I got my mobile phone bill in the mail the other day and, again, I nearly got a heart attack.   It has been like this for over the last 10 years. Whatever I do, this bill is always way higher than expected.

I tried everything from switching operators to  spending hours figuring out the optimal subscription plan. I do not place calls from my mobile if I can avoid it, especially abroad. I avoid SMS when e-mail is possible. I do not even dare to use the data services, although I have a 3G phone.  Still no luck. The main issue is that I work in a small country, live in the country nearby and often go to a two other countries for shopping and leisure. I am roaming on other networks than my home one 75% of the time. While this may sound unusual, actually this is what the whole European Union construction is all about: abolish borders.

I decided last year to subcribe to Transatel, a MNVO (Mobile Network Virtual Operator). In short, they do not have a network on their own, but buy capacity from other operators. It looked attractive because they cover several countries. They give you a local phone number in each country you choose. This makes it cheaper for the people calling you.  I can receive calls on my Luxembourg number while in Belgium and no roaming charges will apply. Sort of. Because, actually, you only get a limited number of minutes each month for call transfers across countries. Once you have reached the threshold, you are billed for the call transfers. This is just roaming charges by another name. At the time of subscription, they promised my monthly bill would be 50% lower. It looks like my usage profile was not part of their statistical sample…

The European mobile market is very fragmented. Each country has 3 or 4 mobile operators. Even those self labelled paneuropean networks like Vodaphone or Orange are actually alliances of different national operators, loosely tied by a similar logo.  All the rest of their offerings is different: subscription plans, services, phone numbers and roaming charges.  As for roaming charges, I noticed on several occasions in the past that if your home network operator is a Vodaphone partner, it may sometimes be cheaper to select a non-Vodaphone network abroad.

Those alliances are another way to make the offers more opaque to better fool the customer. On the economics of the mobile market, there is this interesting post from Kurtis Linqvist (thanks to Patrik Fältström for the link) . Just like Kurtis, I agree that there is no such thing as free and open mobile markets  in Europe.  I, too, hope the European Commission will continue to regulate the market until such time that it will cost the same price to call a mobile in Stockholm from Madrid that it is to place call from Los Angeles to Washington.  At&T in the US has a subscription plan for unlimited voice calls throughout the US for USD99.99/month. Unfortunately, given the current market conditions, I do not see a similar paneuropean offer any time soon.

Luxembourg City has started the deployment of a mesh WIFI network named HOTCITY. It’s free, as in “free beer”. It’s rather fast, too. They are deploying access points on signposts, traffic lights, etc.

As always, good intentions are somewhat countered by real life conditions. You have the access, but where can you actually sit with your laptop ?  Certainly not on the sidewalks at the Luxembourg station plaza. They are overcrowded by commuters waiting for the bus. In the train station itself, perhaps ? This time the HOTCITY signal is disturbed by the P&T Wifi installed in the station itself, and this one  is not free.

Cybersquatting often is a real issue for the one whose domain name has been stolen. Sometimes, though, it can generate a good laugh.
Take a look at this site:  http://www.luxembourg-ISOC.org/

This was the first domain name used by the Luxembourg chapter of ISOC. We abandoned it some time around 2002 or 2003, to use “ISOC.lu” instead. We stopped paying for the domain name. I verified at the time that the domain name had indeed disappeared from the whois and was removed form the indexes of search engines.

Hence, I was surprised to find while Googling that the domain name was:

1. still existing
2. still registered to ISOC Luxembourg
3. even hosted a web page which is a copy of the original main page of the original site, circa November 2000.

This is funny and problematic at the same time. Funny because, at least for me, this old web page brang back memories of a very exciting period. Problematic because this is rewriting history in a sense.This page is eight years old, yet the unsuspecting web surfer would think this is the latest one to date.

This also proves that one cannot trust the whois to return accurate data. I swear I have not renewed this domain name for at least four years. Still the data returned by whois is the one I submitted in 2001 !. The only difference is that I have never worked with EstDomains.

