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The Internet IT Technology

The Next Net 237

Posted by Zonk from the interweb-2.0 dept.
Qa32 wrote to give a heads up on a BBC article discussing the IETF's plans for the future, including information on VoIP, IPv6, and security concerns. From the article: "Given the net was designed for the whole community, it has done well to reach millions. If you want to reach the whole population, you have to make sure it can scale up."
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The Next Net More

The Next Net

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  • Mass media distribution (Score:3, Insightful)

    by thundercatslair ( 809424 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @01:26PM (#12060747)
    IPv6 is nothing, it was just created because we are running out of IP addresses quickly. The future as I see it is mass distribution of media. Instead of running out and buying movies you could download the whole dvd and watch that.

    • Re:Mass media distribution (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mboverload ( 657893 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @01:44PM (#12060851) Journal
      First we need download speeds that are even close to our Asian neighbors.

      It is pathetic that even poor people in South Korea have lines for 20 bucks a month at 25 mbps. America the leader in tech? I beg to differ.

      • South Korea is also just a *teensy* bit smaller than the US. The infrastructure costs required to wire all the areas in the US with 25 Mbps speeds would be enormous. Also, just how many people can afford 20USD/month in South Korea? Does this include "the poor people"? Quit trying to compare two vastly different situations just to bash the US.
        • These comparisons are normalized to scale. Why doesn't *anywhere* in the US, like a Korea-sized area around NYC encompassing 50M people, get 25bps for $20? Where lots more people have $20:mo? Could it be that the situations are vastly different in the agressiveness with which the respective telcos are pursuing innovation? Or are you saying that Koreans are somehow innately more bandwidth-hungry than Americans?
          • Verizon just laid fiber in my neighborhood (suburban Pennsylvania) and are rolling out 15mbps for $40/month. Not bad.
            • I get 6Mbps residential RoadRunner for $50:mo in NYC, which used to cost $25K over fractional T3 only to businesses, so I'm kinda happy. By the time they deliver 25Mpbs for $20:mo, Koreans will have 155Mbps.
          • Korea is a lot more densely populated than the USA, or most of the western world, as far as I know. It makes a big difference on returns if the infrastructure you're laying down is reaching 10 times as many people per unit length.

            That doesn't explain the excellent, although probably not quite as good, internet connectivity in Sweden and the Netherlands.

            ~phil

            • Re:Mass media distribution (Score:4, Insightful)

              by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @02:47PM (#12061151) Homepage Journal
              What about the Korea-sized swath from DC, through Philly and NYC, to Boston? It's pretty densely populated with rich media consumers. Why not just in NYC, where only 10% of the fiber is even lit, and we're among the richest, hungriest media consumers on the planet? Could it be that broadband providers are limited by their bizmodel, defined by the regulations they lobby incessantly to retain? That their lazy management is more interested in the low-hanging fruit of overcharging for pay-per-view of the movies they own, rather than opening up the infrastructure to competition from every shop with real broadband, or P2P?
          • 25bps for $20? Poor lads. I hope, it is more along the line of 25Mbps. :)

            I think it is because the telco-market in the US has been fairly agressive, which didn't leave much room for investments in the future.

            The bandwidth we enjoy outside of the U.S is usually the result of previous "investments" in state monopolies. The investment resulted in having a good infrastructure. Overspec'ed, just to telephone with.

            Today, years after liberalising the telco-market, the companies can use this infrastructure in pl
            • What US competition? The telcos spent their money acquiring each other, and building extra infrastructure they don't want to sell, because it would create competition for their pay-per-view and telephony businesses. "Aggressive", sure, but not for innovation.

        • Re:Mass media distribution (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Hogwash McFly ( 678207 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @02:40PM (#12061105)
          Quit trying to compare two vastly different situations just to bash the US

          You know, not every negative observation about the United States is an attempt to jump on the 'US Bashing' bandwagon.
        • South Koreans are not all that poor.

          Every post seems to be suggesting that south korean is some third world country, with the economic strength of Uganda when the reality is that their GDP per capita is roughly equivalent to that of lesser EU nations.
      • Only on Slashdot can you make some wild accusation like the US is the leader in technology (who says we are?) and then correct your own made up shit and be moderated as funny all the way up to 5.

