We’ve a couple of interesting tidbits to present today on the subject of Internet technology, unrelated but nonetheless interesting. Each affects our daily use of the Internet.

First off, we have a major trunk line latency issue from yesterday afternoon that affected tens of thousands of web sites and general Internet access over a wide area. For those unfamiliar with the structure, and without getting too complicated in an explanation, our Internet is carried over major trunk lines that are supported by such companies as Qwest, Verizon, AT&T and Sprint, to name a few.

The signal from your little desktop through your Internet Service Provider (Comcast, or Verizon, or AOL, etc.) passes over lines provided and supported by these major trunks, through numerous servers along the pipeline to get to the server that hosts the web site you are trying to reach. It would surprise you to learn how many different server boxes and trunk lines your little signal, your little request to get to Google or Amazon or YouTube, passes through before you arrive there. Yet, it also takes milliseconds to travel all that distance.

But, sometimes there are traffic jams along the way, or systemic failures or little “brownouts” or speed reductions on those trunk lines. These are referred to as “latency” issues – - signals that are slowed for a multitude of reasons.

Such was the case yesterday afteroon, 12 November, around 4:20. Verizon had some of those “latency” issues, and access to tens of thousands of web sites and servers that rely upon the Verizon trunk line for service were adversely affected by this. If you were on line around that time, you may have noticed that your email slowed down a little, or a site you were trying to get to wasn’t there.

These little “hiccups” in the system happen all the time, more than you might expect. It’s one of the reasons good hosting companies have multiple connections to the Internet instead of relying upon a single trunk line to the virtual world. When one trunk line connection is experiencing those “latency” issues, hosting companies simply switch to another connection line.

In KISS’s case, that switch yesterday was to Qwest and away from Verizon. We use the resources of a site you might find interesting: Internet Health Report. You can see the listing and configuration of the main trunk lines, and you can see where traffic might be jamming up a little when it happens. It did happen yesterday, and for a while those of you who were online might have noticed a little blip.

Verizon is back up to normal speed and productivity today, and there is clean bill of health being given to the Internet as these words are being written. It will happen again, maybe not with Verizon the next time, but it will happen again. And again. And again. But it gets sorted out quickly when it does happen.

The other tidbit to share with you has to do with spam. A “Well Done” shout out goes to a couple of ISPs and federal law enforcement officials in California. A company in San Jose, McColo Corp., suspected of being a major U.S. hosting service for international firms and syndicates that are involved in everything from the remote management of millions of compromised computers to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography via email, had its plug pulled from Internet connection this week.

Immediately thereafter, monitoring services reported as much as a 65% drop in spam worldwide as of Tuesday evening. Seems like a reasonable conclusion to reach that there was a cause/effect relationship here, and a clear indication of some good detective work having been done.

We’ve promoted the most severe punishment for those found guilty of spamming in past columns, and we haven’t changed our minds. Estimates today, or at least before McColo Corp’s plug was pulled, put the number at over 1 billion pieces of spam around the world every day. Those same estimates suggest it might be more than 99% of all email sent each day, too.

For the moment, then, we can report that the Internet health is good today, and, spam volume is down for a while. Two good tidbits to share.