-stakeholder technical community must continue to address challenges, getting ahead of issues before they become problems.

The tremendous rate of growth of the Internet has been fueled by conscious decisions along the way that provided a vibrant and open environment where innovation flourishes. The Internet was not an accident. The technical community, encompassing the IETF and others, plays a critical role in leading efforts to continue this rapid expansion of the benefits of connectivity, while ensuring the future and freedom of the Internet. And we are committed to the IETF as one of the key forums where Internet standards are developed and core Internet principles are protected and fostered.

Tags: 2015 goals, broadband, ietf, internet, Macedonia, multi-stakeholder community, UN Broadband Commission

Judging from the buzz at this year’s CDN World Summit, CDN federations are a hot topic—and not just because they were the focus of my keynote. In short, the industry has moved beyond “if” and is now talking about “when” and “how.” This is good news because I believe CDN federations will play an important role in creating new opportunities for service providers to monetize their services.

As consumers demand greater amounts of high-quality content for their in-home and mobile devices, service providers (SPs) are finding it difficult to increase revenues while containing costs. In response, many SPs have implemented their own CDNs to reduce content-transport costs and improve the quality of content delivery to customers. While this approach has helped, results have been limited. Read More »

Tags: CDN federations, cdn world summit, Cisco, Cisco IBSG, Content delivery networks, ietf, internet engineering task force, Service Provider, SP

By Francois Le Faucheur, System Architect, Cisco Systems

With the CDN World Summit coming up this week in London (Oct 26-28), it seems a good time to describe something that’s been a working passion of mine: CDNI, where the “I” stands for “Interconnect.”

What’s CDNI? It’s a new working group within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), co-chaired by myself and my colleague Rich Woundy, Senior VP/Software and Applications for Comcast. The working group mission is to develop standards for the interconnection of CDNs run by different operators, so they can inter-operate and collectively provide a multi-footprint CDN — thereby pooling resources that are owned and operated by multiple operators.

It’s all about how to link up the world’s CDNs, so that they can exchange information and work collectively. Just like the Internet was about linking up the world’s IP networks.

Read More »

Tags: cdn, cdn federate, cdn federation, cdn world summit, cdni, comcast, content delivery network, content delivery network interconnect, francois le faucheur, ietf, internet engineering task force, rich woundy, Service Provider

What if your mobile device allowed you the freedom to seamlessly roam across any network in the world, regardless of location or operator and with all the attributes you would expect, security or privacy…  With LISPmob, we may have gotten a giant step closer as we open sourced a network stack for network mobility on Linux platforms, an implementation of basic LISP mobile node functionalities.

This is the Locator Identifier Separation Protocol, which supports the separation of the IPv4 and IPv6 address space following a network-based map-and-encapsulate scheme based on an IETF open standard.

We hope this will be a project and a community many will find not just interesting and vibrant, but necessary and fun to engage, collaborate and contribute.

How will this help your plans to deal with all these amazing possibilities of mobile access to an ever-growing Internet?

Tags: github, ietf, ipv4, ipv4 address exhaustion, IPv6, Linux, LISP, LISPmob, open source, open standards