EuroDNS, the Luxembourg registrar, used its well attended New Year party last Wednesday to invite the Minister of Telecoms, Jean-Louis Schiltz to talk about a law voted at the end of December 2007. According to the Finance and Budget Commission Report on Draft Law 5801, «Revenues generated from use of, or license to use, a Domain Name are exempted from Luxembourg corporate taxes up to 80% ».

This is of course excellent news for EuroDNS, but also for domain name investors, both in Luxembourg and worldwide. ICANN will probably launch a RFP for new TLDs next June in Paris. As such, someone took the opportunity to mention that Luxembourg would be an ideal place to launch a new gTLD. The proposed gTLD floating around seems so obvious it is surprising no-one though about it before. At this stage, I cannot expand any further until this proposal is formalized, but stay tuned for more news.

Found in an office of the Luxembourg Ministry of Finance:

For those who do not read French, it says: “The seat opening is 29 X 23 cm wide. If you miss the hole, please use the brush to clean. This brush is not a toothbrush”

I blogged last year about the willingness of the Luxembourg authorities to enhance the country’s connectivity. I appended a traceroute showing the how a packet moving between two sites geographically distant of less than a kilometer from each other would actually travel through most of Europe. Not only is there no improvement to date, it is actually getting worse. Here is today’s traceroute. It goes is the other direction than last year’s.

traceroute to www.isoc.lu (158.64.14.86), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
(5 internal hops deleted)

6 147.67.224.2 (147.67.224.2) 8.301 ms 9.866 ms 14.375 ms
7 uu194-7-242-205.unknown.uunet.be (194.7.242.205) 11.214 ms 7.786 ms 8.543 ms
8 uu194-7-242-201.unknown.uunet.be (194.7.242.201) 10.411 ms 8.841 ms 9.023 ms
9 so-3-0-0.xr2.bru2.alter.net (146.188.2.121) 8.792 ms 9.223 ms 9.005 ms
10 so-1-0-0.tr2.bru2.alter.net (146.188.9.153) 11.849 ms 10.144 ms 11.786 ms
11 so-7-1-0.tr1.ams2.alter.net (146.188.15.225) 13.349 ms 12.818 ms 12.397 ms
12 pos1-0.br1.ams3.alter.net (146.188.3.214) 12.849 ms 13.775 ms 12.857 ms
13 pos4-0.core2.amsterdam.level3.net (146.188.67.202) 15.719 ms 12.937 ms 12.696 ms
14 so-4-0-0.mp2.amsterdam1.level3.net (4.68.113.82) 13.680 ms 13.982 ms 12.900 ms
15 ae-1-0.bbr1.frankfurt1.level3.net (212.187.128.30) 23.811 ms as-1-0.bbr2.frankfurt1.level3.net (212.187.128.97) 23.178 ms ae-1-0.bbr1.frankfurt1.level3.net (212.187.128.30) 23.395 ms
16 ae-31-53.ebr1.frankfurt1.level3.net (4.68.118.94) 33.517 ms ae-32-56.ebr2.frankfurt1.level3.net (4.68.118.190) 23.688 ms ae-31-55.ebr1.frankfurt1.level3.net (4.68.118.158) 23.166 ms
17 ae-4-4.car2.milan1.level3.net (4.69.133.137) 32.141 ms 31.910 ms ae-1-100.ebr2.frankfurt1.level3.net (4.69.132.126) 29.827 ms
18 dante.car2.milan1.level3.net (213.242.65.26) 32.716 ms ae-4-4.car2.milan1.level3.net (4.69.133.137) 32.112 ms dante.car2.milan1.level3.net (213.242.65.26) 32.570 ms
19 dante.car2.milan1.level3.net (213.242.65.142) 33.288 ms so-6-3-0.rt1.gen.ch.geant2.net (62.40.112.33) 51.075 ms dante.car2.milan1.level3.net (213.242.65.142) 42.808 ms
20 so-6-3-0.rt1.gen.ch.geant2.net (62.40.112.33) 38.728 ms so-7-2-0.rt1.fra.de.geant2.net (62.40.112.22) 37.665 ms so-6-3-0.rt1.gen.ch.geant2.net (62.40.112.33) 37.290 ms
21 so-1-3-0.rt1.lux.lu.geant2.net (62.40.112.54) 41.656 ms 43.051 ms so-7-2-0.rt1.fra.de.geant2.net (62.40.112.22) 37.016 ms
22 restena-gw.rt1.lux.lu.geant2.net (62.40.124.150) 43.677 ms so-1-3-0.rt1.lux.lu.geant2.net (62.40.112.54) 42.767 ms 42.155 ms
23 gate-2-v33.bce.restena.lu (158.64.16.38) 42.558 ms restena-gw.rt1.lux.lu.geant2.net (62.40.124.150) 48.978 ms gate-2-v33.bce.restena.lu (158.64.16.38) 51.384 ms
24 gate-1-v26.rest.restena.lu (158.64.16.218) 47.132 ms gate-2-v33.bce.restena.lu (158.64.16.38) 44.242 ms gate-1-v26.rest.restena.lu (158.64.16.218) 43.795 ms
25 gate-1-v26.rest.restena.lu (158.64.16.218) 44.614 ms 44.706 ms boaz (158.64.14.86) 43.837 ms !<10>
26 www.isoc.lu (158.64.14.86) 42.866 ms !<10> 42.585 ms !<10> 41.996 ms !<10>

