Intelligence
Latest Articles
Latest intelligence on infrastructure operators, policy decisions, market moves, and digital power shifts.
IETF
Al Morton and the Capacity Test That Did Not Become a Service Promise
A speed measurement can be valuable evidence about a particular method, path and time. It becomes unreliable when its bounded result is promoted into a promise about every future session, an access plan, an application or a whole network.
Global Institutional
Batfish and the promise of checking a network before change
Batfish turns multi-vendor configurations into a common routing and forwarding model so operators can test reachability, policy and selected failures before production changes. Its value still depends on snapshot completeness, parser coverage, explicit intent and post-deployment…
IETF
Muhammad Shahzad and the Device Record That Did Not Revoke Access
Deleting a device record can be an important operational signal. It is not, by its own force, a contemporaneous proof that a network enforcement point withdrew access, that the device stopped attempting connection, or that a later session was denied.
IETF
Cédric Fournet and the Receipt That Did Not Make a Log Complete
A signed receipt can answer a sharp question about an entry and a particular tree state. It cannot, merely by looking formal, answer the larger question operators often want to ask: whether every event that mattered reached a complete, trusted and still-current log.
History
The WAN Session Was Up. The End Stations Still Had Two Links: RFC 1434
In an early-1990s network, a terminal could believe it was talking to a distant peer while every acknowledgement it saw came from a router in the same room. RFC 1434 made that split deliberate: keep fragile local link timing local, build another circuit between switches, and…
IETF
Christian Amsüss and the DoC Security Context That Did Not Protect the Upstream Resolver
A protected DNS-over-CoAP exchange can be an important fact without becoming a story about the whole resolver path. RFC 9953, collectively authored by Christian Amsüss, says that DoC can provide confidentiality and integrity between parties sharing a DTLS, TLS or OSCORE context.…
Global Institutional
Batfish and the promise of testing a network before it changes
Batfish turns multi-vendor configurations into a model of routing and forwarding so operators can ask whether reachability, policy and failure behaviour survive a proposed change before touching production. Its answers can be exhaustive inside the model, but their operational…
Leaders
Aaron Moreck and the Network-Service Decisions Behind NaaS and SD-WAN
Aaron Moreck’s public record sits at the operating edge of a regional technology company: network services, customer connectivity, managed firewalls and SD-WAN. The evidence supports a profile of a technical decision surface, not a claim that one director owns every customer…
History
The Codes Aligned. The Circuit Still Needed Permission: RFC 1394
A two-letter domain, a telex answerback and a telephone prefix could all point toward the same country and still leave a message nowhere to go. RFC 1394 made those correspondences useful by placing them in one table. It also marked the table's limits: values could be wrong…
Global Cloud Services Trends
Snowflake's AI Budgets Follow Entry Points, Not Just Agents
A budget attached to a Cortex Agent does not necessarily follow every request that reaches it. Snowflake's treatment of CoWork-originated activity exposes a wider question for enterprise AI: where spending is counted, whose access can be stopped, and how long the stop takes to…
Creators
Albert Greenberg and the network as a distributed computer
Across AT&T, Microsoft Azure and Uber, Albert Greenberg repeatedly addressed the same problem: how to make a large network behave as a coherent system while topology, traffic, control software, hardware and failures change at different speeds. His influence is clearest in control…
IETF
Paul Wouters and the IKEv2 Requirement That Was Not a Negotiation Receipt
“MUST implement” can sound like a deployment report. RFC 8247, co-authored by Paul Wouters, uses it for a narrower purpose: ensuring that IKEv2 implementations have a shared algorithmic baseline. It does not say which transform two peers offered, which one they selected under…
IETF
Bernie Volz and the DHCPv6 Trigger That Did Not Yet Configure a Client
A server log can make the word “Reconfigure” look final: the server issued the message, so a client must now have new settings. RFC 9915, co-authored by Bernie Volz, is more exact. Reconfigure is a carefully authenticated trigger for a later exchange. It is not, by itself, a…
History
The Route Named a Next Hop. The Link Still Had to Agree: RFC 1433
Two machines could occupy the same data-network service and still be unable to exchange a frame. RFC 1433 began from that uncomfortable fact: routing could identify a shorter next hop, while address resolution and link filters retained the power to make the route usable—or turn…
IETF
CATS OAM Can Verify a Steering Policy. It Cannot Choose a Remedy.
The active CATS OAM draft is trying to close a real visibility gap. A service instance can remain reachable at the network layer while the application behind it is slow, exhausted or unavailable. A system that steers traffic only by network reachability may therefore send clients…
Creators
Albert Greenberg and the network as a distributed computer
Across AT&T, Microsoft Azure and Uber, Albert Greenberg has worked on a recurring problem: how to make a large network behave like one coherent system when topology, traffic, control software, hardware and failure all change at different speeds. His influence is best understood…
Leaders
Amit Thapa Chhetri and the Long Build Behind Nepal's Cable Internet
Subisu's origin was not a clean founder myth. The public record instead shows a team testing an idea against a regulatory system that was not yet ready for it, then carrying the operating work forward until the venture became an institution. Amit Thapa Chhetri's role is useful…
IETF
Wassim Haddad and the Prefix That Did Not Yet Authorize Forwarding
A mobile router can have a home-agent registration before it knows which mobile-network prefix it may use. RFC 6276, co-authored by Wassim Haddad, makes the next boundary explicit: only a valid DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation lease allows that prefix into the home agent's binding cache…
Story
Inside AFRINIC’s Reverse-DNS Cleanup
The registry’s public data distinguish delegation records, domain entities and resource holders. They also distinguish an error inventory from removal events. Those differences explain why a falling count can reflect worthwhile maintenance without measuring the restoration of…
IETF
IETF's Survey Can Diagnose a Governance Problem. It Cannot Ratify a Repair.
The IETF Community Survey 2025 gives the organisation a more useful picture of itself than a slogan ever could: a large but imperfect sampling frame, a modest voluntary response, a clear account of what was counted, and a set of concerns that should not be wished away. That is…