ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) on Tuesday condemned the practice of redirecting Internet users to a third-party portal when they mistype, or enter a nonexistent URL. You'll recall that the practice gained international attention when Verisign implemented their heavily-loathed Sitefinder initiative in 2003. That effort pushed ad-laden portals instead of proper errors Internet wide, but Verisign was forced to shutter the idea after significant backlash and ICANN criticism.

ICANN published its opinions and findings in a draft memo, which discourages the practice of redirecting requests for nonexistent domains across all network levels, and suggests possibly even a ban of the practice, at least among gTLD owners. The Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) has long opposed such efforts, calling it a "destabilizing practice."Since Verisign's NXDOMAIN substitution effort, ISPs have widely been deploying redirection tools of their own and the tactic, dubbed DNS redirection, has grown to be an industry standard. While it's pushed by ISPs as something helpful, the concept's entire purpose is to create a revenue stream out of your sloppy typing.

Manassas, Virginia was the first US city to see a real, non-trial launch of broadband over powerline (BPL) technology. However, BPL has floundered the last few years because of its inherent potential for interference with amateur and emergency radio, its irrelevance in the face of next-generation speeds, and the unavoidable fact that many utilities simply didn't want to be broadband providers.

Yesterday we issued a report exploring how Verizon was again hinting at how they believed metered billing is inevitable. We also discussed how yet again, you had an ISP suggesting that a shift to metered billing was financially necessary (not true) and that the ISP desire to shift to metered billing was dictated by some kind of altruism (also not true). Apparently, this position upset Todd Spangler over at Multichannel News, who somewhere in between taking pot shots at "edgy bloggers" and "clueless" flat-rate pricing proponents arrives at his central thesis: that consumption-based billing is inevitable: story continues..

You might remember Ohio-based Buckeye Cablesystems for when they came down hard on the heads of cable modem upcappers back in 2002, going so far as to bring in the FBI to investigate users who were trying to squeeze extra bandwidth out of the cable system. It's now 2009, and Buckeye has found a much better solution for bandwidth-hungry customers -- they've started a fiber to the home trial in Toledo, but they're installing it without having to dig up any existing infrastructure thanks to a new technology by Kabel-X.

Over the years we've seen no limit of specialized hardware, software or other gadgetry promising to defeat the laws of physics and speed up your Internet connection above and beyond its basic capabilities. From the "Juice Boosted" scam to Earthlink's latest absurd acceleration ploy, by and large these are all snake oil.

Earlier this week, blogger and 25-year communications industry vet Brough Turner started a bit of a ruckus with a blog post suggesting that AT&T's wireless broadband network problems were partially AT&T's fault, and not just attributable to the massive influx of data-hungry iPhone users. Though he admittedly didn't have access to the AT&T network guts or first hand experience running a HSDPA GSM network, Turner speculated that AT&T had misconfigured their network, specifically in terms of latency and RNC buffers: story continues..

A new report by Sandvine Corporation confirms what other reports this month from Cisco and Arbor Networks also suggested: P2P's share of overall capacity is down, and video use of all kinds is exploding. The study tracked traffic from 20 carriers and 24 million subscribers, mirroring much of what Cisco recently reported. Namely, that Internet "prime time" is later than TV prime time, and live video use is surging. Sandvine says that 26.6 percent of total traffic is "real-time entertainment traffic" (video, gaming, music), while P2P use dropped from 32% to 20%. As we noted the other day this doesn't mean P2P is "dying."

A little more than a year ago, Comcast got their wrist slapped by the FCC for throttling upstream P2P traffic (and lying about it to the press and consumers), though the "sanction" contained no substantive punishment or fine. Still, Comcast has been battling the ruling ever since, arguing that the FCC's neutrality principles (pdf) don't give the FCC the authority to investigate the issue, much less sanction the company.

While some cable operators are now running fiber to the home service, they're usually only doing it in higher-end developments where they get an easy return on their investment. One such carrier is Metrocast (see our user reviews) who've decided to deploy Motorola's fiber/coax hybrid RF over Glass (RFoG) technology -- a solution that lets cable operators use their traditional coax hardware over fiber. According to a Motorola press release, Metrocast will be deploying the technology "in select Virginia properties in specific rebuild areas." According to the Metrocast website, unless you live in one of these higher scale developments, the fastest broadband service they currently offer is 10 Mbps downstream.