This time we go from Luxembourg to Brussels, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Milan and Geneva and finally back at home. 15 hops last year. 21 this year.

Much of the blame goes to Verizon, who consistenly declined to peer at the local internet Exchange, citing the fact that the peering vould be very uneven.

According to the local press, PayPal has decided to settle its European offices in Luxembourg. To this effect PayPal has been granted a banking license. After Skype and eBay itself, this is the third company from the eBay group to select Luxembourg as its main European office. This is good news for the economy.

This is also good news for the local users. Hopefully, it will soon be possible to transfer money from a PayPal account to a Luxemburgish bank account.   At this very moment, if you select Luxembourg from this web page, you are being told you can transfer funds to a US bank account…

At long last, the incumbent operator, P&T, has upgraded its ADSL infrastructure to the ADSL2+ standard. As a result, download speeds now range from 2 to 15 Mbits/s.  This is  most welcome, as  it moves Luxembourg back into the top 30 leading countries with broadband access. The icing on the cake is that this is being done with no additional subscription fees.

Many competing ISPs (Visual Online, Luxembourg Online, Alternet, Tele2)  use the P&T infrastructure. Hence , their offers have been adapted, too. I guess it will only take weeks before the competing infrastructure provider, Cegecom, will offer the same speeds, too.

A few months ago, the Luxembourg chapter of ISOC launched a survey among the Internet users. The main finding was that the users were unhappy with the slowish speed of their “broadband” connection. While I would not dare to say that this report changed the landscape, I think it nevertheless contributed to speed up the deployment of the new DSLAMs.

Which much fanfare, several public and private partners launched a company called LuxTrust which sells SSL certificates for web sites. Why on earth we need yet another certificate authority is beyond me. I guess this is a matter of national pride. Previously, the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce sold Globalsign certificates. Globalsign is a Belgian company.

There are still a few glitches, though. As can be seen from this screenshot, LuxTrust still needs the right certificates for themselves. Although they claim their certificates are compatible with 99% of the browsers on the market today, it failed with my browser (Firefox 2.0.x) .

And, by the way, if you are a not-for-profit and cannot afford those expensive certificates, get a free one from CACert. If you just need encryption when you do not want people to send their passwords in clear text over the wire, this is just what you need.

The CACert root certificate is installed by default on many Linux distributions, as well as FreeBSD and OpenBSD. For other OSes and browsers, you only need to install their root certificate. This web site, as well as the web site and sub web sites of ISOC Luxembourg use it.

A while ago, I pointed out the very bad decision taken by Dexia-BIL bank in Luxembourg to use a Macromedia Flash applet to defeat phishing attempts. Competition being what it is, the number one bank in Luxembourg, BCEE, could not afford to sit and watch. They just copied the idea.