        As far as this population density stuff goes, few people mention the cost of living differences between South Korea and the United States. Sure, $20USD (15.4EUR)sounds miniscule to us (any first-world country really), but that could be a big percentage of a South Koreans households' take-home pay. The telecom com

      • For DSL, getting this kind of speed is predicated on local loop length. Some major North American providers are now putting in FTTN (or even FTTP) which will make local loop lengths short enough for VDSL, which will get you your 25 Mbps, or even higher. This builds out the infrastructure needed for triple play (data + video + voice).

        This hasn't been done previously in North America because getting that much fiber laid wasn't economically feasible here. That is starting to change. It doesn't have anything

      • "First we need download speeds that are even close to our Asian neighbors."

        Uh, right. We don't need 25 megabit connections for movies. 150KB/s is enough for streaming a dvd quality video (MPEG4 compressed). I regularly get 400KB/s thanks to my handy-dandy cable modem. Heck, a few years ago I was subscribed to an on-demand service that worked pretty well. Pity it went bye bye. :(

  • Interesting quote (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @01:28PM (#12060757)

    From part-way down TFA:

    "The top priority is to ensure that the standards that make the net work, are open and free for anyone to use and work with."

    Interesting for many here that the new guy at the head of the IETF seems to give this issue such emphasis.

    • Re:Interesting quote (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "Interesting for many here that the new guy at the head of the IETF seems to give this issue such emphasis."

      You mean just like the standards that make the existing net work?

      Actually, my biggest fear is VoIP - not directly, but the flak it will take from the telcos. I think we'll see some serious posturing from them as VoIP as a core feature on a internet upgrade would destroy their revenue model, not partly, but totally. They won't own the network, and they don't make the phones, they'll become a redunda

  • Just make sure... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @01:29PM (#12060766)
    you keep patents out of the standards... Microsoft have been trying to stick one in for the basic premises of IPv6... and surprise, surprise... they were also involved in the standards committee... [eweek.com]
    Those familiar with the meetings of the IETF as the committee hammered out the IPv6 IP address discovery system told eWEEK.com that Microsoft was actively participating in those discussions back in late 1997 and early 1998. Microsoft left the meetings and filed a patent for work on which there already existed numerous RFCs (requests for consensus)--basically the legislation that runs the Internet.
  • This history of IPv6 will never be introduced on our planet when the big players (ISP, Datacenters) and universities start using our their network. Someday I asked my Internet provider when will they start using IPv6 on dial-up networks, imagine what response did I got? "IPv6??? What is it"
    • Get a real ISP then, my ISP (Andrews & Arnold) assigned a v6 block to me, and have been doing so for at least a year.
    • At least according to this article [gcn.com]. And adoption by a major US Government Agency will if not force at least strongly encourage organisations doing business in that arena to follow. And then their upstreams. And so on.

      Also, in all honesty, I fear that the 4 billion number is low, not high and NAT/PAT are only stopgap measures. (Especially with the relatively wide range of protocols that require application level awareness to actually translate, including such staples as H.323 and the rest of the multimedi

  • Dosen't the internet scale? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blanks ( 108019 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @01:30PM (#12060772) Homepage Journal
    "If you want to reach the whole population, you have to make sure it can scale up."

    I thought with the current schema the internet uses it was allways setup to scale and allow for redundency, where one section can do down and a new one can take place. Or new networks could easily be added, and expanded off of.

    Even new technologys like P2P and torrent etc were able to come out, still functioning correctly with the internet with no changes.

    Maybe they mean the ability for the technology to scale up, meaning situations like the IPv6 would not be such a consern. But then again IPv6 is a huge change to the entire structure of how the internet functions.
    • The internet is not as robust as you think. Have a few DNS servers go down (as we saw some months ago) and the whole web is fucked.
      • Have a few DNS servers go down (as we saw some months ago)

        Whoa, did I miss something? What happened some months ago with the DNS?

        Anyway, root servers are all over the world as far as I know, so there's plenty of redundancy there. Even TLD and cTLD have replicas all over the place.

        And even if the whole DNS structure came down, "the internet" would be still up. Only the name resolution service would be down.

