Join us as we gather around the hedge,
where we dig into technology,
business, and culture with the finest minds in
computer networking.
Hello, Tom. How are you this morning?
Hello, Russ. I'm doing well. How about yourself?
Fine. So tell me about the box in
the background.
So the box is the box that a
model rocket kit came in. Me and my
oldest boy work on model rockets together. And
this one's a two stage, so it's more
complicated than any one we've done before. Oh,
really cool. Really cool. You could you could
free up some desk space by using the
box as a plant stand. I
could.
I don't think the plant consent of the
plant to do that. Yeah. I was I
was gonna say, I don't think the plant's
excited about that because it's not exactly stable.
Well, I mean, I don't know. You know?
Just trying to bring the plant back to
the conversation.
It's a plant.
It is. It's heard some things. I'll tell
you.
We are still awaiting the plant cam.
Yeah. I wonder how many people would watch
it.
Probably. More than you could imagine.
I was going to say.
Probably,
you'd probably get higher ratings there than we
do on the hedge. Yeah. There we go.
So we also have George with us who
is upside down as always, but you can't
see it on the camera. Nope. Gravity is
working its magic effect on me at this
very moment.
Every time you guys every time you say
that, Russ, I'm tempted to make a comment
about the toilet water swirling backwards.
The thing is, that corallis force,
I don't believe anyone has been able to
successfully demonstrate it because perturbations
in small bodies of water persist for remarkably
long time. And so this whole thing about
we did it and we left the water
and then it went down the other way
in the other hemisphere, You would have to
do this thousands of times. And who's got
time? Right?
The same people who are watching Tom's plant.
Okay.
Yeah. Well, maybe it is true.
So,
George, what are we talking about?
I wanna talk about this weird
connection between the rise of IPv6
in the world
and the status of IPv6 against IPv4. But
in particular,
IP v six in the planned economy,
which is not something we see a lot
of in the developed Western world, but in
the region I work in, the Asia Pacific,
planned economies, they're actually a thing. Right? And
so there's this weird
join of two things coming together.
So do you think
oh, I don't wanna dive too deeply too
quickly. Do you think
that planned economies have been more successful or
less at deploying IPv six?
And I've
Go ahead. Let's answer that one first.
I actually think that they have been consistently
more successful.
And simultaneously,
there are quirky corners where they've been really
remarkably less successful. And this is high risk
for them, which we can talk about a
bit too. But I would say on balance,
yes, they have been more successful.
Okay. And would you say that's just because
they have the power to say go do?
And It has a component of that. And
what do you think this says about v
six and the actual
requirements for v six in the real world.
Oh, you have you have stepped into the
big problem here. Because although
six is alive and well and is a
visible force in the global network, it's ubiquitously
deployed at about 40%,
60% in The USA,
80 to 90 in India.
And as we'll see in Vietnam and China
are at really accelerating
rates. It's about 45%
in China and about 60 to 70 in
Vietnam.
The necessity
of this activity,
we've arrived at a really strange time that
it is arguably
less necessary
than it ever was thought to be because
of the success
of gnats,
carrier grade gnats,
which are everywhere.
Remind me of banana man. Yes. But anyway,
that's
that's I think it's in indicative
George is trying to process Banana Man.
Was that a West Coast TV show, like,
on the search on something?
Anyway,
so I think it it might be indicative
that
when you when you see something that is
widely deployed or being widely deployed in a
planned economy,
Maybe this is just my prejudice living in
a world of unplanned economies.
It always makes me suspicious that
whatever is going on there
is not
really
something that's necessary,
but something rather that's being perceived as necessary
by a small set of people within the
planned economy.
Rather than being drawn
by actual user needs, it's being pushed
in the other direction kinda makes me suspicious
a little bit.
Okay. So
let's just talk a little bit about the
nature of life in a planned economy.
Central planning.
Deep philosophy
early in the morning.
Central planning is about structural efficiency
and
something I'm going to call social equity.
You want people to have adequate supplies
of protein in their diet
and you look at the distribution of protein
across your diet and you notice that people
who live in the coastal areas get huge
amounts of fish and people who live in
the northern areas get huge amounts of lamb.
But you also notice that there's this weird
asymmetry that the lamb eating regions don't have
much fish, and the fish eating regions don't
have much lamb. And so a planner would
look at that and they might say,
should we be doing some kind of equipoise
here and get some lamb to the fish
areas and some fish to the lamb areas?
