For some years now the
general uptake of IPv6 has appeared to be “just around
the corner”. Yet the Internet industry has so far failed
to pick up and run with this message, and it continues
to be strongly reluctant to make any substantial
widespread commitment to deploy IPv6. Some carriers are
now making some initial moves in terms of migrating
their internet infrastructure over to a dual protocol
network, but for many others it’s a case of still
watching and waiting for what they think is the optimum
time to make a move.
So when should we be
deploying IPv6 services? At what point will the business
case for IPv6 have a positive bottom line? It’s a tough
question to answer, and while advice of “sometime,
probably sooner than later” is certainly not wrong, it’s
also entirely unhelpful as well!
I’m not sure that
anyone can provide a clearer date in response to that
question, but what may be useful is to explore why IPv6
will be useful to have sometime in the near term future
and how IPv6 and IPv4 are likely to interact. And then
the “when” of IPv6 may be a little clearer—or maybe not!
To start off with this
exploration it may be useful to compare where we started
with the Internet with where we are today, and then see
how this relates to the IPv6 story.
The Evolution of the Internet Architecture
The original
architectural model for IP was in many respects a very
simple model, but also one that was very powerful.
Perhaps, in the spirit of William of Occam, the true
strength of IP lay in what had been deliberately omitted
from the specification, leaving in the form of the
Internet a relatively simple and straightforward packet
switching architecture.
William of Occam,
(1285-1349), English philosopher and scholastic
theologian. Occam was born in Surrey, England. He
entered the Franciscan order and studied and taught at
the University of Oxford from 1309 to 1319. Denounced
by Pope John XXII for dangerous teachings, he was held
in house detention for four years (1324-28) at the
papal palace in Avignon, France, while the orthodoxy
of his writings was examined. Siding with the
Franciscan general against the pope in a dispute over
Franciscan poverty, Occam fled to Munich in 1328 to
seek the protection of Louis IV, Holy Roman emperor,
who had rejected papal authority over political
matters. Excommunicated by the pope, Occam wrote
against the papacy and defended the emperor until the
latter’s death in 1347. The philosopher died in
Munich, apparently of the plague, while seeking
reconciliation with Pope Clement VI.
Occam’s Razor,
“Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate”, has
become a basic principle in science and philosophy,
stating that entities should not be multiplied
needlessly. This principle underlies all scientific
modeling and theory building. In any given model
Occam’s Razor helps to cut away those concepts,
variables or constructs that are not really needed to
explain the phenomenon. Though such a process there is
less chance of introducing inconsistencies,
ambiguities and redundancies.
The network implemented
an unreliable datagram delivery service. Each datagram
(or packet), had information describing its source and
intended destination. Each network switch (or router),
either moved the packet closer to where it believed the
destination was located, or it just dropped the packet.
In the latter case the switch may send a control
notification packet back to the sender, depending on the
reasons for the drop. All the functionality that created
various transport services, functionality to support
mapping of application-level endpoint names to network
addresses, and functionality to distribute available
network resources across competing applications resided
within the end systems rather than the network. For a
network it really doesn’t get much simpler than this.
But if you were to look
for a faithful implementation of this simple
architecture in today’s Internet networks you’ll be
somewhat disappointed. The concept of single packet
forwarding plane, with a single addressing model
spanning the entire network, and a uniform end-to-end
transport level congestion control model, has largely
disappeared from most production networks, and the basic
concept of ‘end-to-end’ is now perhaps more of an item
of historic interest than a current pillar of networking
architecture. These days carrier internet networks come
replete with multiple forwarding layers, thanks to MPLS,
numerous active network elements, including firewalls
NATs and application layer gateways, various forms of
NAT traversal agents and of course application level
gateways and application level switches, load balancers,
dynamic application switches and various forms of
context-sensitive dynamic environments. We also have
various forms of resiliency mechanisms, including path
diversity elements, resource management systems, and QoS
response systems. We have active Distributed Denial of
Service (DDOS) detection elements embedded in the
network and even network level session and application
tracking systems as one more level of network defense
against the ever-escalating security problem. This is no
longer anything remotely similar to the concept of a
simple unreliable datagram delivery service, and if you
are looking for a simple dumb network with smart edges
then you won’t find it in production Internets.
What happened to the
original Internet model? What was so wrong with a model
of data communications that placed most of the
functionality of the network into the devices
themselves, and cast the network into a role of best
effort packet switching? One sneaking suspicion is that
the data communications industry itself, or at least the
carrier part of the industry, is resisting this path to
network simplicity, and in their continual quest to
wring out every drop of value out of their networks the
carrier ISP sector continues to be seduced by
feature-packed network services that are intended to
offer their customer higher value network solutions.
