Replacement of the Telecommunications Act imminent

The end of April should see the signing into law of the Electronic Communications Bill, which replaces the Telecommunications Act (and some others) - a month late.

The Financial Mail expect the Department of Communications to issue policy changes that will be wide-ranging and that will have a dramatic effect on competition. Finally. The changes are expected to be:

1)	LLU (Local Loop Unbundling). Essential if any ISP is to provide service without going through Telkom's convoluted distribution and billing network. It also would allow the SNO to offer access on those lines without an 'agreement' from Telkom allowing them access.
2)	Sentech allowed switched voice. This effectively makes Sentech a competitive telecommunications operator - from a policy viewpoint. This would help mitigate the decision to not license more than one extra operator (i.e. the SNO) as there will effectively be another competitor in the market.
3)	Possible declaration of SAT-3/WASC/SAFE as an essential service. Telkom will obviously oppose any such move. Searching for 'STM-1' (i.e. a 155 Mbps connection) on MyBroadband reveals a 6-to-1 price disparity for such a link between other operators on SAT-3 and Telkom. Ghana and Benin have cheaper international access (for large volumes) than South Africa!

D-Link and The NTP of Death

D-Link are not the first vendor to ship a DDoS 'poor NTP implementation' in consumer network hardware: witness Netgear vs University of Wisconsin. And you would think that other vendors have taken appropriate action to prevent a recurrence.

D-Link forgot. I think.

Other people have views that aren't quite so Slashdot-crowd-aligned - viz some NANOG comments about poor network implementations (of course). And some indications that this problem (i.e. D-Link's effective-DDoS on Poul Henning-Kamp) might take quite some time to go away - 6 years or more!

Verizon and AT&T confirm 'net neutrality' at USTA

(from the latest edition of Dave Burstein's excellent DSL Prime)

From the USTA conference:

“If the consumer has purchased three megabits of capacity from us and there is video coming to them, whatever comes from the Internet we will deliver to them without any blocking, degradation, or other interference.” Tom Tauke, Verizon’s VP and D.C. lead, at USTA

“We’ve said very clearly we’re not going to block, effectively or otherwise. We’re not going to degrade,” added Jim Cicconi, his peer at AT&T.

Is this marketing-speak? Dave says he will post tapes of this press conference (I guess I just answered my own question - it is marketing-speak).

But there are some teeth showing at the FCC:

Kevin Martin joined in the battle, reminding the telcos “If you sell 3 megabits, that’s what you should deliver.”

This sounds like one to remember for posterity.

Distributed journalism

An interesting alternate future near-history, in the form of a Flash animation, explores the possibilities of an 'arms-race' between:

1) Microsoft (and Friendster)
and
2) Google (and Blogger and Amazon)

Talks a little on the ideas of automatic recommendation, and multiple preferential filters (e.g. preferred editors, in this context)

A new theory of war

The New York Time has an article on the Pentagon's network upgrade.

In it, it is claimed that "military intelligence - including secret satellite surveillance covering most of the earth - will be posted on the war net and shared with troops".


Good to know that the well-trained members of the US military will be able to take advantage of this promising new thing called the Intar-web.
[An interesting paper on friendly-fire inspired by Gulf War 1]


How will they manage the changing tension between:

1) The chain-of-command

• Alternate instructions from the ERDC's TeleEngineering Operations Center
• Strategic vs tactical views might impel soldiers to act in their immediate best interest (staying alive?) instead of acting to achieve strategically or tactically important objectives
  

2) The chain-of-reporting

• Secrecy-management problems suggested by the Times article
• Leakage of operational details via request analysis (cp Google's potential for log scanning)