As was pointed out in the case of Dexia-BIL, the system is very user-unfriendly. However, customer-friendliness does not seem to be part of the equation.

Somehow, banks feel responsible for the fact that their customers are clueless when it comes to Internet e-mail. Rather than educating them, they think it is smart to protect these poor souls against themselves and their naivety. Or it could be the legal department telling the IT guys they have to find a way for the bank not to be held liable in case a customer would sue them if he fell victim of a phising e-mail.

So, again let us remind the banks and their customers how to fight phishing attempts:

• Use common sense. A reputable bank does not send e-mails asking for personal information they should already have. Actually, a bank does not use e-mail to communicate with customers. They are convinced you are always available to walk to their branch office during office hours, and that you have nothing better to do.
• Ask your ISP to filter out phising attempts in incoming e-mail messages. The cost is low. Open source tools do a wonderful job at that. MailScanner and Amavis-new do it for free. If your ISP wants to spend a lot of money, there are commercial products, too. If it is unwilling to do that, there is still client-side software. But you should rather move to an ISP which cares about its customers. In the “ISP” acronym, “S” stands for “Service”. If there is no service, vote with your feet.
• Avoid broken mail clients that display HTML by default.
• Double check the hyperlink you are clicking on.

And if you are too dumb to do any of the above, avoid accessing your bank account through the Internet and go to the branch office for every transaction. At least, this will give additional work to the clerk behind the desk and maybe he will be able to keep his job, rather than being fired because “customers use the Internet anyway”.

Update: 2nd March 2007: The bank confirmed they want to use Flash to defeat key loggers.

1. Key loggers are a “feature” of MS Windows, mostly. Well conceived operating systems do not allow the installation of such malware. The choice of the operating system is up to the user. He is free to upgrade to a more secure one. If he does not, that is his problem not the bank’s.
2. On the Windows platform, key loggers should be intercepted by the anti-virus program. If it does not, that is the user’s problem not the bank’s.
3. While the Flash applet may help defeat the key loggers on the Windows platform for the specific use of the online banking service, it does not solve the general issue of the key logging malware on the Windows platform in general. In fact, this would give the false impression to the clueless user that he is protected against key loggers, while in fact he is only protected for a specific application and not when using his credit card on Amazon or elsewhere.

The only conclusion one can draw from the whole thing is that the bank wants to be legally covered in case a customer complains. Security has nothing to do with it. The bank could easily disclaim liability in case the user does not implement the right security tools on his computer. It could, for example, disclaim liability in case the browser allows the installation of malware, which is typical of Internet Explorer.

The original post is after the break

My bank, Dexia Luxembourg, has recently changed the login procedure to their online banking system to use a Macromedia Flash applet. My guess is that they want to find a way to defeat phishing and key loggers. I said “my guess” because bankers are not known for communicating much with their customers, even less to actually explain their decisions. The customer is just too stupid to understand … This is just another guess.

Using Flash is a real bad idea, because it is proprietary technology. If and when Adobe decides to drop the whole thing or change the specs, or ends the support of one of another platform, the bank and its customers will be stuck.

Some years ago, the same bank had an authentication system that required the Microsoft Java virtual machine. Not only did it not work on non-M$ platforms, it did not work either on all those Windows based computers that ran Sun Java. Apparently, the bank did not learn from its own recent history.

Flash is only available on a limited number of platforms: Windows, MacOSX and Linux. The statistics of this web site indicate that only 82% of the browsers support Flash. Although this is certainly not representative of Dexia’s customers, it shows that not all users have the Flash plugin installed in their browsers. Why they don’t is a question the bank should ask itself. Maybe they have good reasons.

In many corporate computing environments, there are security policies which prohibit the download or use of some software. Windows network administrators can block the use of certain files types or programs with a few mouse clicks. As Flash is increasingly being used to deliver video content, which eats up the corporate bandwidth, I would expect that some companies will prevent Flash to be used in their environment. Too bad for the bank’s customers wishing to manage their checking account from their office.