Another way of looking at this role is that the carrier
industry is hooked on the complexity business, and has
embarked on a business model of creating networking
systems that are sufficiently complex that customers are
supposed to baulk at doing it themselves. After all any
construction enterprise can hang wire on poles, bury
wire in the ground, or drop wire to the bottom on the
sea. The highly complex operation of the resultant
network is supposedly the unique value-adding role of
the carrier enterprise. Of course this complexity
escalation works only as long as the solutions are not
so complex that the carriers themselves start to baulk
as well! As a carrier industry we may have already
crossed this particular complexity line, and we may have
already managed to create a technology environment that
is sufficiently complex that no player, not even the
carrier, is able to manage the resultant interwoven mesh
of disparate systems that make up a carrier Internet
platform.
The question in my mind
when looking at this rapid progression from
architectural simplicity into often mind-boggling, and
doubtless eye-wateringly expensive complexity for
Internet networks is whether this is the outcome of a
disordered process of entropy or one of a more ordered
and directed process of evolution of the Internet?
The case for entropy is
certainly very strong. What is evident is that the
internet is besieged by various forms of local
optimizations that intentionally alter the behaviour of
parts of the network to suit the desired characteristics
of certain classes of application. Such incremental
local actions tend to impose a cost on the entire
system. Whether the issue is one of adding network level
support for mobility, support for various forms of
address compression, support for differentiated service
outcomes, resilience against various forms of hostile
attack, or various forms of enhanced service
availability, the typical outcome is one of increased
network complexity and increased network cost with
increasingly marginal returns in terms of overall
service capability. This is a drive to disorder and
decay in that local changes are not uniformly adopted,
and the network itself starts to alter its overall state
from uniform simple order into visible chaotic disorder.
Of course it is also
possible to view this change process as one of
evolution, where an active system is under constant
pressure to adapt in order to survive and thrive in a
changing environment. There’s no obviously intelligent
design here, and the overall evolutionary process
follows no particular planned path. The outcomes are
often chaotic and invariably unpredictable, but within
the process is a driving discipline of a competitive
environment where service providers are constantly
challenged to adapt their service offering to meet the
demands of customers. Here it is the competitive market
that imposes the evolutionary pressure to adapt and
survive or wither away into commercial bankruptcy.
Herbert Spencer, 1820 –
1903, British philosopher and sociologist, was a major
figure in the intellectual life of the Victorian era.
He was one of the principal proponents of evolutionary
theory in the mid nineteenth century. It was Spencer
who invented the phrase “survival of the fittest”, and
originally applied it to the process of elimination of
firms in the rather vicious cut and thrust of
Victorian capitalism. Upon the publication of Charles
Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” in 1859 Spencer
quickly saw the parallels to natural selection and
applied the phrase to the process of natural
evolution. As a result he became on the a group of
philosophers known as “social Darwinists”, applying
Darwin’s principles to human society. It has often
been considered a relatively harsh philosophy,
espousing in its most extreme form that the fittest
members of society naturally survived and prospered,
while the weaker members of a society were doomed to
perish.
Many of the incremental
measures we see in today’s networks have been bought
about by this reactionary response to market pressures
rather than though a distinct planned process of
technology development. One could characterize
firewalls, Network Address Translators (NATs), Quality
of Service (QoS), Application Level Gateways (ALGs),
network caches, and a myriad of similar mechanisms as
examples of this form of ad hoc response to market
pressures for network services. Whether they represent
entropy or evolutionary change in the Internet model is
perhaps left as a personal perspective.
One area of technology
continues to sit outside this process of current
technology churn in the Internet, and that’s IPv6. IPv6
is not an outcome of a reactive model of technology
development, but is instead an example of a centrally
planned development that was designed in anticipation of
a market situation. Curiously, the very conditions that
IPv6 was intended to avoid, namely that of a chronic
address shortage in the deployed network, have already
manifested themselves in many ways and in many places,
and yet the market demand for IPv6 services remains
relatively insignificant, and certainly below a
threshold for viable commercial services for many
operators.
So what’s the problem?
How will IPv6 services appear in the market? Is this an
evolutionary process of orderly migration of IPv4-based
services into an IPv6 networking realm? Or is IPv6 going
down a path of premature extinction, never to appear as
part of the mainstream communications portfolio? Or will
IPv6 play for high stakes here and take on IPv4 as its
major competitor and win market share through a
revolutionary process of defining price and performance
points that are simply not sustainable with any other
technology, including IPv4?
Lets now look at the
potential futures for IPv6, and in particular look at
the options of extinction, evolution and revolution in
the context of IPv6 and its struggle for market takeup
in the coming years.
Extinction
Is IPv6 another case of
OSIfication, or another example of a network technology
that simply will never attain mainstream adoption?
The Open Systems
Interconnection (usually abbreviated to OSI) was a new
effort in networking started in 1982 by the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO),
along with the ITU-T.
Prior to OSI,
networking was completely vendor-developed and
proprietary, with protocol standards such as SNA and
DECnet. OSI was a new industry effort, attempting to
get everyone to agree to common network standards to
provide multi-vendor interoperability. It was common
for large networks to support multiple network
protocol suites, with many devices unable to talk to
other devices because of a lack of common protocols
between them.
