Tag Archive for India

| August 4, 2018
Comments Off on Happy Birthday to IPv6

Happy Birthday to IPv6

Happy Birthday to IPv6You are forgiven if you missed IPv6’s birthday (I did). The next-generation network addressing scheme turned 6 years old back in June. June 06, 2012, was World IPv6 Launch Day when everybody was supposed to permanently enable IPv6 on their networks. The results – not so good. There are global highlights but 3/4’s of internet users still regularly connect to the Intertubes over legacy IPv4.

The Internet Society rightly points out that enterprise operations tend to be the “elephant in the room” when it comes to IPv6 deployment. If only 26% of networks advertise IPv6 autonomous system prefixes, 74% do not. Most of the 3/4ths not using IPv6 are likely to be enterprise networks.

Enterprises have traditionally been reluctant to embrace IPv6 — there has been no real need to implement it, with many seeing it as an additional cost and risk with no direct use for their daily business.  Cost can include monetary assets, but also people and time

IPv6Migrating to IPv6 will be hard. The migration will involve all departments of the organization and every piece of equipment connected to the network. Then consider that the migration will be made over time and that everyone needs to be on the same page working together for the best outcome and smoothest transition.

Legacy systems can be defined basically as older systems. They likely are missing some common functionality from current technology, but still exist because they perform a key or important function for the organization just fine, thus there is no reason to replace it. However, this attitude is starting to change.

Microsoft logoLarger and more tech-savvy enterprises are forging innovative paths forward. CircleID points out Microsoft (MSFT), which made one of the first publicly announced purchases of IPv4 address space, reportedly purchasing 666,000 addresses at $11.25 per address in 2011. In a recent blog, Microsoft described the steps is taking to turn off IPv4 and become an IPv6-only company. Their description of their heavily translated IPv4 network includes phrases like “potentially fragile”, and “operationally challenging”, and about dual-stack operations, “complex”.

Outside of the enterprise space, there’s still the rest of the Internet that needs to make the migration. According to the stats in the article, the top carriers in the U.S. still carry less than half of the IPv6 traffic that the Indian ISP Reliance Jio carries. The Internet Society takes the happy view that the excuse that “no one is doing IPv6” is gone. For many people and networks, IPv6 is the new normal and is the future of Internet connectivity.

Some of the highlights for IPv6 are:

  • 237 million people in India connect over IPv6.
  • Mobile operators are adopting IPv6, some have over 80 or 90% of their devices connecting over IPv6.
  • 28% of the Alexa Top 1000 websites are IPv6-enabled.

ISOC - State of IPv6 Deployment 2018

 

National mobile networks are driving the global adoption of IPv6. Some mobile networks are taking the step to run IPv6-only to simplify network operations and cut costs. Japan and India are leaders in IPv6 adoption.

Reliance JIOThe Indian wireless carrier Reliance Jio has an 87% IPv6 rate.

In Japan, the top three wireless carriers are:

U.S. wireless carriers are deploying IPv6 also:

Many home and business users get Internet connectivity from broadband ISPs. Many broadband ISPs have deployed IPv6 on their networks. They send the majority of their traffic over IPv6 to major content providers. For example, Comcast (CMCSA), the largest broadband ISP in the U.S. is actively deploying IPv6. Per the World IPv6 Launch website, Comcast has an IPv6 deployment measurement of over 66%. Globally broadband ISPs are also deploying IPv6.

The following table from the Internet Society lists the top IPv6 carriers based on the number of users.

