Internet Society Pulse

The Economic Benefits of Fiber Deployment New changes to US broadband assistance programs may unintentionally favor certain technologies, such as fixed wireless …

New analysis reveals that fiber deployment to the remaining 56 million unserved US households could generate at least $3.24 trillion in net present value (NPV) through increases in housing value, income, employment, and other societal benefits. pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/the-eco...

Why AI Requires a Resilient Internet

Country-level data on #AI use and Internet resilience is crucial for validating the current risk to development, writes Abhishek Vajjala and Anirudh Tagat pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/why-ai-...

Internet shutdowns are spreading in Africa, which is a concern for its burgeoning digital economy, which requires reliable Internet to continue its rapid growth, writes @abshwehdy.bsky.social pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/africas...

TL;DR CDN network infrastructure is typically well-optimized for offering network connections with little to no variations. Though when there is variation, it can result in non-trivial degradations.

A recent study by researchers at BITS Pilani, Goa & Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam sought to characterize the consistency of latencies of the paths between end users and 100 edge servers of 5 popular CDNs.
To do so, they used @ripencc.bsky.social Atlas anchors as vantage points. 🧵

CDNs have become critical for reducing latency by serving content from “edge” servers that are in “close proximity” to end users. This task has required CDNs to deploy hundreds of thousands of servers in diverse networks and geographic locations. 🧵

🧑‍🏫 Latency or round-trip-time (RTT) between two end hosts (for example, a user’s laptop or tablet & a web server) is a key determinant of user experience. Establishing a low-latency connection between any two communicating endpoints is, therefore, crucial for maximizing application performance. 🧵

On the Constancy of Latency at the Internet’s Edge New study characterizes the stability of latency between end users and content delivery network (CDN) edge servers, whi…

Today's Pulse Blog post is all about latency, specifically how constant latency is from Content Delivery Networks #CDNs edge servers. 🧵
pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/on-the-...

Lessons from the Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 Outage: A Resilience Perspective An hour-long outage of one of the most popular global Domain Name System (DNS) services highlighted the need for greate…

Internet outages happen all the time.
What we learn from them and change helps us reduce the impact when the next one occurs. @amreeshphokeer.bsky.social shares his resilience lessons from last week's @cloudflare.social #DNS outage.
pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/lessons...

DM us if you’re interested in hosting one of our future workshops or having us present on the #OFDS initiative to your group. 🔚

The Open Fibre Data Standard - Internet Society The Open Fibre Data Standard (OFDS) is an open data, open standards initiative supported by the Internet Society.

This was the first of several efforts @internetsociety.bsky.social are leading to advance awareness and adoption of the OFDS worldwide since taking over the secretariat role this year. 🧵 www.internetsociety.org/blog/2025/04...

Participants included representatives from
AFRALTI
Digital Economy
@gigaglobal.bsky.social
Guifi.net
@internetsociety.bsky.social
@opendataservices.coop
@unicef.org
🧵

OFDS: Switzerland Workshop Sets the Scene

Recently, we held an Open Fibre Data Standard workshop at @gigaglobal.bsky.social Connectivity Centre in Geneva to develop a framework for moving forward with #OFDS 🧵
pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/ofds-sw...

This approach means moving beyond the traditional policy focus on hardware and connectivity. Policymakers, educators, and community organizations must invest in digital literacy programs that cater to the diverse needs of communities.

The study by Harvard, Microsoft, and the University of Pennsylvania researchers showed that areas with higher household incomes and greater educational attainment consistently showed higher digital engagement.

The New Digital Divide New findings challenge the assumption that digital divides disappear once basic broadband infrastructure is widely avai…

The digital divide is typically understood as the gap between those with access to Internet infrastructure and those without. But new research challenges this assumption, specifically in the US 🧵 pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/the-new...

‼️ Amid protests, #Togo started blocking access to Facebook, Telegram, Signal, YouTube & DuckDuckGo last week.

OONI data shows that the blocks remain ongoing.

We document these blocks in our latest report: explorer.ooni.org/findings/167...

#ooni #censorship #opendata #keepiton

The recent events show Egypt's very poor ISP market competition and dependence on a dominant local upstream provider is affecting its overall Internet resilience. Read our analysis pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/egypt-i...

The Starlink effect is real!

Back to #DNSSEC, there remain 73 ccTLDs that have yet to enable it. You can check if your country's has, via the Pulse Country Reports pulse.internetsociety.org/reports

Tuvalu: Strikes deal with GoDaddy to manage .tv - ABC Pacific Tuvalu looks to have hit digital gold, signing a new deal for for the management of its extremely valuable .tv domain name. The country already gets about 1/12 of its national income from the domain a...

An extra bit of #ccTLD triva:
.tv, the ccTLD for Tuvalu, generates more than 7% of the country's GDP due largely to its association with the live streaming platform Twitch. www.abc.net.au/pacific/prog...

Country-code Top Level Domain #ccTLD registries look after the domains that signify the geographic location of websites, for example, .ga for Gabon and .ge for Georgia, both of which recently joined the 168 ccTLDs that have enabled #DNSSEC, protecting all the domains under their watch.

DNS Security Extensions #DNSSEC was developed to provide an additional level of security for the Domain Name System, using cryptographic techniques to validate the authenticity of #DNS information.
(Like many other components of the Internet, the DNS started out without any security features.)

Gabon, Georgia, and Papua New Guinea Country Code Domains Go Secure

DYK that 168 countries now have DNSSEC-enabled ccTLDs?
pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/gabon-g...

What's #DNSSEC, you say? 🧵

More Countries Join the Majority IPv6 Club

Congratulations to Brazil, Guatemala, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Sri Lanka, and Tuvalu(!) for joining 13 countries with over 50% #IPv6 capability.
Read Mat Ford's analysis. pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/more-co...

Measuring the OneWeb Satellite Network

OneWeb’s lack of Inter-Satellite Links impairs its seamless handover performance, study. pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/measuri...

Why the Internet Is the New Public Utility

In moments of crisis, people need more than just Internet access—they need resilient, rights-based digital infrastructure, writes Saadia Azim in her latest Pulse Blog post pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/why-the...

Where Is Market Competition Improving

Market competition is a critical component of a resilient Internet. Healthy competition among ISPs can increase consumer choice, reduce prices, & foster innovation, efficiency, & Internet quality.
So, which markets have seen positive changes recently?
pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/where-i...

People at the Heart of Developing Tonga’s Digital Resilience The Tongan Internet community is looking towards other countries to improve its Internet development and resilience in …

Capacity development is equally important as infrastructure to not only increase Internet resilience but also bridge the digital divide in countries like #Tonga, writes Seluvaia Kauvaka pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/people-...

Report Highlights Kazakhstan’s Role In Developing Internet Resilience in Central Asia

A new @internetsociety.bsky.social and CAPS Unlock report shows that Kazakhstan is taking steps to reduce dependencies and improve its and Central Asia’s Internet resilience, writes Callum Voge pulse.internetsociety.org/blog/report-...