However, the actual
OSI protocol stack that was specified as part of the
project was considered by many to be too complicated
and to a large extent unimplementable. Taking the
“forklift upgrade” approach to networking, it
specified eliminating all existing protocols and
replacing them with new ones at all layers of the
stack. This made implementation difficult, and was
resisted by many vendors and users with significant
investments in other network technologies. In
addition, the OSI protocols were specified by
committees filled with differing and sometimes
conflicting feature requests, leading to numerous
optional features. Because so much was optional, many
vendors’ implementations simply could not
interoperate, negating the whole effort.
The collapse of the
OSI project severely damaged the reputation and
legitimacy of the organizations involved, especially
ISO. The worst part was that OSI’s backers took too
long to recognize and accommodate the dominance of the
TCP/IP protocol suite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Systems_Interconnection
Will IPv6 act as a
catalyst to take a step in some completely different
technology direction that may be as radical in their
nature as previous big leaps of technology in the
communications sector? In the same fashion as the
industry has already lurched though multiplexing
solutions based on Frequency Division Multiplexing, Time
Division Multiplexing and then Packet Switching, are we
awaiting something far more radical than a realignment
of some of the IP packet’s header fields? Is IPv6 a
rather eloquent demonstration that packet switching has
reached some basic set of limitations and that a
successor technology to IPv4 needs to take a completely
new approach to a shared communications environment?
The original IP
architecture, as a very simple adaptation layer between
a broad collection of packet switching technologies and
a similarly broad collection of services and
application, is certainly dying at the moment, if not
already dead. The model of coherent and transparent
end-to-end packet transmission is disappearing from
today’s network, and is being replaced with a collection
of packet header rewriters, a set of content sensitive
packet forwarding systems and even entities than perform
session interception and regeneration. Any application
that assumes a simple end-to-end model of packet
delivery has no role in today’s Internet, and any
popular internet application has to be able to invent
its own identity space, and be able to allow its data
streams to pass through NATS, ALGs and other middleware
elements with impunity. This may require multi-party
interactions to complete the transaction were previously
only two parties were necessary. For peer-to-peer
environments we are now looking at application mediators
and agents to assist in setting up the necessary
rendezvous points, as well as assisting in the
identification of what forms of middleware behaviour
exist in the network path (STUN, ICE and TURN are good
examples of this approach of application-level
middleware discovery). Efforts to impose overlay
topologies, tunnels, virtual circuits, traffic
engineering, fast reroutes, protection switches,
selective QoS, policy-based switching on IP networks
appear to have simply added to the cost and detracted
from the end user utility
So, today, we are
engineering applications and services in an environment
where NATs, firewalls and ALGs are assumed to be part of
the IP plumbing. We now have constrained models of
interaction that divide the work into clients and
servers, and mandate that all transactions are initiated
by clients and are directed to servers.. We now have
forced applications to invent their own per-application
identity realms, and required applications to also
require the deployment of active middleware in the form
of agents in order to orchestrate multi-party rendezvous
and referral. By implication NAT states and other
middleware states are now multi-party shared states, and
what were considered to be local autonomously
functioning entities now are faced with the complexities
of supporting a signalling environment that is
associated with distributed shared state.
All this complexity is
not just a problem in the abstract sense, but a form of
architecture that results in more fragile applications
and higher operational costs. The Internet, far from
becoming simpler and cheaper, is under increasing
pressure to take on increasing complexity and operate
with escalating costs
Can IPv6 reverse this
trend? We’ve all heard the observations that IPv6 was a
typical standardization conservatism. IPv6 also
represents an outcome of engineering compromise between
making marginal changes and taking an entirely new
approach to packet switching architecture, and the
standards process is invariably one that tends to avoid
making radical decision. IPv6 represents a very marginal
change in terms of design decisions from IPv4. IPv6 did
not manage to tackle the larger issues of overloaded
address semantics. IPv6 did nothing to address routing
scaling issues. IPv6 has done little in terms of
altering the semantics of packet switching, and what we
are left with in IPv6 is a slightly larger address
field:
One could be
excused for thinking that the marginal changes in IPv6
over IPv4 represent such a small difference that no
one would be interested in paying their share of the
rather high price of worldwide transition. Alex
Lightman, chairman of the IPv6 Summit, was reported to
have raised the question of who will actually pay for
the transition to IPv6. As reported by
internetnews.com, “There is an unreleased report by
the Dept. of Commerce estimating it will take $25-$75
billion to pay for the transition, according to one of
our speakers,” Lightman said. “So what part of that
will the U.S. government pay for?”
December 12, 2005,
http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3570211
But if IPv6 is indeed
too small a change over IPv4 and its fate is really to
be that of extinction, then what other approaches can we
take to a successor to IPv6? Is there anything else
around today that takes a radically different view of
how to multiplex individual transactions within a common
communications system? The answer to this question
appears to be “no”, or at least there appears to be
nothing that has been developed beyond the initial
conceptual stage, and certainly nothing that has been
extensively evaluated for such a role. So, for the near
term, there does not appear to be any alternative
technology waiting in the wings. If we don’t appear to
want to adopt IPv6, and are happy to let it lapse into
extinction, then we need to design and develop another
protocol. In that case how long would such a new design
effort take? And if we embarked along such a path what
is the likelihood that the effort would encounter
precisely the same set of constraints as the IPv4 and
IPv4 design efforts and what is the likelihood that the
effort would end up in much the same place as
IPv6—taking a slightly different view of a common set of
design trade-offs between a common set of basic
constraints that were already encountered in IPv4? Of
course there is also the option of heading well beyond
the current concepts of packet switching and look at
entirely different communications architectures, but
here the considerations of the design and development
timelines become a significant inhibitory factor here.
