Nayanee Gupta's weblog

Two months ago, Comcast was in the news for it’s covert attempts at traffic-shaping, by throttling peer-to-peer file sharing between BitTorrent customers. The cable internet provider reportedly used equipment from Sandvine, a Canadian company which makes networking equipment designed for traffic policing, i.e. blocking new and forcefully terminating already established internet connections when required.

In a counter move, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released software that helps users determine whether online hiccups they are experiencing are genuine network delays or evidence of deliberate network traffic manipulation.

Continue reading "A “Sandvine” for internet customers" »

Posted by Nayanee at 06:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Following our very interesting discussion in class on the spread of the Internet in the developing world, and the effects thereof, I wanted to highlight this interesting news article about the deployment of a new fiber-optic cable project, funded by the Africa Development Bank, that will connect 22 East African and landlocked African countries to one another and to the rest of the world through high-quality Internet services. The cable is expected to transform telecom services for 250 million Africans.

While West Africa is relatively well connected by undersea cable, the Indian Ocean’s eastern African seabed is the only one in the world without a submarine fiber-optic cable, forcing the region to rely heavily on limited and expensive satellite links. As a result, countries along the coast and in its hinterland have some of the highest communications costs in the world (about 2000 to 3000 times that of developed countries).

Continue reading "Essaying doubts about Africa's new EASSy cable" »

Posted by Nayanee at 04:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)