Hop 255

Cogent and Level 3 Agree

Cogent and Level 3 have agreed to a new longer term peering agreement after their recent de-peering spat.

"As part of today's joint announcement, Level 3 and Cogent underscored their common view that the implementation of their modified peering agreement, effective immediately, serves the best interests of both companies' customers. As a result of the agreement, Level 3 will not proceed with disconnection on November 9, as previously announced."

Bloggers had their letters ready to send and were (still are) forecasting gloom in respect to the competitiveness of the backbone market. The same arguments were made circa the MCI-Worldcom merger but failed to materialise. Indeed, a look at transit prices and financial performance shows backbones have not proven to be the bottlenecks in a way they could exercise pricing power in the USA. Statements such as these from SBC's Ed Whitacre may give more cause for concern but it is the telco's contol over local access, and not the merger with AT&T's Internet backbone, that is their source of leverage. On the other hand, just as the customers of Cogent and Level3 screamed when a small fraction of the net was not visible, just try telling customers they can't access Google or Skype! And I doubt that the customers of SBC would see their payment to SBC to access the Internet as giving Google or Vonage a free ride. Here is the Whitacre quote:

"How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?
How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts! "

Indian DSL Pirces

India's largest telcos are reported to be planning to lower their DSL prices for from Rs 399 (US$885) to Rs 199 (US$4.41). BSNL has already reduced its DSL tariff by 50 per cent from Rs 500 ($11.10) per month to Rs 250 ($5.55) per month for 256-kbps connections.

ICANN, Verisign .com and com.

This article sets out some of the background to the new ICANN-Verisign deal where Versign keeps .com and Icann gets greater authority over the dot users don't see at the end of the domain. More background here. At Icannwatch they ask a good question. Why do the new arrangements seemingly assign perpetual rights to .com if only a four year renewal was needed?  Karl Auerbach says in commenting on the Icannwatch post that the 2001 agreement was perpetual and Icann is bound by that. He points to his notes from the time to back that up. So it seems the Board at the time bears the responsibility -- and the current Board had little room to maneuver.

That still leaves the question as to what is the benefit to the Internet community of a perpetual lock-in with a 7% permissible annual increase?  This is well ahead of any forecast inflation rate and costs should, if anything, be decreasing. It is hard to see the sense in assigning a monopoly a 7% annual inflator not based on any transparent process or justification. No regulator, and Icann does not like to use that term, in the normal course of events would strike such a deal. They may be stuck with the 2001 Board decision but why 7%?

At a delicate stage of WSIS, which may be why Icann felt under pressure to strike this deal, the down side is that they have sadly handed critics of the present system a powerful argument. Under the new arrangements the dollars flow, in seeming perpetuity without any opportunity for competitive bidding, from the rest of the world to a United States company.

Domain Name Statistics

This is an excellent site on domain name statistics. Looking at the pie makes you realise how delicious it is for Verisign at $6 per domain and a new 7% allowable annual increase. Hop255 wonders how that impacts of firms like GoDaddy who have taken registrations for 10 years at a fixed price. Do they have a like deal with Verisign? We assume not as until now Verisign could not guarantee it would be the registry. That raises the question as to whether the registry fee could be higher than the retail price paid by the GoDaddy customer who has signed up for 10 years. More generally a good deal for Verisign and probbaly for ICANN but who was looking out for users? A competitive and transparent process should have been used to decide the registry operator.

BBC quiz

Off topic but just did this BBC history quiz. Hop255 scored 10 out of 12 but should have got the Harold and Battle question (pressed too fast instead of reading question properly). And we had forgotten the answer to the civil rights question.

Meanwhile a fairly good article on Internet Governance in Reason.

New Skype Competitors

New Skype competitors are emerging all the time. Two say they are offering free calls back into the PSTN, for fixed lines, in a number of countries. These include VoIPBuster and VoIPCheap. Hop255 has discussed French VoIP companies, such as NetAppel, doing this before. All three have to pay termination fees, assuming they are legit, so:

• either they support the service through other sources of revenue (e.g. advertising).
• their margins on other calls (e.g. to mobiles) are enough to cover free call volumes.
• or a backbone carrier is giving them an inducement to market in this way, and is bearing the cost of termination itself, with the expectation that its own volumes will cover costs.

VoIP Threat Taxonomy

This VoIP Security Threat Taxonomy aims to define the many potential security threats to VoIP deployments, services, and end users. Part of the challenge of devising effective VoIP security protections requires first identifying these threats in the first place. Voipsa's overall goal of this project is to help ground VoIP security awareness in the industry, press, and general public. Meanwhile Skype has let an external expert review its security.

Skype's registered users

Trends like this make you wonder how many of Skype's registered users are real and how much speculation has occurred.

History of Internet Governance

The history of the Internet Governance debate is nicely summed up here.

Skype Advertising

Ebay floated the idea of "Skype advertising" this week which comes as no surprise. If it brings down the cost of SkypeOut then Hop255 is supportive. Meanwhile the SkypeJournal has an interesting post on a user who changed their skype user name to the reflect the car they want to sell.