So if we think that
IPv6 is not the answer, and we believe that we should
look elsewhere for a successor technology to IPv4, then
it is likely that any such effort would take at least a
decade, or, more likely longer to generate a workable
outcome. And the other nagging consideration here is the
question of whether such a design effort would end up as
a marginal outcome in any case. Would we be looking at
no more than a slightly different set of design
trade-offs within a common set of constraints?
So in the near term,
and possibly in a longer term of some decades to come
“extinction” is not a very likely outcome for IPv6—there
is simply no other option on our horizon, so if we are
to move away from IPv4 sometime soon then IPv6 is what
we will be using instead.
Evolution
So if the premature
extinction of IPv6 is highly unlikely, then can we made
do with IP4 indefinitely, or should we be looking for
some evolutionary path into IPv6?
Can we continue to use
IPv4 indefinitely? There’s little doubt that the IPv4
network model is under relatively severe stress in terms
of its address and routing scalability, and there is no
confidence that IPv4 can be made to scale indefinitely
to encompass larger and larger populations of users. As
we’ve already noted the Internet is no longer a simple
network, and as it continues to grow then its likely
that at some point the cost of scaling the various
components and their forms of interaction reach a point
where its just no longer a viable proposition to
continue to grow. While increased volume usually implies
lower unit cost, at come point the cost of complexity
starts to become a significant factor in unit cost
escalation, and the network reaches a scaling failure
point. The possible pressure points include the
capability to scale NAT deployment indefinitely, the
capability to scale routing systems, the capability to
scale network middleware indefinitely, the capability to
effectively ward off various forms of hostile attack on
the network, and the capability for an ever larger ever
more complex network to operate in a stable and useful
fashion. Whether this is a failure point of the
capability of the technology, where the network itself
reaches a size where it just cannot operate in a stable
mode, or whether this is a failure point of the
underlying economics of the network where the unit costs
of the service escalate beyond the point of viability is
an open question, but the common factor is that IPv4 is
a technology platform with finite scaling bounds, and it
cannot fuel an open-ended networking future.
Hopefully we should
have evolved the network beyond these limitations well
before reaching such a critical failure point, and the
major lever here appears to be to head towards a simpler
network that performs fewer functions within the
network. Simpler networks, simpler applications, simpler
operation, better scaling properties. This is certainly
the core promise of IPv6.
So if the question is
“should we evolve the network to IPv6?”, then the
general answer appears to be a resounding “yes” for most
values of “we”.
However the precise
motivations vary for each player. IPv6 can allow for the
resumption of a network model that uses unique global
addresses for each connected endpoint, for endpoint
populations that can scale into the hundreds of
billions. IPv6 is capable of embracing a device-dense
world. The per-address cost can be reduced dramatically
through the elimination of various forms of dynamic
address translation technologies, as well as the
elimination of the scarcity premium factor in IPv4
address mechanisms. Application complexity can also be
reduced, and the diversity of application models can be
broadened. This model of universal addressing allows for
many forms of peer-to-peer networking models as well as
supporting communication transaction security models
that reply on end-to-end coherence. All these factors
point to a networking model that supports simple and
ubiquitous communications services which in turn
supports utility device deployments. So the desired
outcomes appear to point to simpler networks, simpler
applications, larger populations of connected devices,
more efficient services, and a broader diversity of
service models. So the set of potentials presented by
ubiquitous adoption of IPv6 presents a very compelling
picture of benefits for a diversity of players in the
industry.
However none of these
potentials has managed to persuade the industry to take
the plunge and undertake the transition to IPv6 so far.
The potential benefits of IPv6 appear to offer
insufficient drive to the industry to get this
transition underway. Why is this? Perhaps its because
the pressure points of the current IPv4 deployment don’t
cause uniformly high levels of pain. ISPs are neither
application authors nor are they device manufacturers.
So ISPs do not directly incur the additional cost of
complexity in the application or the cost of additional
memory, additional software and additional configuration
complexity in the device. So the ISP feels insufficient
levels of direct pressure to roll out a new network
protocol.
What else would drive
an ISP to deploy a new networking protocol? In crude
terms there are two very basic business drivers—fear and
greed. Greed is the desire to enter new markets in a way
that maximizes beneficial outcomes, while fear is a
defensive response to emulate the business opposition to
defend an existing market position. So in these terms is
there an “early adopter reward” for deployment of IPv6?
What is the fear or greed driver here that would propel
the ISP industry into undertaking this transition?