RankISPCountryIPv6 Users (estimated)
1Reliance JioIndia237,600,764
2ComcastUnited States36,114,435
3AT&TUnited States22,305,974
4Vodafone IndiaIndia18,368,165
5Verizon WirelessUnited States15,422,684
6Idea CellularIndia14,681,694
7Deutsche Telekom AGGermany14,261,836
8T-Mobile USAUnited States14,057,105
9KDDI CorporationJapan11.871,952
10Sky BroadbandGreat Britian11,829,610
11ClaroBrazil10,235,805
12SoftbankJapan8,613,145
13OrangeFrance7,924,119
14AT&T WirelessUnited States7,694,881
15Cox CommunicationsUnited States6,316,462
16Kabel DeutschlandGermany5,835,590
17SK TelecomKorea5,764,073
18NTT CommunicationsJapan5,596,206

 

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| May 5, 2017
Comments Off on Over Half the World Connected to the Internet

Over Half the World Connected to the Internet

Over Half the World Connected to the InternetNew statistics show that over half of the world’s population is now using the Internet. The 2017 Q2 Global Digital Snapshot Report on social media and digital trends released by Hootsuite, a social media management platform, and We Are Social, a social media agency, found that more than 3.8 billion people around the world now use the internet. This means that global internet penetration is 51%. The report’s author flips the number and points out that people who don’t use the Internet are now in the minority.

How are these people getting online? The report says that the total number of unique mobile users now stands at 4.96 billion. The use of a mobile phone is now ‘normal’ around the world. Almost 66% of the entire global population regularly uses a mobile phone. More and more of these users now own a smartphone too, and the latest data suggest that more than half of the world’s population now uses one of these powerful devices.

2017 Global Digital Snapshot

2017 Global Digital Snapshot Report by Hootsuite

The rapid spread of smartphones has led to significant growth in the number of mobile internet users. The number of people around the world accessing the internet via mobile reached almost 3.4 billion during early April 2017 according to the author.

Additionally, 93% of all internet users now go online via mobile devices (phones or tablets), and with the majority of new internet users now ‘phone first’, mobile’s share is likely to increase even more.

With all of this increased access, We are Social, writes that global social media users total to more than 2.9 billion users. This means that social media users are still increasing at a rate of more than 1 million per day – that’s 14 new users every second.

2017 Internet use

2017 Global Digital Snapshot Report by Hootsuite

The article observes that mobile social media continues to see the fastest growth across all our key data points. In the past 3 months, mobile social media users grew by more than 1.6 million new users every day. The total number of people around the world accessing social media via mobile devices now stands at just under 2.7 billion, representing global penetration of 36%.

Where do all of these mobile social media users go? Of course, they go to Facebook (FB). The research says that Facebook dominates the social media world. The latest data suggests that the world’s favorite social platform adds more than a million new users every day.

Facebook usage 2017

2017 Global Digital Snapshot Report by Hootsuite

Asia is the center of Facebook’s growth. Much of that growth came from India. With almost 250,000 new users in the country every day, the author speculates there’s a good chance that India will overtake the US to become Facebook’s most active market by July 2017.  Bangkok is Facebook’s most active city, with roughly 30 million people in Thailand’s capital using the platform.

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It should be obvious to any marketer that firms need to remake their customer engagement plans and implement real-time interaction with their customers. Simon Kemp, We Are Social said.

“Half of the world’s population is now online, which is a testament to the speed with which digital connectivity is helping to improve people’s lives … Given this latest data, it’s probably time for us to stop referring to social as new media, and integrate it more seamlessly into our day-to-day activities.”

I think Mr. Kemp is too optimistic when he says that “digital connectivity is helping to improve people’s lives.” Followers of the Bach Seat know that too much social media is bad for you.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| February 1, 2009
Comments Off on Fannie Mae – What Ails America

Fannie Mae – What Ails America

Fannie Mae - What Ails AmericaComputerWorld reports that an Indian national Rajendrasinh Babubhai Makwana, in an outsourced contract job as a Unix engineer is accused of planting malicious code on his employer’s network. Makwana was employed by the Federal National Mortgage Association, better known as Fannie Mae. He has been accused of planting malicious code on the corporation’s network that was to “destroy and alter” all the data on the company’s servers on 01-31-09, court documents show.

H-1B VisaMakwana, 35, was indicted on 01-27-2009 by a federal court on a single charge of computer intrusion, according to documents released yesterday. Reports are unclear about the attacker’s employer or his employment status. According to the AP, Makwana has lived in the United States since at least 2001.