        You would need a full scale DOS and take down most of the tier 1 providers (not unthinkable wi

    • Re:Dosen't the internet scale? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      from my understanding, IPv6 isn't THAT dramatic of a change from IPv4. It's all in the addressing. Your NIC doesn't really CARE what address it has. For that matter a router shouldn't care what is really going on with the addresses other than "This packet goes here and that packet goes there". IPv6 makes that a little different but not totaly alien.

      There will still be subnet masks and that will still be what a router uses to move packets from one network to another. Once a packet is on the "correct" n
    • There are some issues that are making it hard for the Internet to scale up. For a few years now there have been issues with the size of the routing tables on the major routers. It is nice to think that this is just a hardware issue and new routers would solve the problem. But that would be ignoreing the economics of the situation.

  • An observation on IPv6 (Score:4, Informative)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @01:33PM (#12060785) Homepage Journal
    Here's a little observation about IPv6 - very few major web sites have an IPv6 address.

    Try it yourselve with dig or nslookup - try looking up AAAA records for any of the sites you visit, and see how many would be accessible via IPv6.

    For example, try
    dig slashdot.org aaaa

    • Re:An observation on IPv6 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jrcamp ( 150032 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @01:54PM (#12060894)
      Please read about Transition Mechanisms [wikipedia.org] for IPv6.

      This is not an all or nothing thing. We do not have to turn out the lights on IPv4 before we can start utilizing IPv6.

      • True, IPv4 addresses are a subset of the IPv6 address space.

        However, if the site in question does not support IPv6 packet formats, then an IPv6-only host would not be able to contact the site, as the site would not be able to form the IPv6 packets back to the requesting host.

        So either the requesting host would have to have an IPv4 address available to it (either directly or via NAT), or the requesting host would be unable to access the site.

        And the simplest way a web site can advertise its ability to sup

        • Re:An observation on IPv6 (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          It's expected that transition stages (different people will pass through these at different rates according to their needs & budgets) will include

          1. Most systems having IPv4 only, IPv4 is used for all internal & external services

          2. Systems have IPv4 and IPv6, but IPv4 is used for internal services, some IPv6 external services are used without specific engineering (this is what you get if you set up a modern OS X, Linux or beta Windows these days by default)

          3. Internal services become available on

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Very few major web sites have AAAA records. But a regular A record gives you an IPv6 address, because the IPv4 address space is included in the IPv6 address space. Chances are that current sites won't generally move to IPv6-only addresses for a long time, just because there's little reason to discard an IPv4 address you already have, or to get a second IPv6 address in addition to the automatic equivalent. Slashdot, for example, has the IPv6 address ::66.35.250.150, aka ::4223:FA96, and will probably keep us

  • Wow! think of all them IP addresses. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pg110404 ( 836120 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @01:39PM (#12060818)
    I believe IPv6 has something like 50 addresses for every square foot of land on the earth.

    That's amazing. Soon we'll be able to wire up our entire house and everything from the fridge to the alarmclock would be accessible from the internet.

    I only hope if it gets to that, nobody can hack into my microwave when I'm cooking my dinner, or someone hacking into my alarm clock and messes with the settings.

    If microsoft does good on their desire to control it all, they'd better finally have some reasonable measure of security. I wouldn't want to wake up to find out some low life got to my hot water heater and turned it off because of a buffer overflow vulnerability.
    • They have this other thing called "NAT" (Network Address Translation [wikipedia.org]). You could use it to assign every device in your house a 10.0.0.0/8 (I think that's the CIDR) address, and still only present one IP to the public internet. It's what's making IPv6 so slowly adopted - it's unlikely that you'll have more than 16,000,000 devices in your house.

      • Re:Wow! think of all them IP addresses. (Score:5, Informative)

        by asdfghjklqwertyuiop ( 649296 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @02:40PM (#12061104)
        NAT is no substitute for real address space. The only reason so many people use it today is because real address space is too limited.

        • NAT has other purposes (Score:5, Interesting)

          by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @03:29PM (#12061379) Homepage Journal
          NAT is the ISPs way of keeping its subscribers in line, and acting as consumers rather than citizens. Given the TOS of my ISP, it just doesn't matter whether I get NATted, or not. Anything I could do that I can't do behind NAT isn't allowed.

      • They have this other thing called "NAT" (Network Address Translation). You could use it to assign every device in your house a 10.0.0.0/8 (I think that's the CIDR) address, and still only present one IP to the public internet. It's what's making IPv6 so slowly adopted - it's unlikely that you'll have more than 16,000,000 devices in your house.