Unfortunately there appear to be no clear “early
adopter” rewards for IPv6. Existing players currently
have strong motivations to defer expenditure decisions
because of strong shareholder pressure to improve the
earnings per share position within the carrier industry.
This is not the time to support a business case to leap
too far ahead of the existing business model and take a
somewhat riskier longer term position in the market.
There is still some considerable uncertainty over the
future of the voice industry as the competition with
VOIP becomes more intense, and there is still a basic
push by the industry to enter into value-added service
markets that entail more complex network architectures,
and IPv6 is seen as being a longer term direction that
has little of relevance to the current ISP industry
position. The return on investment in the IPv6 business
case is simply not evident in today’s ISP industry. New
players have no compelling motivations to leap too far
ahead of their seed capital. All players see no
incremental benefit in early adoption. And many players
short term interests lie in deferral of additional
expenditure. So the short term industry response appears
to be to defer expenditure on IPv6-based deployments and
await further developments.
So if the question is
“when will this transition to IPv6 happen”, the general
industry response appears to be “later”. So the real
question here is what is the nature of the trigger for
change, or, at what point, and under what conditions,
does a common position of “later” become a common
position of “now”?
So far we have no clear
answer from industry on this question
This is not a case of
where regulatory initiative would be all that helpful.
Our previous experience with OSI and various national
and regional GOSIP programs has provided a convincing
lesson that technology adoption though regulatory
measures or administrative fiat are abject failures. So
we are forced to look back at the market interaction
between services providers and consumers of the services
to see where the leverage may lie. Unfortunately there
are few network differentials in the current consumer
world that provide any great leverage—after all its
still email and its still the web, ands the choice of
protocol over which these applications operate should be
a matter of supreme indifference to the end consumer.
Expecting the consumer to pay more for a supposedly
seamlessly invisible network attribute is indeed a bad
case of wishful thinking. Indeed it is perhaps worse
than this. In recent years we have managed to create a
secondary supply industry based on network complexity,
address scarcity, and insecurity. The prospect of
further revenue erosion from simpler cheaper network
models based on IPv6 deployment is one that this
industry views with some suspicion and fear. The
business obstacles don’t stop here. The concept of
simpler networks leads to the concept of revenue erosion
for provision of network services. In an industry that
has already undergone significant turmoil over the past
decade, and where the current incumbents are looking at
weak financial figures for their businesses the entire
concept of outlaying more capital investment to deploy
an IPv6 network is not exactly a glowing proposition.
Indeed the industry has already invested large sums in
packet-based data communications over the past decade,
and there is little investor interest in still further
infrastructure investment at present. When you add to
this the consideration that IPv6 is a step back to a
simpler, cheaper network, then this translates to an
incremental investment that will reduce their revenue
yield per customer. This is not exactly a
business-friendly proposition. So its little wonder that
the industry has been far more fascinated in the concept
of MPLS, QoS and VPNs in an effort to increase the
returns on their network investment through the quest
for “value added services” and at the same time paid lip
service to IPv6 without any major level of investment to
match.
Oops!
So evolution, or an
ordered migration from IPv4 to IPv6, does not appear to
be happening. IPv6 is not seen in a highly positive
light. IPv6 promotion may have been too much too early,
and these days IPv6 may be seen as tired rather than
wired.
“Everything over HTTP”
and the client-server model of networking has proved far
more viable than perhaps it should have, and these days
any decent application that gains popular attention can
traverse NATs, ALGs and a myriad of other middleware
barriers with consummate ease. If it couldn’t be so
agile then it simply would not gain popular attention.
So we now have an Internet where the service portfolio
appears to be collapsing into a small set of
applications that are based on an even more limited set
of HTTP transactions between servers and clients.
Maybe it’s just
deregulation of the industry, where short term business
pressures simply support the case for further deferral
of IPv6 infrastructure investment. In this economic view
of the Internet industry there is insufficient linkage
between the added cost, complexity and fragility of
deploying network middleware and associated traversal
applications at the edge of the network and the costs of
infrastructure deployment of IPv6 in the middle. This
leads to the observation that deregulated markets are
often not perfect information markets, and the points of
pain, or cost, become isolated from potential remedies,
or savings.
It would appear that
evolution is really not an option for IPv6 either.
Revolution
The transformation of
IPv4 from a research experiment to a mainstream public
communications environment is an interesting case of
technology revolution. IPv4 presented a portfolio of
cheaper switching technologies, more efficient network
usage, simpler networks with lower operational costs,
and structural cost transfer from operational costs
within the network to capital costs at the edge. IPv4
represented a compelling and revolutionary business case
of stunningly cheaper and more effective services to end
customers. This was the silicon revolution at its most
effective. The transformation has not been ordered and
well planned. Some of the giants of the older telephone
world have lost vast amounts of money, some have gone
bankrupt with others have been sold off as mere shadows
of their former market presence. Workforces are being
realigned, investors have had to adjust their
expectations and regulators have been confronted with an
entirely new set of market behaviours and associated
services.