Proponents of White Space broadband hope to use the unlicensed and partially vacated spectrum created by the shift to digital television to create a new broadband delivery systemn (and sell hardware using this technology). A coalition of major companies, including Google, Microsoft and Dell recently conquered the objections of Dolly Parton and the broadcasting industry to get FCC approval, and are now moving forward with the technology's first tests. The first tests in the United States of the technology will take place in Claudeville, Virginia, where local schools are getting an added perk:In this instance, the technology is providing backhaul access between the Internet and the local area's Wi-Fi network. Ideally, white space broadband would be used to provide rural last mile access at lower prices.

In the past few weeks, two different Internet traffic studies from Cisco and Arbor networks have indicated that P2P's overall Internet capacity consumption is down. Or more accurately, that P2P's slice of the Internet capacity pie is starting to be dwarved by quickly growing video consumption. Cisco's study (which we covered yesterday) pretty clearly indicates this relativity, but Arbor's indicated that P2P traffic had "declined dramatically, leading to reports that P2P was "dying." Of course GigaOM (via Techdirt) notes this relativity, but there's something else in the piece that seems more pertinent:In other words, Arbor indicates that as ISPs crack down harder on P2P use, more P2P users are using encryption and as such can't be tracked. That would seem to suggest the numbers may not only be relative -- they may be completely wrong.

One of the talking points repeated over and over and over by carriers who oppose network neutrality is that network neutrality rules will "stifle investment" in the sector. Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg said as much yesterday, and AT&T urged their employees (via private e-mail accounts) to bombard the FCC with the talking point earlier this week.

According to a new survey from Cisco studying global broadband use, the average broadband connection generates approximately 11.4 gigabytes of Internet traffic per month. The survey included anonymous, aggregated network usage data provided by a group of more than 20 global ISPs.

The latest data suggests that U.S. ISPs are finally ramping up their requests for IPv6 addresses, suggesting that we're finally making headway toward IPv6 migration. In the first nine months of 2009, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) received 300 requests from carriers for blocks of IPv6 address space, compared to 250 requests received in all of 2008 and 2007. "We give each ISP enough IPv6 addresses to support 4 billion networks, and each network can contain trillions and trillions of hosts," says ARIN CEO John Curran, who specifically names Comcast and Verizon Wireless as two carriers who've sped up adoption significantly.

Last year Comcast faced an FCC investigation and endless media scrutiny for their decision to use packet forgery to throttle upstream P2P for all users. Cox dodged much of that media attention despite the fact they were busy doing roughly the same thing. That's in part because nobody noticed what Cox was doing (well, almost anybody). But it's also because unlike Comcast, Cox didn't lie about what they were up to when asked about it.

Earlier this month we discussed how "research firm" Nemertes Research had returned once again with their Chicken-Little prognostications that the Internet would soon start facing an Exaflood, or Internet capacity collapse. As we argued then, the entire Exaflood idea is a myth cooked up by carriers to help scare lawmakers and the public into believing that bandwidth is a dangerously limited and precious resource, and if you don't give carriers what they want (the right to metered billing, fewer consumer protection laws, no neutrality laws, removed price controls) the Internet will explode and you'll all be sorry.

Last night a routine maintenance of the Swedish top-level .se domain went seriously awry, creating an error that made DNS lookups for all .se domain names start failing. The net result was that Internet access in Sweden effectively ground to a halt for more than an hour and a half. The entire problem began when an incorrectly configured script forget to add the needed terminating "." to the DNS records in the .se zone. Given the whole DNS lookup chain broke down from the DNS mistake, there's still a number of users offline.

A new study by Arbor Networks indicates that the majority of Internet traffic now goes through direct peers and does not run over tier one incumbent provider networks. That's not particularly surprising, given the number of companies like Google that are building their own fiber networks. According to the firm, about thirty so-called "hypergiants"(Google, Facebook, Microsoft) manage about 30% of all Internet traffic. The study, which tracked traffic over 3,000 peering routers on 110 different networks, also notes that P2P traffic has "declined dramatically."

Comcast has stopped by our forums to note that the carrier has partnered with the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) to, for the first time, deploy a DNS Root Server on the Comcast network. "This benefits our customers by supplying faster resolution to the DNS Root, but also benefits the Internet community generally, by adding redundancy to the DNS F-Root servers that ISC manages and has deployed all around the world," says a Comcast representative in our forums. Comcast's been beefing up their DNS servers, services and tools lately, in part because they want to improve service quality, but also because they probably want to bring some of the DNS redirection ad money lost to Open DNS back in house.

In an apparent bid to lure back those customers who've made the switch to OpenDNS (along with those users' DNS redirection ad dollars), Comcast this month announced in our forums that they've launched a new portal for tracking DNS server uptime. "The new DNS cache query tool will allow customers to run queries against not only our National Domain Helper cache servers but also the No Redirect caching servers as well," says a Comcast employee.