The NY Times has a great op-ed on "Net Neutrality" this week, which got me thinking… Is the expectation of total and complete internet neutrality realistic and do we even understand what that might entail?
First, let's look at what net neutrality might actually be defined as. Strangely, when discussing net neutrality, often examples of net non-neutrality are cited. These are typically cases where Internet Service Providers (ISP's) have blocked various applications or throttled the heavy bandwidth consumption from heavy users. From my point of view, net neutrality is not just an ISP issue, concerning what they will allow or not allow, but a Carrier Ethernet issue as well. A packet typically travels across dozens of networks owned by different companies from source to destination. Any one of these networks could decide to impede, limit, or throttle the packet depending upon a wide range of attributes, including where it originated from, the type of packet, the host application, etc. On one hand, if every carrier in the world decided to start doing as it pleased with any packets traversing its network, the internet would cease to function as we know it today. On the other hand, faced with a deluge of packets, carriers are being forced to at least set some guidelines, limits, and rules.Read more
On a recent train journey to London, I found myself shoe-horned into a fully booked quiet coach. When I pulled out my usual travelling companions – iPhone and Blackberry – I thought I would be greeted by looks of disdain or at the very least some ssshhhing. However, this wasn’t the case and when I looked around I began to see why.
In recent weeks, the development of the United States’ broadband infrastructure has taken a few sharp body blows. First was the Google/Verizon 
While recent blog posts on low-latency networks were focused on speeds and feeds of data transport between two given locations the underlying physics were always considered as a constant that cannot be changed. It is widely accepted that fiber optic transport is the fastest and most efficient way to transfer information in networks and the speed of light seems to be the natural barrier here. To break this natural barrier, things like WARP drives or usage of wormholes could be the next alternative but unfortunately research has not reached a status yet that would make such things seem realistic (see 
In 2008 and 2009, green networking was a hot topic in the storage and enterprise space. It was impossible to attend an exhibition or conference without seeing a raft of roundtables, presentations and general hype about the topic. There were even some dedicated green networking shows. Although I have to confess that the only thing memorable about these events was the non-green nature of my carbon footprint to attend.
On a recent trip from Munich to Meiningen, I set myself a challenge of counting the number of local exchanges and street cabinets that came into view. In my defense, my iPod was flat and there was little to listen to on the radio. Needless to say, this task proved a little more difficult than I expected. In fact, I lost count somewhere around 100.
The explosion of data being generated and transported across the world’s networks is a topic that often consumes a great deal of time in the storage and enterprise community. I often find myself engaged in discussions on data transport using terms such as gigabytes,