There are other reasons, too:

1. Phishing fraudsters need to work quick. That means they have to find as much victims as possible in a very short time frame. The best way is to target banks with a huge number of customers, like Bank of America or HSBC. A small bank like mine is unlikely to be a target for fraudsters.
2. There are enough tools the ISPs can deploy to identify phishing attempts in e-mails. In Luxembourg, most of the ISPs do not filter spam or charge for filtering. Too bad. But again, it is up to the customer to vote with their feet and select a professional ISP.
3. The user should be suffciently aware by now that a real bank never sends an e-mail asking for access codes. It has been repeated over and over again in all languages and in all media. Unless you are just arriving from Mars, you should know. If you don’t, I am sorry to say it is your problem now and that you should bear the consequences of your ignorance. It is not up to a bank to set up strategies to work around clueless users.
4. The Internet is no different from the real world. You would not drive a car before learning how to drive. Similarly, you don’t believe the average salesman ringing at your door. Some people totally lose their common sense when they are front of a computer, forgetting the Internet is a ugly medium for a ugly world. But it is not a bank that is going to change this perception.

In the case of this specific Flash applet by Dexia, the design is poor, to remain polite. Its interface requires a mouse and even then, it asks you to place large areas into small boxes.

There is apparently a competition for the most unfriendly application ongoing between Dexia offices throughout Europe. At the same time the Luxembourg branch threw this awful Flash applet at its customers, the Belgian Branch did even worse.

They now require to have your Maestro card and a special random code generator, both of which you are most likely to have with you in a cybercafé in Shangai or elsewhere. It takes 9 steps to log in. And the same steps again every time you need to confirm an order.

Dexia Belgium wins the price of the most unfriendly Internet banking application, with Dexia Luxembourg close second.

The American Chamber of Commerce of Luxembourg is organizing an event tonight at the RTL TV studios called “IT, Society, and Culture”.

I will be presenting some reflections on how we went from a top-down approach of the Internet to a bottom-up proces and what the challenges are. My presentation is here in PDF format.

The main idea behind the presentation is that we have not yet reached the bottom-up phase, despite all the talk about blogs, YouTube, etc. The fact remains that the hoster of the blog or video sharing platform is still in a position to take down you web site. There is still someone, somewhere who can silence you. It is only when your platform will be under your total control that we will be able to the the user is the Internet, as Time Magazine puts it.

However, before we can reach that stage there are still some technical challenges we need to solve. If you wish to host your blog on your home computer, you need an easy to understand operating system and web server. It’s coming. You also need bandwidth. Asymetrical DSL won’t cut it. What you need is fiber to the home, with 100 Mbits both ways. You also need a fixed IP address. With current IPv4 addresses becoming scarce, IPv6 seems like the answer.

There are societal challenges, too. With IP everywhere and always on, we risk an Orwellian society where every one of your moves can be monitored. Will the average Internet user use the increased bandwidth to contribute something useful for the society, or post gore videos of men being hanged ?

The French newspaper Le Monde reports that the incumbent operator France Télécom will start deploying 100 Mbit/s Internet connections to the home in the Paris area, starting next March. Its competitor, Free, has similar projects.

At the same time, the Luxembourg incumbent is saying it will not deploy a FTTH network if competitors are allowed to use it.
In the meantime, “high speed” in Luxembourg still means 3 Mbit/s. Look out P&T Luxembourg: as you can see you from your French neighbour, one can be the incumbent and nevertheless be innovative.

My newspaper this morning reported that Luxembourg is opposing a proposal from the European Commission regarding new regulation on the pricing of mobile phone calls.

For those not aware of what is at stake, here is a brief explanation. Currently, when roaming with your mobile phone all over Europe, you pay substantial roaming charges when abroad, even if you wish to make a local call. What the Commission says is that a local call is a local call, irrespective of what is your home network operator. If you are a customer of LuxGSM and happen to be in Paris, you should be able to call a number in Paris at the same price a customer of Orange or Bouygues would pay.

