From Eli Noam, December 2002: The Effect of Deregulation on Market Concentration: an Analysis of the Telecom Act of 1996 and the Industry Meltdown

Easing Wireless War in India: "India's telecommunications regulator has announced a new pricing system in an effort to temper an intense fight over interconnections and revenue sharing in the country's fiercely competitive wireless market, one of the fastest growing in the world." [New York Times: Technology]

Cybercrime, long a painful side effect of the innovations of Internet technology, is reaching new dimensions, security specialists say. [International Herald Tribune]

Daniel Karrenberg on the inpact of the SQL worm on DNS root name service: "A further tentative conclusion is that this data (again) supports the case for distributing root service across the Internet using IP anycasting." For more explanation of anycasting, see here "More anycasting of the F root server", "Anycasting the root name servers" and "Distributing the K-Root Service by Anycast Routing" [via icann.blog.us].

From [CNN.COM] article on Saturday Internet attack: "A fast-moving computer worm snarled business and government computers Saturday, slowing some corporate systems to the point of inaccessibility. Internet security experts said the worm does not appear to have done any serious damage." A quick technical analysis of the worm is available here. See NANOG archives for much discussion.

Further to my earlier note OFTEL asks investigation on mobile termination rates, following a study by the UK Competition Commission, OFTEL, the UK's regulator for the telecommunications industry, has decided that it will require four mobile operators to reduce termination charges for making calls to their mobile networks. The ITU Strategy and Policy Unit hosted a workshop on this topic back in September 2000.

The Korean Ministry of Information and Communication announced on January 20, 2003, that it will adopt a set of measure to tighten regulations on those who send unsolicted emails or SPAM.

In Korea, the country with the highest broadband penetration in the world, it is perhaps easier than elsewhere to become addicted to using the Internet. "Therefore the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) and the Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity and Promotion (KADO) establish the Center for Internet Addiction Prevention and Counselling (CIPC) in order to correct the Internet misuse and to help Internet addicts.

Follow-up to my earlier note on the recent "Conference on SPAM Filtering: January 17, 2003": webcasts of the sessions, proceedings and a spamconference ideas mailing list are available.

Guy Kewney's Mobile Campaign has a fascinating article on Locustworld's affordable wireless mesh network solution, Meshbox. LinuxDevices.com has a primer explaining the MeshBox - a Linux-powered wireless mesh repeater by Jon Anderson, its creator.  As Guy Kewney's article notes: "However, there are going to be some controversial areas in the Locustworld experiment. The cheekiest move was the setting up of an IP address numbering authority, WIANA, or The Wireless Internet Assigned Numbers Authority." Also see my earlier articles on wireless mesh/parasitic/symbiotic networks in Watch this airspace and parasitic networks and Seeding Mesh Networks.

A Slashdot article has a link to a review by Micah Alpern of future virtual keyboards.

The Internet Software Consortium has announced they've come to agreement with the Spain Internet Exchange (EspaNix) to anycast the F root server in Madrid.  For more info on anycasting on this site, see "Anycasting the root name servers" and "Distributing the K-Root Service by Anycast Routing". This follows on from their announcement in November 2002 to create F server mirrors in the Asia-Pacific region. Update: APNIC today (January 23, 2003) made a Call for Expressions of Interest for the support of APNIC Points Of Presence in the Asia Pacific region, including potentialhosting of instances of the F root server. APNIC has also provided a root server trial FAQ.

OAGI, an XML business language standards group, recently joined four International Standards Organizations in a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Electronic Business, which includes the IEC, ISO, ITU and UN/ECE [Boston.com].

• "The purpose of the MoU is to minimize the risk of divergent and competitive approaches to standardization, avoid duplication of efforts and confusion amongst users," said Houlin Zhao, Director of ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau. "Under the MoU's Management Group, for instance, ITU technical groups will be able to share their agendas with OASIS technical committees to promote convergence where appropriate and advance the interests of the marketplace at-large."

Last July 2002, the OECD updated its Guidelines for the Security of Information Systems and Networks. Last week they made available a related suggested Implementation Plan (PDF), which most significantly, makes specific suggestions on the exact role of government in fostering and promoting security.