Perhaps the most
compelling view of IPv6 is in the same vein of being a
revolutionary force with large scale disruptive
implications to the industry. The leverage here lies in
the observation that IPv6 represents an opportunity to
embrace the communications requirements of a
device-dense world—an opportunity that is simply lacking
in the IPv4 realm. This device dense world is a world
that is far larger than that of human-use devices, and
encompasses a potential population that is at least some
2 - 3 orders of magnitude larger than today’s Internet.
This encompasses a world of embedded communications,
smart tags and applications that can encompass many
forms of active and passive monitoring.
In and of itself this
sounds benign, of not innocuous for the Internet. But
how much money would you let your washing machine spend
on communications services? Or your luggage tag? Or any
one of thousands of chattering devices? The economics of
a device-based communications world are vastly different
fro that of a human-mediated communication. In the voice
world the value proposition shifted away from cost-based
service tariffs towards value-based tariffs. It wasn’t
the cost of allowing two people to speak to each other,
but the value people placed in being able to talk to
each other. Even the Internet so far has an inherent
value in human-based communication. The value of today’s
Internet lies in people-to-people messaging, lies in web
browsing, lies in downloading entertainment, and lies in
other predominately human pastimes. In a device world
the value proposition is at a much lower level, and one
way to look at the resolution of a device-based Internet
is to think of a service environment that reduces the
end consumer costs by a further 2 to 3 orders of
magnitude. Yes, that implies that the threshold for a
device-rich communications world is an industry price
benchmark of megabit per second access tariffs for
between 2 to 30 cents a month, or being able to purchase
gigabit per second internet access for the same $30
price benchmark we use today.
How to achieve these
revised price benchmarks for Internet services is the
critical question. We’ve already extracted massive
improvements in transmission cost efficiencies in the
move into wave division multiplexing on fibre cable.
We’ve already extracted massive improvements in the
efficiency of switching through the move from time to
packet switches and the move from state-based circuit
switches into stateless packet-based switches. We’ve
already extracted further cost efficiency in the network
by pushing many of the services and functionality out to
the edge and attempting to follow a direction of simpler
cheaper networks.
So what’s left? I
suspect that the truly revolutionary message in IPv6 is
a message about the extracting efficiencies in the
business model of communications. We appear to be
looking at a transition from value to volume with IPv6.
IPv6’s true leverage is about the ability to encompass
world of tens of billions of chattering devices. The
service industry that provides the networking services
to these tens of billions of devices will not be a
bloated inefficient relic of a bygone era of monopoly
service enterprises. Indeed its likely that there will
be nothing in common with the enterprises that operate
in this industry today. IPv6 appears to be carrying an
implication of a quite dramatic shift in the service
enterprise to an industry based on a commodity utility.
We are looking at an industry that will operate at a
level of single digit operating margins and investment
returns similarly phrased. If we want IP to operate from
anonymous sockets in the wall, or seamlessly over
wireless, then we will be looking at service delivery
systems that provide simple lowest common denominator
networking service. The search for value-added services
and value-added networks have no logical role in such a
commodity utility world. This all sounds quite
conventional, and the path to commoditization of many
artifacts and services is a well trodden one in many
industries and service sectors. So why is this such a
revolutionary message for the communications industry? I
suppose that the observation here is that this is one
industry which is continuing to live the myth that there
is a pot of gold out there in value-added
networking-land, and that the windfall profits made in
successive waves of innovation in the telephone industry
over the decades will continue to repeat itself, and
there is a pervasive air of denial over a message that
says that the value is going to be destroyed by volume.
In this industry the words “commodity” and “utility”
remain taboo!
The IPv6 Condition
In taking an objective
look at IPv6, there are no compelling technical feature
or revenue levers in IPv6 that are driving new
investments in existing IP service platforms. It does
not appear that an industry-wide shift to IPv6 is going
to be driven by the current value-added network service
model and the associated current set of consumers of
today’s services. There is just insufficient marginal
benefit to the end consumer to create a value
proposition that will justify paying an increased tariff
for having access to IPv6 as well as IPv4—after all its
still email and its still the web!
The current user base
has managed to become wedged in a situation where there
is not enough impetus to move away from the networking
model of IPv4, and we appear to be stuck within a
client-server model of network-mediated relationships.
The network operators continues to push the network into
undertaking a higher valued role in mediating
communications and usage of the network continues with a
largely human-directed set of services. One could
characterize this as an environment that places
extracting maximal value from the network as the prime
objective, over serving maximal volume
Interestingly, the
underlying engine for digital communications, the
silicon chip industry also started in a vein of
attempting to place silicon chips in highly-valued
devices, but this industry made the switch to a volume
industry decades ago. This is an industry that has
significant cost differentials between design and
fabrication, so it’s probably little surprise that they
quickly appreciated the longer term value in a general
approach to recouping the design cost in very high
volume production runs.