Or they might say, you know what? They're
both first class protein. And the principal point
here is that every adult should have something
like 1.5
grams per kilogramme of body weight protein per
day. And if we can guarantee that kids
in particular get enough protein to build healthy
bodies, who cares where it comes from?
But the point is,
if you are aware you have a massive
deficiency of protein in diet for a region
in your economy,
you're not doing your job as a government.
You're creating problems. You're making structural deficits that
are going to incur
future burdens, health burdens, productivity burdens. So when
it comes to things like food and national
strategy for food and a national plan to
say, by 2032,
all children born in this economy will have
a minimum quotient of protein in their diet
either supplied through shops
or because the state intervenes and provides protein
supplements to ensure a healthy
development of people. It's like it's pretty hard
to say that's not a good idea. There's
a real structural reason behind that to do
with the nature of distribution of food
in a society.
Things aren't always equal. So I kind of
feel like you can look at some things
in a planned economy and it's incredibly easy
to say, yeah, we should do that.
But when it comes to an Internet,
you actually kinda hit the nail on the
head. Why do we have to have a
national planned economy to decide to deploy v
six?
In whose interests? What's what's the side benefit
here? So where did this drive come from?
It's a really good question.
Yeah. And, do you have any sense of
the answer of that question? Or is it
more like
you don't live in those economies, so it's
hard for you to know?
Well, it's hard for me to know.
And what I'm going to say is, frankly,
personal opinion.
And I've never worked for a government, and
I've never consulted to government, so I have
no real exposure to this. But my own
sense of this
is kind of mixed up in things that
I've picked up talking to people who do
live and work in these economies.
And the principal point here is getting things
into a national plan is not an easy
goal.
It's not like you ring up your local
rep and say, hey, I think we should
have a national plan for v six. And
they say, good idea, Tom. Put it on
the list. We're gonna have a national v
six plan. And Tom goes off, writes it
up, and hands it to Russ. And Russ
stands up in the podium at the national
planning session and says, we're committed to v
six and it's done. It doesn't work that
way.
I've been told by people in these economies
that just to get a ministerial
directive that we should be discussing better v
six address structure is like a two year
investment in time. And that's something totally within
the discretion of the minister. If you wanna
change a national law, it's three to five
years. And if you want to put something
into the long range national plan,
which goes out to 2032
in the case of Vietnam and 2030 in
China, you're talking a five plus year mission
to bring this to the table. So if
you want
the National Economic Planning people to take your
problem seriously, you have to get your ducks
in a row
or your plants. So and and and if
you if you were to go to that
minister or that person, whoever the the politician
is, whatever you call that particular politician,
to get this done,
you have to come with a reason.
You do. Yeah. And so
now the question is, what would you give
as a reason?
Is it because it improves Internet access?
I'm not convinced you could make that case
any longer because of CG NAT.
So here we are. We've arrived in a
place where CG NATs work ubiquitously.
But you have to think, to be in
the national plan, we're actually rolling the dial
back five or more years. And if you
look at the life story
of technologies
to assist
with scarcity in v four, it was a
pretty mixed bag back in the deeper time.
This was technology
that imposed scaling limits on machines. It meant
interrupting your supply chain if you were already
constructing
systems to design them to work properly in
this environment. We were talking about three or
four
competing mechanisms to run dual stack v four,
v six. The Chinese had designed their own.
So
when you go back to when people would
have been saying we should have this on
the national plan, it would not necessarily have
been obvious that Nats were going to scale
to the extent they have, particularly
in the hardware
that people in these economies are exposed to.
Because the other side of this problem is
that technology
is now
strategic for competition between economies.
I think it probably always has been. But
the thing is that increasingly,
we're much more aware collectively in the networking
space that the equipment, the boxes,
are themselves
units of economic force. And so the decision
to say Huawei is not going to be
deployed in our economy. There's a whole hoo
about
this being about spying and strategic asset control
and risks in the time of dispute that
they'd turn off the remote switch on Huawei.
But you could also say that it's just
a straightforward economic play. It's no different to
a dispute about beef sales or fish sales.
And
in these economies,
in China and Vietnam,
they have been very, very aware
of the effects of external parties
on their national planning initiatives. The exposure of
risk in China
to having technology withdrawn from availability,
being denied access to aspects of emerging technology
has been a significant problem for a very
long time.
So I think as a priming problem coming
to people in the technology management space nationally,
they were primed to receive a message.
Six is something that we can operate
for ourselves and construct a network for ourselves
with lower risk of exposure
to shortages of resources, particularly
v four. And remember, historically,
I think these economies have felt behind the
ball compared to developed Western economies that got
their hands on a lot of v four
addressing resources very early in the game because
they invested
in that technology.