Grid Computing Good for Business. Corporations are starting to salivate over grid computing's potential for massive storage and processing power. Its creators -- tech and science geeks -- look forward to a new era. ""Now we're starting to see major industrial players engage in grid computing. That's going to change the nature of what we do." [Wired News]

In a follow-up to my earlier piece, it's finally available: Lufthansa is now offering onboard wireless broadband service on scheduled flights. They've started with the popular Frankfurt - Washington D.C. (Dulles) run. Lufthansa's press release announcing the service is here.

ITU's annual World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Meeting opened today. The meeting will cover topics related to the definition, collection, processing, dissemination and use of telecommunication/ICT indicators (statistics). The programme and list of documents is available.

[Computerworld] Wi-Fi spectrum battle pits antiterrorism efforts against commercial growth: "The U.S. position paper, submitted to the ITU at its November meeting in preparation for the ITU's World Radio Conference (WRC) in June, which will make the spectrum decisions, endorses a global allocation for WLANs in the 5.150-5.350 band as long as radars are protected by a technique know as Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS), which shuts down WLAN transmissions when a radar signal is detected."

[New York Times] Who Owns the Internet? You and i Do: "Mr. Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, studies how people use online technology and how that affects their lives. He has begun a small crusade to de-capitalize Internet — and, by extension, to acknowledge a deep shift in the way that we think about the online world." "Mr. Jones was cool to the idea, until he looked at copies of Scientific American from the late 19th century, and noticed that words for new technologies, like Phonograph, were often uppercased."

Countries with high broadband penetration are seeing the development of specialized portals devoted to broadband service delivery (e.g. streaming TV, pay per view video). A good example is Hong Kong's now.com.hk.

News on US E-Government Initiatives in the New York Times: Move to Open Government Electronically.

The ITU-T has announced (Word) the approval of ITU-T Recommendation J.122 (Second Generation Transmission Systems for Interactive Cable Television Services – IP Cable Modems). From the prepublished Recommendation J.122: "As cable operators have widely deployed high-speed data services on cable television systems, the demand for upstream bandwidth has increased, particularly with the popularity of more symmetric data applications. The current Recommendation has been created for the purpose of increasing channel capacity and improving noise immunity. The intended service will allow transparent bidirectional transfer of Internet Protocol (IP) traffic, between the cable system headend and customer locations, over an all-coaxial or hybrid-fibre/coax (HFC) cable network." Cablelabs has issued an associated press release:

• "The new standard can be used as the foundation upon which IPCablecom IP-communication/telephony services can be offered. The standardization is remarkable due to the fact that work on the specification began less than 18 months ago. The rapid standardization is important to promoting worldwide adoption of this important technology."

CommsDesign also has a related piece.

[Wired]: Bye Telemarketing, Hi More Spam? "According to Enrique Salem, CEO of Brightmail, which filters 10 percent of Internet e-mail, eight percent of the mail the company filtered in September 2001 was spam. In November 2002, it was 40 percent."

From The Anatomy of the Grid (PDF):

• "The term "the Grid" was coined in the mid 1990s to denote a proposed distributed computing infrastructure for advanced science and engineering. Considerable progress has since been made on the construction of such an infrastructure, but the term "Grid" has also been conflated, at least in popular perception, to embrace everything from advanced networking to artificial intelligence."
• "The real and specific problem that underlies the Grid concept is coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations."

Also see The Globus Project and the Global Grid Forum.

ITU Media Advisory: ITU to hold Workshop on Member States' experiences with ccTLDs. More information and contributions to the meeting can be found here.

From News.com, Speedy Net video codec done, but late: "The technical design of a compression technology that promises to stream video over the Internet at DVD-worthy speeds has been completed, according to the international standards team developing it. But the widely anticipated standard, known as Recommendation H.264 of the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union (ITU), won't be ready for public consumption until March--three months behind schedule." This work is done in ITU-T Study Group 16, the ITU-T Lead Study Group on multimedia services, systems and terminals.