The IPv6 Conundrum: The Interplay Between Carriage, Content, and Regulation, and 
the Impact on Economies:
With Geoff Huston, Chief Scientist, APNIC

{fastsocialshare}

Among the many important Internet anniversaries and milestones we reached in 2011, a significant one was in February 2011, when IANA handed out its final blocks of IPv4 address to the RIRs (Regional Internet Registries). Plus, the IPv4 address stocks are rapidly running out in the Asia Pacific, and other regions will soon follow!

Thus, it was timely that on World IPv6 Day, June 8, 2011, Google, Yahoo, Bing and Facebook, converted their main web pages to be reachable over both IPv4 and IPv6 (for a 24-hour test period). This acted to draw the attention of the industry towards preparing their service offerings for IPv6, and was also intended to encourage them to accelerate their deployment plans for IPv6 in the Internet.

The imminent exhaustion of IPv4 addresses and the profusion of mobile devices, and more importantly, of M2M (machine-to-machine communication) over wired and wireless media (creating potential demand for hundreds of millions of IP addresses each year), has brought to the fore very interesting issues relating to the transition to IPv6 – E.g. When will it finally occur? How will that process play out? What are the positions of the various players – service providers, content providers, end-users, regulators, and governments -- involved? What are the pushes and pulls, and even the economic implications of this transition?

Indeed, given that IPv6 development was started as a successor to IPv4, during the original discussions of IPv4 address exhaustion back in 1990, and its specification more or less complete by 1998, even we wondered why is it that IPv6 is not already in deployments, and why the brouhaha about the transition to IPv6?

To delve into these issues, we invited Geoff Huston, the pre-eminent world authority on IPv4 exhaustion (and Internet pioneer and visionary, and “Father of the Internet” in Australia, to those of us who have been around a bit in the industry) to share his perspective on this fascinating and, as will be seen, fairly complex issue. Geoff interacted with us during an episode of our signature series “Conversations with Experts,” to share the essence of his key insights into migration issues, having been quoted in the OECD’s publication “The Internet Technical Community Issues Memorandum on Future of the Internet in a Global Economy,” 2008..

 {fastsocialshare}

In this Conversations with Experts episode, we focus on five key aspects of IPv6 deployment and the issues it raises.

Geoff first provides, in his own words, a brief run down of his work in the Internet, going back to the early 80’s, culminating with his seminal role in bringing the Internet to Australia in 1989.

We then discuss address exhaustion in the Internet, it’s history, and why it’s a problem. From there we segue into IPv6, and what the implications are for the various players – service providers/carriage providers, content providers, and end-users, of such a transition. We focus on the investments needed do so, the cost-benefit argument for doing so (who benefits and who should invest in the infrastructure), and finally, who should pay for this transition and why? All complex and interesting issues!

Geoff then explains the carriage providers' problems, with a beautiful analogy going back to the barge operators of old in England! This explains the perpetual tension between the carriage providers (the barge operator or the service provider) and the content provider (the shipper or merchant of old, and the content providers (Google, Netflix, et al) of today).

Geoff draws upon his extensive work with numerous world bodies such as OCED, ITU-T, APEC, and ICANN, to explain why simple market forces many not, in this case, be sufficient to propel the transition to IPv6. It turns out that the Internet is too economically core an infrastructure (worldwide) for it to be controlled solely by the vagaries of “market forces.” Indeed, we then focus on the impact of such a transition (or not) for the economic well-being of many nations, and it is fascinating to hear Geoff articulating the case for some regulator intervention to nudge activity towards the overall economic good of nations.

Geoff’s insights into IPv6 transition issues can also be found in the March 2011 issue of the Internet Protocol Journal.

Biography

Geoff Huston is currently Chief Scientist at the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), where he focuses on Internet infrastructure, IP technologies, address distribution, and Internet operation. Geoff is an internationally recognized and sought after expert, and widely regarded as the pre-eminent researcher on IPv4 exhaustion and IPv6 transition issues.

Prior to APNIC, Geoff spent 10 years (1995-2005) at Telstra as Chief Internet Scientist, and earlier as Technical Manager of the pre-eminent Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNET). At Telstra, he took a leading role in the construction and development of Telstra’s Internet service offerings in Australia and internationally, and was instrumental in introducing the Internet in Australia, back in 1989.

Geoff is an internationally recognized authority, active in numerous Internet organizations, such as the IETF, NANOG, RIPE. He has been on the Internet Architecture Board, and the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. He is an invited speaker, representative, and advisor to numerous international forums and government bodies, advising them on the economic impacts of IP technologies. He is currently Co-Chair of IETF Working Groups on BGP Security and IPv6 Multi-homing.

Geoff is the author/co-author of some fundamental books on IP technology including: The Internet Performance Survival Guide, John Wiley, February 2000; An ISP Survival Guide, John Wiley and Sons, November 1998; Quality of Service: Delivering QoS on the Internet and in Corporate Networks, John Wiley and Sons, February 1998.

Geoff received the BSc (Hons) and MSc (Computer Science) degrees from the Australian National University. His personal website and blog (with insightful observations on all things Internet!) can be found here , and a very interesting bio can be found here.