        OK, and how do I address them? With one external address that's a maximum of 64k connections I can bring in. And sure, people may not be likely to have quite tha

    • from http://engr.smu.edu/~tchen/eets7304_spring05/hw5_ s oln.pdf

      Problem 8. (IPv6) (a) Given that IPv6 addresses are 128 bits, calculate the total number of possible IPv6 addresses. (b) Calculate the surface area of the earth in square feet. Consider the radius of the earth as 3,963 miles, and one mile is 5280 feet (the surface area is 4ðr2). (c) Calculate the number of IPv6 addresses per square foot of earth surface. (d) Repeat the same calculations for IPv4; how many IPv4 addresses per square foot?(a
    • This is the equivalent of 4.3 × 1020 (430 quintillion) addresses per inch (6.7 × 1017 (670 quadrillion) addresses/mm) of the Earth's surface

      hooray! [wikipedia.org]
    • 50 addresses for every square foot

      I stand corrected. It's been years since I even given IPv6 even a first though, I forgot all about it. The 50 addresses statement would be true if IPv6 had a 6 byte address (48 bits), not the actual 128 bits (ipv4 is coincidentally 4 bytes, ipv6 is version 6, not 6 bytes long, and as I've discovered, the version and bytes in IP addresses are not related).

      So doing the math (this time entire earth surface area, not just land mass, as per equator diameter with something

    • I believe IPv6 has something like 50 addresses for every square foot of land on the earth.

      Actually, I believe the figure's much bigger - something like 6.2 x 10^22. (My own calculation, confirmed by one web page, though others give widely varying results. That's based on a figure of 197 million square miles, incl. sea.)

      But that's not the point, because the addresses aren't evenly spread. Once you allocate some of the most significant values to various organisation, protocols, or special values, the

    • Yes, but that number goes down substantially for every cubic foot of area that people could build. Or the number of devices that may want multiple IP's. A 50 floor office building would only have 1 per square foot, and that may be divided amongst things which, for sake of electronics efficiency, may all require an IP. IP over power lines may become standard, and everything may want to feed back state and / or tracking information over it.

      Let's not forget the ever-present allocation inefficiencies. I wo

  • An easier way? (Score:5, Funny)

    by TimeTraveler1884 ( 832874 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @01:41PM (#12060832)
    Given the net was designed for the whole community, it has done well to reach millions. If you want to reach the whole population, you have to make sure it can scale up.

    Wouldn't it just be easier to lower the population to millions rather than changing current infrastructure?

  • Uh-huh! (Score:5, Funny)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @01:47PM (#12060861)
    "If you want to reach the whole population, you have to make sure it can scale up."


    What that means to you, MBAs, is that it sounds like by i-deploying its cross-market and granular mix of best-of-breed technologies for today's e-enterprise, the interweb will finally be scalable!

  • 2.1? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @02:03PM (#12060935) Homepage Journal
    Whatever happened to Internet2? Was it just another Bubble scam, in reverse? Just a way for academics to rip off government and investors with handwaving promises of "Next Generation" apps, from the magic cloud that birthed the first Internet (but without the genius and visionaries)? Internet2 has been in "startup" phase for almost a decade - where's the return? And if it's just percolating beneath the surface of these announcements, why isn't my taxpayer investment getting the credit? For starters, where's the massively scalable multicast infrastucture that would enable all these hypermultimedia apps that everyone wants?

    • Re:2.1? (Score:3, Informative)

      by forkazoo ( 138186 )
      Uhhh... Internet2 is a private academic network. What exactly were you expecting from it, except a set of high speed data links between research universities? It was never intended for the average person to get a DSL connection to Internet2, because all the sites connected to Internet2 also have connections to the Internet, so there would be no benefit. The advantage is that the big universities have a dedicated network, without napster and all that crap bogging it down.
      • It's a research network, not just a reduced-noise hispeed academic ghetto. I'm not asking for a connection to Internet2 - I'm asking what Internet2 has produced to justify the huge investment you and I have made. Most of the apps I've heard about are medical apps, which I'm sure provides a nice, healthy return to doctors and pharmacos, which we're subsidizing as many ways as we can. But one research project mentioned for Internet2, with wide consumer applications, is multicast, which we need now. Where is i

        • Re:2.1? (Score:2, Informative)

          by BigPappa ( 32324 )
          One of the biggest things that we've used it for is something that needs low latency and big pipes, videoconferencing. We have had classes that have students at 3-4 different universities with the profs at each contributing to the class, even in the same session. These were the high quality 5MB/s streams times the number of universities. That's ~20MB going back and forth with all the overhead that that would have. We needed Internet2's pipes to do that.