It likely that IPv6
sits in this same situation, and will only gain
widespread industry acceptance within a broader shift in
the communications industry from value to volume. It we
are truly looking at an Internet of gadgets, of billions
of chattering devices, then what will drive IPv6
deployment in a device rich world is a radical and
revolutionary value to volume shift in the IP packet
carriage industry. In IPv6 we appear to be looking at a
shift in the industry to that of an undistinguished
commodity utility service provision industry. An
industry that will inevitably take on once more a very
conservative profile and one that will no longer be able
to afford further extensive and rapid innovation. So if
we take this step into such a world then we need to be
pretty confident that we are comfortable with this step
being a very long term one.
The IPv6 Revolutionary
Manifesto
It is going to be
unlikely that IPv6 is an evolutionary step for the
Internet, but rather that of yet another revolutionary
step for the communications industry. It is likely that
IPv6 will need to compete for market share with IPv4,
and the basic terms of the competition for the consumer
will be price-based competition rather than feature or
service-based. IPv6’s basic potential is that of
extraordinary volume, but to achieve this we will need
to push down unit cost of packet delivery by orders of
magnitude. It appears that the major means of getting
there is through commodity volume economics that will
direct the industry towards even “thicker” transmission
systems, simpler, faster switching systems, lightweight
application transaction models, and an industry profile
of a commodity utility sector.
This is definitely
going to be a painful revolution, as it will be the
industry itself that will offer the highest levels of
resistance to such a radical agenda.
* * *
In June 2003 the
following announcement was made by the US Department of
Defense:
US Department of
Defense adopts IPv6
Implementation of the
next-generation Internet protocol that will bring the
Department of Defense closer to its goal of
net-centric warfare and operations was announced on
June 13, 2003 by John P. Stenbit, Assistant Secretary
of Defense for networks and information integration
and DoD Chief Information Officer.
The new Internet
protocol, known as IPv6, will facilitate integration
of the essential elements of DoD’s Global Information
Grid—its sensors, weapons, platforms, information and
people. Secretary Stenbit is directing the DoD-wide
transition.
The current version
of the Internet’s operating system, IPv4, has been in
use by DoD for almost 30 years. Its fundamental
limitations, along with the world-wide explosion of
Internet use, inhibit net-centric operations. IPv6 is
designed to overcome those limitations by expanding
available IP address space, improving end-to-end
security, facilitating mobile communications,
enhancing quality of service and easing system
management burdens.
“Enterprise-wide
deployment of IPv6 will keep the warfighter secure and
connected in a fast-moving battlespace,” Secretary
Stenbit said. “Achievement of net-centric operations
and warfare depends on effectively implementing the
transition.”
Secretary Stenbit
signed a policy memorandum on June 9 that outlines a
strategy to ensure an integrated, timely and effective
transition. A key element of the transition minimizes
future transition costs by requiring that, starting in
October 2003, all network capabilities purchased by
DoD be both IPv6-capable and interoperable with the
department’s extensive IPv4 installed base.
I was asked to provide
a comment on this announcement, and at the time I made
the following response:
The enduring value of
IPv6 lies in the massive amount of coherent address
space that allows literally billions of devices to be
uniquely addressed. Address uniqueness is a strong value
proposition when you want an identifier space to cover a
very large deployment space. As an example of this, one
of the two properties of the original
Digital-Intel-Xerox Ethernet II specification that
remains in today’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet specification is
unique 48 bit MAC addresses. All of that highly
innovative CSMA/CD thinking that at the time we thought
was the fundamental property of Ethernet has been
dispensed with, and it’s the address space that still
defines “Ethernet” today.
The general observation
is that any communications system requires any party to
be able to uniquely identify any other party in order to
initiate a private communication session. If you cannot
perform that most basic of communications functions,
then you simply do not have a functional peer-to-peer
communications network.
But doesn’t that mean
that the stories of IPv4 address exhaustion have some
substance? With the large amount of addressable devices
hidden behind NATs, and the associated move to using
domain names as the underlying identifier space for many
communications applications, the pressure on consumption
of IPv4 address space has been reduced considerably, but
at the cost of increased network complexity. This has
implied that in a world of human-driven screens and
keyboards we see some considerable lifetime left in the
admittedly comfortable world of IPv4 as we know it. To
support this model we’ve actually moved away from the IP
address as the unique identifier token for many
applications, and substituted an application model that
is largely driven from domain names. As a trivial
example, look at the virtual hosting mechanism as
implemented in web server implementations to see this
shift in server identifiers from IP address to domain
name. So in the context of the current IP market, as
both as consumers of the technology and as an industry,
we can live with this identity split for some time yet,
because we appear to concentrate our use IP addresses as
a routing and forwarding framework identity and
increasingly use the DNS as the identifier realm of
applications.
Our world is a world
where the device is subservient to the user, and the
applications we associate with the Internet of today are
applications that are essentially human pastimes, such
as e-mail, web browsing, or high-value automated
transactions, such as those commonly bracketed into the
e-commerce area. And we’ve now established a highly
valuable global industry upon these foundations.
In so doing we should
recognize the emergence of a second set of
communications realms populated by uniquely identified
devices that number in their billions, where the
inter-device traffic is not human mediated, and the
value of the device transactions are, on an individual
transactions value level, far lower than the value of
the human-driven realm of IPv4. In other words, in a
device rich communications realm, it’s likely that the
human value we’d ascribe on average to each packet is
far lower than our current Internet IPv4 world of
human-mediated communications. And it’s this
extravagantly device-equipped world that we see the U.S.
