* Also: U.S. still world's top spammer; and High-speed TCP eases WAN congestion
Is it just sour grapes? Qwest stepped up its push for the U.S. government to impose conditions on two mergers involving four of its telecommunications competitors. During a Washington, D.C., press conference last week, Qwest repeated earlier requests for government conditions in Verizon’s acquisition of MCI and SBC’s purchase of AT&T. The two merged companies would dwarf other telecom companies in the U.S., with Verizon and SBC owning more than 70% of the residential long-distance market in many of the territories they operate, Qwest said. Qwest lost out to Verizon in its bid for MCI.
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The U.S. is still the world’s top spammer, but the percentage of unsolicited commercial e-mail originating from within its borders is dropping, according to a report published by security vendor Sophos. U.S. computers were responsible for about 26% of the world’s spam during the six months ending in September 2005, the company found. This was a marked drop from the amount of spam originating in the country during the same period last year. In 2004, 42% of the world’s spam originated on U.S. machines.
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TCP sometimes gets a bad rap because of the way its congestion-control algorithm hunts for bandwidth haphazardly and backs off conservatively at any sign of congestion. However, there is a fix in a protocol enhancement called High-speed TCP (HS-TCP). Documented in IETF RFC 3649, HS-TCP is an update of TCP that reacts better when using large congestion windows on high-bandwidth, high-latency networks.