Looks fine. The trouble is that Luxembourg mobile operators (LuxGSM/P&T, Tango/Tele 2 and VoxMobile) consider that they would lose too much money and, as a consequence, would have to substantially raise the prices of local calls for everyone, including their own customers.

This demonstrates a real issue with competition in small markets like Luxembourg. What is costly to operators is the infrastructure. There are 2 GSM and 2 3G networks for 3 operators. Does it make sense for a country of 400 thousand people ?
The same applies to the Internet infrastructure. There are 2 competing DSL networks. 2 major operators have fiber networks throughout the country, with a third operator coming.

In such conditions, no operator can make any significant economies of scale, leading to high retail prices.
ISOC Luxembourg has been suggesting for a long time that all the infrastructure should be owned by a neutral not-for-profit operator, which would then resell capacity to telecom operators and ISPs. This would not only allow to rationalize the network infrastructure, it would also make billing the operators more transparent.

The Internet gurus tend to be convinced that only the private sector is able to run the Internet. You hear it on every occasion. ICANN should be transferred to the private sector. Internet connectivity in less developed countries will become cheap once the state-owned monopolies will disappear. We could go on for hours.The facts are not that simple. Here’s a real life example.

For years, Luxembourg has tried to attract foreign e-commerce companies. The government has done a lot in terms of lower taxes, highly skilled and multilingual work force, good salaries and living conditions, etc. The only thing that is missing is Internet bandwidth. There is enough for everyday use, but hosting Amazon, Google or You Tube would put the country’s international connectivity to its knees. For years, tier-1 operators said there is no market for large pipes over here. For years, there have been lost business opportunities.

Given the failure of the allmighty private sector to match the demand, the government has decided to pour 30 million Euros in a government agency called Luxconnect, whose task will be to dig and/or rent fiber connections between Luxembourg and the main European Internet exchanges. The two first targets are AMS-IX and DE-CIX. In addition, the agency will build a local fiber ring servicing the main zones hosting IT companies.

It is not yet clear if the agency will provide layer 1 (raw fiber), layer 2 (Ethernet) or Layer 3 (IP) connectivity to the local ISPs. I guess there will be several offers.

In any case, those who think it is fashionable to display any public sector involvement in the Internet as unnecessary interference should ask themselves if the private sector is always able to match the demand.

A few references:
Official press release(French)
Press article from Paperjam (English)
Draft law (French)
No web site yet at www.luxconnect.lu

Two weeks ago, I bought a AVM Fritz!Box WLAN 7050 DSL router to replace my ageing Zyxel one. The Zyxel was not a real choice at the time (4 years ago). It was the only one that the incumbent operator was willing to support. Believe it or not, P&T Luxembourg was still selling the thing last year, despite the fact that it did not support WPA encryption.

The Fritz!Box is the leading DSL router on the German market and AVM has a killer product. It is slowly spreading outside Germany. As I understand, the manufacturer is struggling to meet the demand outside Germany and does not have the production capacities of competitors like Linksys or D-Link. Too bad, because AVM beats them all.

Not only does it do what you expect, ie route your home computer to the Internet. It also does VoIP and can manage multiple SIP providers. It has 3 phone connectors and an ISDN one. Hence, you can use your usual desktop phones to make calls through the Internet and assign dialing rules so outgoing calls can go either through you usual fixed line or through the Internet, depending on what number you dial.

Overall, I am pretty satisfied. The web interface makes the the box very easy to manage. I am amazed at what AVM managed to put in such a small unit. Some minus points, though. You cannot configure your default DNS and NTP servers, nor can you assign a static address through DHCP.

The latter is problematic with my home printer (HP Officejet 7140), which has a statically assigned IP address. The Fritz first tries to configure the printer by DHCP and assigns the WPA key. However, since the printer has a static address, the key becomes somehow invalid. If I enter the WPA key again on the printer, it will work for some time. Now, entering 12 letter passwords on a printer control panel is a real nightmare you do not want to face every few hours.

