Intercontinental Internet communications lie on top of a complex network of submarine cables forming its global communication backbone. As part of ongoing work focused on the criticality of the submarine cable network, fellow researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I mapped traceroute measurements to submarine cables as a first step towards understanding its potential vulnerabilities. … continue reading the blog post …
November 28-29, 2023. Dr. Walter Willinger (NIKSUN) and Prof. Bustamante are co-organizing an NSF Workshop bringing together an initial group of national and international experts to sketch and start implementing a transformative research agenda for solving one of our community’s most challenging yet important tasks: the re-architecting tomorrow’s Internet for “survivability”, ensuring that the network is able to fulfill its mission even in the presence of large-scale catastrophic events.
How many major telecommunication companies are state-owned, and in which economies do they operate? Knowing the answer to such questions can be critical for network operators to make informed decisions on routing, interconnection and general network operations, particularly when they are operating in another economy or when a peer company is owned by a foreign government. Such information can also help operators understand telecom business dynamics in foreign economies they are not familiar with. In a recent study to shed light on different state-owned Internet providers around the world, we at Northwestern University, Northeastern University, the University of California, San Diego and Georgia Institute of Technology found that state ownership of Internet providers is a widespread phenomenon. And that governments have different approaches to engage in telecommunications markets, for example, as access providers (ANTEL in Uruguay), or by creating domestic backbones (ARSAT in Argentina), or investing in international connectivity (BSCCL in Bangladesh). Overall, we identified 989 state-owned Autonomous Systems (ASes) (and 193 foreign subsidiaries) ... continue reading the blog post ...
The growth of global Internet traffic has driven a drastic expansion of the submarine cable network. Today, a complex mesh of hundreds of cables, stretching over one million kilometres, connects nearly every corner of the earth and is instrumental in closing the remaining connectivity gaps. Despite the scale and critical role of the submarine network for both business and society at large, the networking community has mostly ignored it, treating it as a black box in most Internet studies. An invited post for the APNIC blog.