So in a competitive sense, six was an
opportunity
to level a playing field internationally.
And I think that was quite an attractive
part of this argument.
Yeah. I agree with you that in the
context of CGN,
you can't strictly say that it's necessarily
a better network, but I think there's now
good evidence that you have cheaper total cost
of ownership
when you deploy SIX. There are aspects of
the SIX addressing model
using things like Slack
that actually mean you can scale out a
rapid deployment with a very, very low management
cost. Things kind of auto scale well, and
it's kind of parallel to think probably you
remember, Ross, when you were building out big
networks. These were highly segmented hierarchical structures. Right?
You had a lot of technological depth. Well,
the network has flattened, and to a large
extent, Ethernet has swept the world. We're all
now running layer two Ethernet equivalents on fiber
beds, and we're running virtual overlays of competing
providers. And that's a world in which six
can actually work really well.
Six deployment to the desktop
has actually worked out really well, and I
I personally believe it's true. You can have
a lower complete cost of ownership, particularly
if you've been tracking and logging to the
table, which is an incredibly
contentious thing.
So we have to kind of take a
sidearm
and talk about the fact that these are
also economies that have had
a concern
about their ability to understand what do people
really do on a network for a long
time. Now we could be down in the
weeds arguing if this is state control and
if it's good or bad. But the fact
remains,
this is a problem that a lot of
economies
internationally
are thinking about now.
And in particular,
kids.
What the heck have we done
with kids and access to
infinities
of information, good and bad? And that track
and trace component of what are people seeing,
what are they engaged in,
for all you might question its value against
freedom
and rights of access to anything,
in these economies, that's been a significant concern.
You deploy c g NAT, that tracing ability
between the thing that I do to start
getting data and the thing that's done out
on the other side, it goes through a
confusing box
that hides all of that detail.
The logging, the tracking, the management cost, that
rises significantly. And, again,
I suspect
this is attractive to people who live in
the management of a planned economy.
Yeah. Lower TCO,
better track and trace, competitive equality
with Western economies,
ownership of their own national asset. There is
a lot of attraction in that. Yeah. And
I I also think that
when,
when you look at nations,
there are two way two ways that nations
seem to approach international competition
between the countries,
between countries themselves or between cultures or however
you wanna put it. The first is
we're going to win because we're unified,
and we have a specific thing we're going
to do.
The other way to look at it is,
well, our economy is gonna win because we
create smart people, and the smart people are
gonna go do smart things.
And those smart things are we don't know
what those are gonna be. We don't know
what those smart things are gonna be in
five years. We just know that we're gonna
create smart people, and they're gonna go do
that. And I think planned economies tend to
run much more towards
right or wrong, whatever. Let's not get into,
like, this but they tend to run much
more towards the, we're gonna have a plan.
We're gonna outperform
all the other economies by producing
more of x or more of y.
So I've never lived in The USA.
But as someone who's worked with people who
do live and work in The USA, it
just amazes me how
robust
individuals are who are prepared to take a
risk and go out and try and do
something.
And in the economies I lived in, The
UK and Australia,
if you try and fail,
you've got a giant red letter on your
forehead that you have to think hard about
for a long time. In The Netherlands, for
instance, it's incredibly
bad, calmer to have failed in a business
enterprise. It implies that you reduced social capital
for everyone who invested.
And in America,
it's like both sides of the deal, the
VC side and the banking and finance side
and the individual, they all say, hey.
He tried. It was interesting.
You know what? I like that you tried.
I'm gonna give you some money. Try again.
And
that kind of risk taking emotion
is incredibly
strong
in the Internet.
You go into a nation economy of mutuality
operating in a context where things are resource
poor. They're doing a really rapid ramp up
to try and achieve
a middle class high levels of exposure
to interesting technology.
Risk taking is like
a totally different level.
The consequences
of failure in these economies
is significant.
And I suspect
that also plays
to could we all agree on the rules
here? And if the rules are it's v
six,
that's good for everyone because it's lower risk.
Even if you or I might say, did
you really have to do that? Is that
really net beneficial?
It's lower risk.
Yeah. So that so that's an interesting contrast
I never thought about. But
the, I mean, really, one of the main
things we're doing with protocols and interoperability
is reducing operational risk. Right? We're making it
possible
for different people to work together. But the
very economy or economies that produced
the technology
are the ones that embrace risk. I think
Yeah. That's quite interesting. Ironic. It's quite dichotomous,
isn't
it? And you have to have risk to
to innovate. You have to. I don't you
know, it seems like it's you wouldn't be
able to do it without it. And So
let's let's have a let's let's explore a
byway in the history of v six. There
was a component of strong national competition,
particularly in the ITU.
