[Discuss] Geoff Huston's talk at NANOG53

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

Chuck Anderson wrote:
> ...Geoff Huston's talk at NANOG53...:
> 
> http://www.nanog.org/meetings/abstract?id=1853
> 
> The talk is about IPv4 exhaustion and IPv6 transition, but at
> timestamps 10:20, 15:40, and 18:20 he talks about the business aspects
> of providing last-mile access.

This was an interesting listen.

He suggests we are unlikely to see a transition to IPv6 in part because
the carriers are profiting from the scarcity of IPv4, and they already
have lots of sunk cost in v4 equipment.

He lost me, though, we he started to describe how they would use the
IPv4 to IPv6 transition points like a toll bridge and extract money from
content providers. Doesn't tunneling provide a bypass to reach
competitors who can provide that transition point?

An interesting point made was that China was moving forward with v6 far
more quickly than the US, and he speculated that by the time the US gets
around to making the transition (possibly a decade later), the US will
be likely to invent new tech (not clear if he meant new protocols, or v6
hardware) resulting in a potentially incompatible network.

He offered some suggestions for how to increase the visibility of the
problem (exhaustion of IPv4 addresses), but didn't offer up any
solutions for it.

On the last-mile issue he said that the big difference between the old
telecom companies and the ones today is that the old ones were
vertically integrated, such that the sales of profitable services
subsidized the lower layer infrastructure, while today all the profit is
in selling content services, with no money to pay for the infrastructure.

I'm not sure I buy that, if you look at the stats for an ISP like
Comcast, who supposedly makes more profit on net connections than they
do selling video. Maybe in the big picture content (aggregated across
everything available on the Internet) is were the majority of the money
is, but that doesn't mean that the infrastructure part of the business
can't itself be quite profitable, and easily afford v6 equipment.


>Seth Gordon wrote:
>> The Right Way to run the telecom system, IMHO, would be to "delaminate"
>> it (h/t David Weinberger). Have the ILECs be responsible for maintaining
>> the network infrastructure that shuttles bits from place to place, and 
>> let them rent out that bandwidth to service providers, but forbid them 
>> from actually providing any of those services themselves.
> 
> I think Geoff Huston's talk at NANOG53 captures pretty well why this
> doesn't work, and can even be dangerous

You're referring to Huston's point that the lack of vertical integration
is to blame?

But we're stuck in a middle ground. We may not have the vertical
integration of the older companies, but we also don't have the
separation of concern that Seth describes.

The problem seem to come about when you have a company that is
responsible for both, but they see the content side as more profitable,
and there are no regulations or competitive pressure to make them care
about the infrastructure side.

A company that is limited to infrastructure by its legal charter will be
focused on improving and making that infrastructure profitable. It'll
require less regulation, as government won't care how it implements the
infrastructure, as long as it sticks to that as its only business.
Though this still leaves plenty of opportunity for an ILEC to provide
minimum required services at the least cost and milk the monopoly. It
may be that in the absence of competition, the only answer is to have
the ILEC managed (i.e. roadmap of speed improvements) by the community,
even if the physical plant is maintained by a telco under contract.

At some point Huston mentions that community ran infrastructure might be
the solution. That's identical to what Seth suggests, except the ILEC is
government ran instead of private.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/