Hedge 298: The 6G Hype Begins

6 March 2026


 
It’s 2026, and it’s time for a new cellular telephone hype cycle: 6G! Doug Dawson from CCG joins Russ and Tom to talk about why 5G is really 4.5G, the proposed changes for 6G, and the challenges higher frequency ranges and bandwidths face in the real world.
 
It’s definitely worth following Doug’s daily post about the telecom and wireless worlds over at Pots and Pans.

Hedge 297: MPLS

27 February 2026


 
Has MPLS really “died” because of SD-WAN services? Scott Robohon joins Tom and Russ to talk about the past and future of MPLS.

Worth Reading 022626

26 February 2026


 


The current debate on the existence of an “AI bubble” centers on a single question: is the current high level of investment into AI data centers a massive misallocation of capital or the key to future economic growth?

 


The more I have thought about it, the more convinced I am that the very technological advancements that make my life easier — the most recent being artificial intelligence — actually contribute to a busier, more overwhelming life.

 


Using hot water to cool supercomputers? Nvidia and others are doing it. It’s liquid cooling minus the water chillers.

 


New research shows that these claims aren’t true in all cases, particularly when account recovery is in place or password managers are set to share vaults or organize users into groups.

 


Every employer knows to conduct background checks. However, conducting background checks on IT professionals requires an extra layer of verification, given the privileged access they typically have to IT systems and tools.

Hedge 296: AS-SETs

20 February 2026


 
AS-SETs (not that kind) were originally designed to simplify filtering at eBGP peering points–but they seem to have gone horribly wrong. Job Snijders and Doug Madory join Tom and Russ to discuss the history, use, problems, and (hopeful) demise of AS-SETs.

Worth Reading 022026

20 February 2026


 


For decades, many believed SDCs were rare, almost mythical events. However, major hyperscale operators including Meta, Google and Alibaba have disclosed that roughly one in 1,000 CPUs in their fleets can produce silent corruptions under certain conditions.

 


The fundamental rules of creativity and ownership, established in law since the time of the printing press, are now collapsing under the weight of Generative AI.

 


As you and your spouse head off for a two-week Maui vacation, do you hand your 17-year-old boy a bottle of smooth whiskey and the keys to your spare Ferrari, bidding him “have fun while we’re gone”?

 


When Meta Platforms does a big AI system deal with Nvidia, that usually means that some other open hardware plan that the company had can’t meet an urgent need for compute.

 


This paper introduces Whisper Leak, a side-channel attack that infers user prompt topics from encrypted LLM traffic by analyzing packet size and timing patterns in streaming responses. Despite TLS encryption protecting content, these metadata patterns leak sufficient information to enable topic classification.

 

Worth Reading 021726

17 February 2026


If I learned one thing at NANOG 96, it’s how to build an up-to-date state of the art AI data centre! As I now understand it, the process is quite simple.

 


New AI models usually create excitement among the true believers and this year hasn’t been an exception. OpenAI and Anthropic released GPT-5.3 Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 respectively on the same day, February 5. T

 


When my phone stopped working last month during the latest calamitous network outage to hit the US, I assumed it was that pesky Amazon cloud POP in North Virginia playing up again. After all, it was AWS’s VA data centre that triggered three (3) of the last big network failures in North America.

 


Starlink can sometimes shift data more quickly than is possible on terrestrial networks, and improves connectivity in remote areas. But the space broadband service also presents new technical and regulatory challenges, according to speakers who took to the stage on Tuesday at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) in Jakarta, Indonesia.

 


The Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure is infamous for facilitating reflective amplification attacks. Countermeasures such as server shielding, access control, rate limiting, and protocol restrictions have been implemented to improve the situation. Still, DNS-based reflective amplification attacks remain.

 


Recent claims that IXPs “aren’t showing significant growth”, that more interconnection is happening outside exchanges, and that peering can be more expensive than transit challenge long-standing assumptions about the role of IXPs. But do these claims hold up? A new paper from NAMEX explores the data.

 

Hedge 295: Specialization

13 February 2026


 
Should network engineers focus on specializing in one technology, vendor, or solution, or should they think about building a diverse skill set? Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ discuss the advantages of each, how these options relate to the future of network engineering, and skill diversification.

Worth Reading 021326

13 February 2026

https://blog.apnic.net/2026/02/06/from-roots-to-reach-network-resilience-in-natural-disasters/
When communication networks break down, people cannot report their condition, responders lose situational awareness, and entire communities risk slipping beyond the reach of coordinated assistance. Network failure does not merely accompany disaster — it reshapes the human consequences.

https://cornwallalliance.org/nuclear-is-the-most-reliable-path-to-affordable-electricity/
Amid this “worldwide” economic backdrop, nuclear energy presents an affordable alternative to unreliable electricity sources like wind and solar. Economically, it makes no sense to abandon working production methods until new ones can replace the existing and future demand. World citizens are facing this reality in higher electricity prices.

https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2026-02/ipasn.html
There have been a number of services that allow a lookup of an IP address or Autonomous System Number (ASN) and return information about that IP number resource. The Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) each operate a database that records (among other data items) the number resource and the details of the entity that is described in the relevant number registration record.

https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2026/02/09/the-challenge-of-adding-fiber-to-poles/
On February 5, the FCC issued a Memorandum and Order related to a pole attachment dispute between Comcast and Appalachian Power Company (APCO).

https://blog.apnic.net/2026/02/10/the-current-state-of-rdap/
While whois remains in widespread use, the RDAP ecosystem is rapidly maturing. Indeed, 2025 saw significant adoption and an accelerated expansion of RDAP services across the industry.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/10/dijkstras_algorithm_impact_on_networks/
The new algorithm is no minor tweak to Dijkstra’s but a significantly different approach. Its headline claim is that, whereas Dijkstra requires a sorting operation, and thus is only able to perform as well as the best sorting algorithm, this new approach “breaks the sorting barrier”. That is, it avoids the need for sorting and is able to deliver better bounds on performance than Dijkstra.

Worth Reading 021226

12 February 2026


People often invest in companies not because they think the companies will succeed, but because they think others will invest. Thus, they try to invest before the others do, hoping there will be a greater fool who will pay more than they did.


More than half of CEOs report seeing neither increased revenue nor decreased costs from AI, despite massive investments in the technology, according to a PwC survey of 4,454 business leaders.


DNSSEC promised to secure DNS with cryptographic proof, yet messy rollouts, outages, and hype backlash ruined its reputation.


If you start the query process with an IP address, or an AS Number then you can find details about the current holder of that number resource, including its organisation name. But the reverse query is far more challenging in this database query framework.


Earlier this month, OpenAI introduced a new health focused space within ChatGPT, pitching it as a safer way for users to ask questions about sensitive topics like medical data, illnesses, and fitness.


Let’s start with hosting, and the key point here is that resource pools to host AI agents are not the answer. There are multiple reasons for this, but the main one is that the hosting location for AI agents has to balance being close to the databases used, the applications the agent is part of, and the users.

Hedge 294: Resource Constrained Environments

5 February 2026


 
The future of network design and architecture is–based on current trends–is going to be working with and around resource constraints. How would resource constraints impact the way we design and manage networks? Mike Bushong joins Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to ponder network engineering in a resource constrained world.