The box runs an embedded version of Linux on a Texas Instruments AR7 processor. That makes it easy to hack, although of course the manufacturer will void its warranty in such a case. Some people managed to do unbelievable things, like converting a PSTN model to ISDN or change an German model to an international one. I limited myself to installing a ssh daemon and opened some more ports on the firewall, which are not configurable through the web interface.
VoIP is still unreliable, in my case. I do not know if I have to blame the Fritz!Box or my SIP provider, VoIPBuster.com. Some calls get through fine. For others, it rings but there is no sound. It will need another week end to test and debug. Missing codecs, I guess.

From discussions we had with members of the Luxembourg ISOC chapter, it appears that ISPs over here do a terrible job at offering a good Usenet service. Some people complained that they had to buy the service elsewhere. Others just gave up because their ISP was not carrying the groups they wished and offered a very limited choice.

Strange, because offering good Usenet service is neither difficult  nor expensive. In less than 2 weeks, we have been able to offer to our members a good service, with multiple peers, all of which do it for free. How come a volunteer not-for-profit can do what a commercial ISP cannot ?
This is quite typical of the mostly general attitude of ISPs over here, which is along the lines of “Pay your subscription and don’t complain”.

According to the official communiqué, the Luxembourg authorities are planning to fund the development of the country’s connectivity to the Internet, as well as build new data centers for Internet hosting.

This is surprising in that it is a well-known fact, in Luxembourg at least, that we have plenty of unused fiber connecting the country to the major internet exchanges. On the other hand, it may be the authorities are looking at diversifying the connectivity to avoid risks of disruptions and force more competition between operators.

What would also benefit the country are more extensive and diversified peering agreements between the ISPs. Trying traceroutes on various ISPs connections yeld surprising results. It is not unusual to see your connection transiting through Amsterdam, Paris or London for an intra-country connection. A good example: the following traceroute is from a host on the academic network to the Europa web site. Physically, the two machines are less than a kilometer apart, but your packets will travel 1000 kilometers.

You’ll notice the packets are transiting through 3 networks, through Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Brussels.

At a more global scale, Internet connections to Asia and Oceania often transit through the US East and West coasts. The authorities could really help by renting bandwidth on fibers between Europe and the Far-East.

http://www.internetnz.net.nz/media/2006-05-29-research-report

InternetNZ vient de rendre public un rapport comparatif sur l’Internet rapide dans les pays de l’OCDE. Le Luxembourg s’y voit gratifié d’une 23e place (sur 26). Cela est dû principalement à la lenteur des connexions ADSL et l’absence de débit supérieur à 3 Mbit/s.

Concernant les tarifs, le Luxembourg se situe dans la moyenne. Les tarifs ont été pondérés en appliquant l’indice “Big Mac”, le prix du Big Mac variant d’un pays à l’autre en fonction du revenu moyen par habitant. Vous trouverez ci-dessous le résumé en anglais.

Le moins que l’on puisse dire, c’est que l’ISOC a encore du travail au Luxembourg.
Extrait:

Luxembourg fared poorly in this study, ranking 23rd in terms of overall value, and one place behind New Zealand. Ranking in 15th place in terms of broadband uptake, it was not included in the e-readiness study. Luxembourg broadband is primarily DSL, with around 18% cable and a subset of satellite services. It ranks below New Zealand in terms of download speed, averaging 2.4Mbps and it has very few plans of 5Mbps or over. Luxembourg is one of only two countries, along with Portugal, where the average upload speed is less than 200Kbps. The lowest plans on offer had a 64Kbps upload and the most widely available upload speed was 192Kbps (55% of products surveyed). No synchronous products were recorded. Luxembourg ranks slightly better on Comparison of OECD Broadband Markets cost – 15th overall, 9th for business products and 13th for residential. It also has the eighth cheapest connection fees.

http://www.paperjam.lu/c/n/l/articles/13723.html

Luxembourg Communications Minister, Mr. Jean-Louis Schiltz, announced on January 17th that Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has confirmed that it will finally settle its European Headquarters in Luxembourg after a year of waiting.