Last month, we held our first Pulse Internet Measurement Forum (PIMF) at APRICOT 2025 in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia.
Over the course of the day, around 90 people heard from 11 presenters who shared their Internet resilience research and experience. Below is a snapshot of themes discussed on the day and our plans for future events.
Mapping Cables Wet and Dry
Subsea and terrestrial fiber optic cables form the backbone of the global Internet. Without this infrastructure, we wouldn’t be able to communicate with our neighboring cities and countries, let alone countries on the other side of the world, which many rely on for popular and critical web services.
To achieve a resilient Internet, it is paramount that these cables are secure and that proper redundancy is in place ‘when’ something happens to them.
Mark Tinka from TransmissionCo provided an overview of the subsea cable industry’s current state and its efforts to improve efficiency and meet growing demand. One of the main challenges he highlighted is not only keeping up with the demand for laying cables but also fixing them, given that only limited numbers of such ships are available, and many can only service specific waters.
For Steve Song, who recently joined the Internet Society to oversee the Open Fibre Data Standard (OFDS) project, resilience has less to do with failsafe networks than networks that are safe when they fail. In this respect, mapping the current terrestrial cable infrastructure is of growing importance, especially for landlocked countries that don’t benefit from connecting to subsea cables.
The OFDS project seeks to collaborate with regulators and service providers to develop an agreed-upon standard for uniform and accurate publication of terrestrial fiber optic cables. Contact us at [email protected] if you’re interested in collaborating or hosting one of five workshops we’ve committed to holding in 2025.
The Importance of Measuring Locally
To this last point, three of our speakers discussed projects working to improve Internet performance resolution at a country, state, and city level.
RIPE Atlas is one of the most established community projects that actively measures Internet connectivity. It does so using a global network of devices called probes and anchors that anyone can physically host or download to their mobile device. Alastair Strachan from RIPE NCC explained that anyone can access the data from these probes and anchors via Internet traffic maps, streaming data visualizations, and an API.
Ultimately, the more people who host these probes, the greater our understanding of the Internet as a whole and of specific countries will be. Alastair said there were currently large gaps in the data for Asia and Africa.
The Internet Society has previously sought to improve data collection in Africa through its Measuring Internet Resilience in Africa (MIRA) project, which also resulted in the Pulse Internet Resilience Index framework. I participated in the MIRA project and shared with the audience some of the successes and lessons we learned from the experience and our interest in replicating it in other regions to work alongside projects like RIPE Atlas.
Another open-source project that offers plenty of inspiration to those championing their governments to be more proactive in measuring their Internet’s resilience is the Advanced Internet Operations Research in India Internet Measurement Network (AIORI-IMN). Anand Raje shared his experience from this and noted that the government’s support was critical for its ongoing success. Read: India’s Indigenous Internet Measurement System Validates Need for Greater Resilience.
Security, Security, Security
Talk to a group of network operators, decision-makers, or Internet users about the biggest challenges of the Internet, and security will most likely be the leading answer.
Securing all 68,000 advertised networks connecting the trillions of devices to the Internet is an exceptional task, especially when security was not necessarily built into the ecosystem from the start. Still, several projects are working to secure these networks and, importantly, record and share the impact of these measures.
The Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) is a global initiative supported by the Internet Society that provides crucial fixes to reduce the most common routing threats. It also has a public Observatory feature, which Global Cyber Alliance’s Andrei Robachevsky shared with the crowd — Pulse draws from this data for its Internet Resilience Index.
Another data partner that we regularly reference is APNIC. Beau Gieskens was on hand to share updates to its real-time routing security feature in its DASH tool (currently only available to APNIC members). The networking community welcomes these real-time efforts because they enable them to act quickly when a malicious or inadvertent routing incident occurs.
Concentrated Markets Will Dictate Resilience
As the Internet’s attack surface is ever-increasing, those overseeing its expansion are decreasing.
Large Content Deliver Networks and Content Providers, also known as hypergiants, dominate the development of large-scale subsea and terrestrial fiber cable projects and have championed critical and secure technologies, such as IPv6 and HTTPS.
Read: Visualizing The Rise of Hypergiants
While these efforts have been fundamental for the rapid expansion of the Internet, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, argues that the speed at which these select few prioritize and make changes compromises resilience. To what effect? Well, that’s difficult to measure. But one signal that is worth following is the concentration of markets. While APNIC and Pulse dabble in understanding this metric, for Geoff, the accurate indication of how concentrated the Internet is becoming can be judged by looking at the top 10 public companies by market capitalization.
Are You Interested in Hosting a PIMF?
This was only a summary of some of our fantastic presentations during the day. We had some difficulties streaming/recording the sessions, but we plan to share what we have via the event page. Until then, please also check out the presentations by Doug Madory (Kentik) on ‘The sorry state of AS-SET in the Internet Routing Registry,’ Champika Wijayatunga (ICANN) on ‘Digging in DNSKINDS,’ and Christoph Visser (IIJ) on’ Gaming Internet Resiliency with CDNs: Benefits of a Multi-CDN Strategy.’
We are also planning four more face-to-face PIMF events in 2025 and a host of online forums, including our Pulse Journalist Seminars on Internet Shutdowns.
Email us at [email protected] if you’re interested in hosting, partnering, sponsoring, and presenting opportunities.
Photo by APNIC via Flickr