          It's also used to do regular Polycom conferences witho
          • These are the kind of projects I expected Internet2 to prove out. Is there any transfer of I2 tech to the public Internet?

            • Re:2.1? (Score:4, Informative)

              by BigPappa ( 32324 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @04:36PM (#12061717)
              Oh yeah, lots of it. One of the things is IPv6 and multicast. The Abilene backbone (one of the I2's biggest) is entirely v6. The knowledge there on how it works on a grander scale is helping to tune and shape the works that come out of places like Cisco and Nortel. Thier code gets production tested first on Abilene and then to the big networks. We also get the new big routers to test with usually before anybody else does. If you go look at Abilene's [internet2.edu] website, you can see from the network graphic that it's pretty busy.

              Interestingly enough there seems to be a moving away from expensive ATM connectors to cheaper 10GigE connections. Our state network has just converted the backbone to GigE, and I expect that our connection to Abilene will change to that soon as well. I think ATM for medium length hauls will die out, only to be used on extra long hauls like across contries and oceans. I can see the big networks doing this to to cut down on costs and brainpower. ATM is just too complicated.
              • Thanks - finally some signals among the noise in answer to my (impertinent ;) question. Beyond pure infrastructure progress, have you seen any evidence of working multicast subscriptions over I2? Care to hazard a guess whether the IPv6 over the current public Internet would support it, if I included support for the techniques in my own distriubted apps?

    • For starters, where's the massively scalable multicast infrastucture that would enable all these hypermultimedia apps that everyone wants?

      Same place it is on in the regular ol' Internet... Providers can't figure out how to bill for it, so it's more or less not an option. Lovely, eh?

      • Re:2.1? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @02:27PM (#12061041) Homepage Journal
        What's the billing problem? Encrypt the packets with a different private key every 5 seconds, and require each listener to get new copies of the public keys, by subscription in 10-packs, distributed randomly in time. The keybuffers are not multicast, but they're millions of times smaller than the encrypted media, so the smaller-scale unicast model works. If I can think of that in 30 seconds, why haven't the providers thought of it yet? And why do incumbent corporate providers have an advantage, if Internet2 is publicly funded?
      • I don't understand why providers don't see the profit potential of multicast.

        If there's a source "out there" and you have multiple customers that want data from that source, then you:

        1. Charge each customer for the bandwidth they consume at the normal rate.
        2. Are charged at the normal rate -- but only once -- by you upstream
        3. Profit! (Note lack of ????)

        Really, this should be easy, but it's not happening. Maybe it's just a chicken-and-egg thing with applications and infastructure. Maybe nobody's figured ou

    • Internet2 was a crappy name for a WAN linking universities, it was faster, but not a lot diferent to many of the other University WANs aroudnd the world.
      • It's the name for a huge, expensive project that has promised a lot, and delivered little, at least as far as I can tell. Or anyone else apologizing for it in this thread. It was supposed to be a lot more than just faster: more scaleable, more interactive, less latency, more decentralized. A platform for the next generation. Meanwhile, we get breathless articles like the one we're discussing in this thread, throwing "VoIP" hype at the interminible rollout of IPv6, which predates Internet2. What, do they hav

  • More useless IPv6 calculations (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sahonen ( 680948 ) on Sunday March 27, 2005 @03:15PM (#12061314) Homepage Journal
    According to my calculations, IPv6 allows us:

    Over 300 million IP addresses per cubic millimeter of the Earth.
    One IP address for every 5 cubic meters of the entire solar system within the sphere defined by the aphelion of the orbit of Pluto.
    180,000 IP addresses per cubic light year for the estimated size of the entire universe.

    Yup, I think we have enough.
  • Why not IPV32 - and forget about ever worrying about a lack of addresses.. i'd like to give everything an address so why not just set it so high that it'd never be an issue?

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