Department of Defense heading. If your stock in trade is
one of quite astounding feats of logistical deployment
of large numbers of people and large numbers of items of
equipment, then the communications requirement is of a
different order of scale to that of the retail Internet
markets, and, yes, I’m sure that there are entirely
effective arguments behind that decision to look forward
to a communications realm with a uniform base protocol
identifier domain in a scale that is 2 to the power 96
times larger than the entire IP address identifier
domain of IPv4.
I would be cautious
about high levels of expectation that this immediately
translates into an impetus in the market where you and I
converse. My host here where I’m typing this message is
already IPv6 capable, and if you are running a recent
version of host software, then it’s a reasonable
assumption that yours is too. But I’ll send this message
over IPv4 and you’ll receive it over IPv4, and between
my mail sender and your mail receiver the transport
channel will also be IPv4. Should we use IPv6 instead?
Would I pay my provider additional money to compensate
it for part of its additional expenditure to support a
simultaneous IPv6 capable network between you and me? To
send precisely the same message? In precisely the same
time? Along the same path? Using the same transport TCP
session? Obviously, to me, as a (hopefully) economically
rational consumer of such services, and no doubt to you,
in a similar role, there is no value in spending more
money to achieve outcomes in IPv6 that are identical to
what we can already do today in IPv4. And in the retail
Internet world that remains the basic IPv6 conundrum.
Why should any provider spend additional resources to
service the same market with identical services, and in
so doing be unable to raise additional revenue to offset
their additional service costs? One interpretation is
that there is no natural motivation for such activities
in today’s market, otherwise it would already be very
widespread indeed.
What we’ve seen in the
mainstream Internet world is an emerging mythology about
IPv6 that somehow this additional expenditure,
ultimately on the part of the consumer, provides some
additional benefit for the consumer, motivating them to
switch from IPv4-only services to some hybrid of mixed
v4 and v6 and ultimately to a v6 world, and thereby
funding the additional provider expenditure associated
with such a massive transition.
The reality is more
sobering in that in the retail Internet world there is
so far nothing obvious in the “additional benefit”
category. I’m using Network Address Translation (NAT)
right now, using an ssh session back to my mail server
that drives through NAT boxes to make a secure SMTP
session, across a first step of 802.11 wireless in order
to pass this message into a mailing list. I’ve
auto-configured my laptop in the wireless world, and for
me I’m living in a plug-and-play world that supports my
level of roaming access. Would IPv6 make this session
any more secure? Any different in terms of Quality of
Service (QoS)? In plug-and-play models of roaming? Would
there be any visible difference in terms of my ability
to communicate with you? To all of these questions the
basic answer is still “no.”
So, for you and I, we
look inside the IPv6 technology box, and find nothing
new there to motivate us to spend more money for our
existing Internet-based communications services, and for
some time to come it would appear that this limitation
will still hold.
On the other hand there
are circumstances where there is a need to operate in a
much larger base protocol address space. These include
situations where one wants to take advantage of Internet
applications that operate across a world of literally
billions of devices, large and small. The application
space may want to gather constant reports on the
characteristics of the “thing” it is attached to, from a
ration pack to a component of a large naval vessel. You
may want to use supply channels for such devices such
that the deployment is a plug-and-play world without a
massive variety of detailed configuration processes. You
may be looking to an architecture that would be stable
for many years. In such circumstances you really want
take advantage of a uniform set of Internet application
technologies that potentially span massive numbers of
addressable devices. Here a large base address space is
a definite asset. And for such industry sectors in
voicing such requirements where there is also a somewhat
different ultimate value proposition for the supported
communications activity, then it’s quite understandable
that there can be an attractive proposition offered by
immediate adoption of IPv6.
But back in the
communications realm where you and I currently exchange
our messages, such requirements remain in a future
framework that is still waiting for relevant value
propositions that allow it to gain traction with you and
me.
Maybe we just need to
be patient. Steam ships did not halt operation the first
day a diesel powered vessel appeared. It was a much
slower process that led to an outcome of the change of
the maritime fleet. The next generation of mechanization
of naval vessels offered cheaper services, and, as often
happens, market price won in that commodity market.
Market price often wins
in competitive commodity markets. And the Internet
retail market is, in many parts of the world and in many
sectors, a strongly competitive space with all the
characteristics of a commodity offering. And there no
doubt that if you and I could communicate in precisely
the same fashion as we do today, with precisely the same
applications and service environment, using precisely
the same host devices and operating systems as we do
today, but at some attractive fraction of today’s price,
then I’m sure that neither of us would care in the
slightest that our data was encapsulated using a packet
framing format and address tokens that used the IPv6
protocol specifications.
The above views do not
necessarily represent the views or positions of the Asia
Pacific Network Information Centre.
Source
Credit: This has been a featured post from
Geoff Huston, Chief Scientist & Author.