  Go Back

From Telephone Poles to GPON & Packet-Optical Networking: 100 Years of a Rural 
Carrier’s Evolution!:
With Bob Bender, Network Operations Manager, CTS Telecom

{fastsocialshare}

In this day and age, one hears and reads a lot about operator woes: stiff competition, declining voice revenues, increasing traffic volumes, growing network complexity, convergence to a common IP-network, and the need for sophisticated value added services all keep coming up in conversations! With this thought in mind, we at Metanoia, Inc. set out to find some examples of operators that were bucking the trend, and see if we could glean the essence of how they have been able to accomplish that.

So, with operators concerned about costs and profitability, how does a 100-year old phone company in rural America maintain a profitable data services business? It is really possible to thwart competition from behemoths, grow a loyal customer base, and provide great service, all while still remaining profitable? What are the “secrets” and what lessons might other small to medium operators glean from such an example?

This is a question that intrigued us, as we met and interacted with Bob Bender of CTS Telecom, the CLEC arm of a 100-year old traditional telephone company, Climax Telecom in Climax, Michigan. We learnt that the secret lies in using technology cleverly, making technology transitions at the “right” time, and in scaling operations appropriately.

To help elucidate these concepts further, and to share with us the interesting story of how Climax Telephone evolved from doing traditional phone service to, today, offering packet-based Ethernet EVCs (!) – quite a leap if we may say so :-), we invited Bob Bender of CTS Telecom (who has had an instrumental role in enabling this transition, from in-the-trenches work to high-level design) to an episode of our signature series “Conversations with Experts.” Bob discusses with us this (on-going) transformation.

 {fastsocialshare}

In this Conversations with Experts episode, we talk with Bob Bender about CTS Telecom’s evolution and transition over the years, to draw out some key takeaways of their approach, which we believe would be valuable for other small and medium operators.

Bob starts with telling us a bit about Climax Telephone’s history, and then talks about the range of technologies they’ve had over the years, and their evolution to the present day. The key to the transition was the ability to meet the three main technology challenges – transform their switching for voice from TDM to packets, deploy a high-speed IP core, and a provide Carrier-Ethernet based all-packet access network.

We then seque into discussing CTS Telecom’s differentiators, and talk about what they have meant for their success thus far. Bob then highlights CTS Telecom’s strategy to transform its access network. It’s unique proposition being that, unlike other competitors (large and small), CTS Telecom has invested (and continues to invest) in building/acquiring a last-mile access network, which gives it control of the much-coveted "last mile", while reducing dependence on the incumbents for last-mile access to the end-customer. In addition, CTS Telecom has invested in sbuilding valuable partnerships with its vendors, and expanding its “on-ramp” strategy.

Finally, we conclude with summarizing how all these pieces fit together allowing CTS Telecom to today come full circle – from carrying packets over TDM to carrying TDM over packets!

Biography

Bob Bender is Network Operations Manager at CTS Telecom, and has been there since 1998. (Climax Telephone is a 100-year old ILEC in Climax, MI, with CLEC operations as CTS Telecom since 1996.)

At CTS Telecom, Bob plays a truly multi-faceted role, leading network architecture, design, and technology planning. Additionally, Bob and his team in Operations and Engineering are also responsible for contributing to strategy, and for technical sales, customer meetings, vendor relations, service development, and road-mapping to keep CTS Telecom on the cusp of the technology curve!

Bob and his team have been instrumental in helping CTS Telecom make several significant technology transitions. Recent projects have included the selection, design, and implementation of the Metaswitch softswitch, TDM-to- packet migration planning, NGN packet-optical network planning and implementation, and the launch of MEF-based Ethernet services. Current activity also includes ARRA Broadband Stimulus GPON implementation in the ILEC and a NGN access network project to replace the legacy DCL and Wave7 EPON with the Adtran Total Access 5000 MSAP.

Bob has had to evolve his career, to keep him on the edge of new technology evolutions in computers and networking, amassing the expertise that serves him well to this day!

Indeed, with a background in graphic design, Bob dropped out of art school to work as “compositor” for a publisher, operating phototypesetting equipment. As technology advanced, he became a systems manager, overseeing a mini-computer based text-processing system that output on phototypesetting equipment. With the advent of personal computing and “desktop publishing”, Bob moved to the vendor side, as a network engineer for a publishing systems integrator, delving into LAN and WAN networks and dabbling with routers, just as IP networks started to evolve.

The future of traditional publishing looked bleak, and the constant nationwide travel to publishing sites became exhausting, so an opportunity arose to change careers. An associate of Bob’s who was a manager for Climax Telephone said “How’d you like to learn about the phone business?” Since this meant being home every night, although less lucrative :-), Bob made the official switch from publishing to telecom.

His first assignment was a month at Lucent 5ESS translations school, after which he worked in “translations”. At that point, all of Climax’s revenues were from voice services. As the Internet blossomed, Bob attended a class on Cisco routers. Climax had been providing T1s for several small ISPs, but they proved short-lived. Finally, CTS decided to get into providing Internet access for its customers, initially using IDSL, and then T1 and integrated access (voice and Internet). In 2004, he was named “Data Products Manager” and lead the development of the ISP operations. In 2005, Bob spearheaded the deployment of PON. In 2009/10 he helped design and launch CTS Telecom’s Ethernet and packet optical network, and their Ethernet services business.

  Go Back