Kurtis's Blog

A recent PCWorld article quotes a TeleGeography report that says that traffic growth on the Internet has slowed down. At two different conferences the past days I have had some various discussions regarding this. The conclusions seems mixed. I would tend to agree that we have seen stagnation since early 2008, but there is also signs that traffic growth is picking up again. What will be interesting to see is what the looming economic downturn will do for traffic. Personally I am not sure it will affect traffic levels at all. As opposed to the stock-market bubble in 2001, when the burst hurt infrastructure companies and build out, there was also a lot of cheap bandwidth available after rapid (over-) expansion. We are not there today, even if there are a lot of projects for international capacity underway. In addition, we today have a fairly advance content provider market, and the application usage is growing.

Today will mostly be spent in meetings. I am giving two presentations on IPv6. The first is on the current status of IPv6 deployment in Sweden and the second will on motives for deploying IPv6.

In preparation for the first I looked a bit for deployment data. It seems pretty depressing if you look at the number of glue records for .SE zones at

(Courtesy of IIS. Click the image to go to their page...)

The number of zones is pretty low....

I dug around in the RIPE data last night, and also noticed that there are only 57 allocations to Sweden. Of these

1 is /20
1 is /25
37 is /32
7 is /48 (IX prefixes)

12 prefixes are between /32 and /48. This seems to be mostly prefixes that are really /32s or deemed to be returned in order for a larger prefix.

This is actually not so bad - if it wasn't that there are 387 ASNs delegated to Sweden and 215 LIRs. But the most depressing realization was that we had 22 prefixes delegated in November 2003. So almost five years later we have managed to just over double from nothing to - well double nothing...

I am planning to make these graphs running every night and a web-site with the statistics. When I get the time...

My first IPv6 presentation of the day can be found here, and gives an overview of where we are in Sweden right now.

I actually asked for some more data that didn't make it to the slides. When I have all of it I will post a new (And longer) post here.

I was invited to speak to the optoSUNET days in Tammsvik about why you should care about deploying IPv6 (In Swedish).

Basically, if you believe some of the data - IANA will run out of the IPv4 pool in 2 years, a month and 7 days (But it was only 3 days yesterday!). While that is a numerical exercise that can be interesting, for all intents and purposes we have run out. NAT was a nice duct tape but it will only take us that far.

So late yesterday afternoon the swedish government announced amendments to the signal intelligence bill, so call FRA law. The new amendments proposes a lot stricter definitions of when signals intelligence can be gathered, it also limits the "customers" of the information to the military and what I assume to be translated to the prime minister's office. The new amendments also include the fact that targets have to be approved by a special court and a notification to Swedish citizens that erroneously or by mistake have been captured in the data gathering.

Now, we are starting to see the split in the opposition to the signals intelligence. From having been labeled as the same, the opposition now will have to start making their views clear. The largest opposition party, the Socialdemocrats, who had asked for a lot of the amendments, like the court are still criticizing the law. But it starts being somewhat silly. From having had concrete proposals they have now moved to critique of the process instead. But what makes me (unusually) upset is the that the critique comes from the former Socialdemocrat justice minister, Tomas Bodström, that in the EU was one of the main drivers and architects behind the so called Data retention directive. This directive, at least as proposed to be implemented as Swedish law, had a lot more far reaching privacy concerns at least for me. In fact the FRA law now has more far reaching privacy protection than the data retention law. In the FRA law data is only allowed to be kept for 12 months (Tomas Bodströms EU directive allows for up to 24 months). It's protected by a court, as opposed to the data retention system that is automated and requires an attorneys approval - with no supervision of how the data is uses. Again, as opposed to the FRA law where the Data inspection agency actually will review this. I think Tomas Bodström has shown some pretty horrible judgement here. But I guess that is just politics. Go figure.