According to the complaint sworn by FBI Special Agent Jessica Nye, Makwana was let go from his outsourced contract position at Fannie Mae’s Urbana, Md., datacenter on Oct. 24, 2008. He was fired after he had “erroneously created a computer script that changed the settings on the Unix servers without the proper authority of his supervisor,” Makwana had created that settings-changing script on Oct. 10 or Oct. 11, as much as two weeks before he was fired, Nye said.

Fannie Mae data centerWithin 90 minutes of being told he was terminated on Oct. 24, and several hours before his access to the Fannie Mae network was disabled later that evening, Makwana embedded a malicious script in a legitimate script that ran on Fannie Mae’s network every morning, Nye said in her affidavit.

The logic bomb would have “caused millions of dollars in damage and reduced if not shutdown [sic] operations at [Fannie Mae] for at least one week” if it had not been found before Saturday’s trigger date, the complaint said. “this script would power off all servers, disabling the ability to remotely turn on a server,” said the government’s complaint. “Subsequently, the only way to turn the servers back on was physically getting to a data center.”

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I agree with Dvorak’s piece on MarketWatch which asks the rhetorical question, why was Makwana working at Fannie Mae in the first place?  Are you telling me no American citizen could have done his job? 

It has long been believed that in most cases H-1B visas in technology have been exploited by companies such as Fannie Mae only because programmers coming from India work cheaper. Over the years, companies like Fannie Mae have been begging for more and more H-1B visas to outsource more jobs.. That means more people working cheaper than the going rate. You get what you pay for.

This episode also is further evidence that Fannie Mae is still a poorly run company. Is it really so hard to turn off someone’s network access when you take their ID card?. A good place to start is that when a person is meeting with their boss and HR, to be terminated, their access to all systems is to be suspended. There is no reason to allow access to remote systems. In this case, based on the papers filed, Just more of my tax dollars at waste work.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| July 9, 2008
Comments Off on Only 3% of Mobile Phones Recycled

Only 3% of Mobile Phones Recycled

Only 3% of Mobile Phones RecycledA survey released by Finland based mobile phone maker Nokia has that one of the main reasons why so few people recycle their mobile phones. Most people simply don’t know that it is possible to recycle mobile phones. Even if they were aware that a mobile could be recycled, did not know how to go about doing this.

  • Two thirds said they did not know how to recycle an unwanted mobile device
  • A majority (71%) were unaware of where to recycle an unwanted mobile device.
  • Globally, half of those surveyed didn’t know phones could be recycled, with awareness lowest in India at 17% and Indonesia at 29%, and highest in the UK at 80% and 66% in Finland and Sweden.

Nokia also found some other interesting factoids about our mobile phones recycling habits.

  • On average consumers have owned around five phones.
  • Only 3% of people recycle their mobile phones.
  • Three out of every four people indicated that they don’t even think about recycling their devices
  • Nearly half of the respondents were unaware that it is even possible to recycle their mobile phones.
  • The majority of retired phones, 44%, are kept at homes never used again.
  • One quarter of users are passing on their old phones to friends or family
  • Sixteen percent of people are selling their used devices particularly in emerging markets.
  • Remarkably only 4%, of retired mobile devices are being thrown into landfill.

Markus Terho, Director of Environmental Affairs, Markets, at Nokia said, “If each of the three billion people globally owning mobiles brought back just one unused device we could save 240,000 tons of raw materials and reduce greenhouse gases to the same effect as taking 4 million cars off the road.”

Up to 80% of any Nokia device is recyclable and precious materials within it can be reused to help make new products. Mr. Terho said, “Using the best recycling technology nothing is wasted. Between 65 – 80 per cent of a Nokia device can be recycled. Plastics that can’t be recycled are burnt to provide energy for the recycling process, and other materials are ground up into chips and used as construction materials or for building roads. In this way nothing has to go to landfill.”

Nokia has collection points for unwanted mobile devices in 85 countries around the world, the largest voluntary scheme in the mobile industry. People can drop off their old devices at Nokia stores and almost 5,000 Nokia Care Centers. To find their nearest take back point people can visit ecoATM.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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