And people would talk
about fastest broadband economy, and they'd say 50
megabits represents the goal of broadband. Which economy
is going to be first to get 75%
of their population
on broadband?
Well, some economies dived in whole scale. Korea,
for instance, did a massive
national build out of a high speed network
that that could deliver 40 megabit
to virtually every person living in urban metro
Korean
locations. And they did it building their own
customer premises equipment.
So they had no balance of payments cost.
They weren't incurring debt in the international markets.
But here's the thing,
they did it in a v four only
technology.
So when the market swung to say, let's
do high speed v six,
the Korean national economy sitting there going, wow,
we just deployed CPE to every household with
a ten to fifteen year life. We're three
years in, and you're telling us we have
to replace it? That is really incredibly bad,
Juju.
Yeah. Well, the same thing happened in, quote,
unquote, developing or developed economies too. In The
United States and Europe in particular,
we deployed a lot of copper
because it's what you could do. Right? It's
what you had. Nobody had fiber, so you
deploy copper to everywhere.
And then you're in this position where, like,
oh, twenty years on, the copper's dead.
And you can't really afford to run fiber
because the incremental cost is not incremental.
So now what do you do?
Oh, now I'm stuck in this copper world,
and it only goes so fast. I mean,
we actually saw this in Greenland. They have
these little villages of twenty and thirty people.
They've deployed copper.
Copper exists in the ground in those places.
And yet now you can't I mean, you
can't afford to run fiber
to a village of 30 people out to
all the homes.
So what do you do?
Like, you're stuck in this situation where you
can't maintain the copper forever. It just degrades.
You can't deploy new copper, and you can't
deploy new fiber.
So places that used to have access
are basically losing that access that they've had
for twenty years, and it looks really, really
bad on paper.
So this quality
about first adopter, second adopter, and the behaviors
that expose when you do that, it's absolutely
fascinating.
Because the Korean experience
was was that they were able to achieve
a specific goal. They got a national broadband
economy off the ground really quickly, but they
ran straight into
the complexities
of there is not enough v four in
the Korean national Internet
to supply a unique address to every person.
They had to deploy
in the context of running v four with
NAT. And the thing that you would do
in that situation in a modern parlance is
you'd say, great. We'll dual stack this, and
we'll run v six to the people who
can. And we'll keep our v four supply
for the limited amount of overlay and do
some kind of natting technology.
Well, there's a problem here.
The switching fabric
turns out to have an awful lot more
to do with the architecture of the network
layer than people want to say. And if
you've built out a CPE scheme that is
v four only, you've probably built out a
distribution
network
and a backbone network that has strong components
of v four only. And you or I
might say, well, hey. They're all packets. Right?
It should be easy to just put another
layer two framing in this.
No. No. No. No. No. It is not
easy to put a new arbitrary
layer two encoding
in a stack designed for a single protocol.
Yeah. This stuff gets complicated. Yeah. Especially when
you think about satellite
or you think about
any kind of long haul fiber circuits or
undersea cables,
the framing in all of those repeaters and
all those pieces and bits
Yeah. They're hard baked into the hardware because
you can't get enough switching speed in software
based switching to do any of this. So
you've baked in certain packet and not just
packet sizes. Packet sizes aren't the real problem.
The real problem is the header size and
your look at tables. Right? How many how
many bits do you have to latch off
a packet to be able to read the
next thing to do with it and the
assumptions that are built there? There is a
brilliant talk John Scudder gave to the IEPG
about ten years ago when he talked about
these trade offs between hardware and software path
and the consequences
of saying, I'd like to do a 128
bit read to decide to do my packet
routing, and just what that means. It's a
great talk.
So the thing is that
economics isn't like a static situation. It's not
a monopoly board where you get to tear
it up and start the game again to
see what changes.
You're stuck in the world that you live
in.
So China and Vietnam
were somewhat behind the ball in terms of
their capital investment,
and you would think that that's a problem.
But if you come to this second deployment
effect,
they had the benefit of all the negative
experiences other people had. And they were able
to put in their spec sheet that v
six stack that you used to have as
a tick box item, but you were never
going to turn on. We now know that
the stack works. We'd like that fully enabled
in management when we deploy. This new four
g network, it's gonna be dual stack day
one. The five g network, it's going to
be v six only with a v four
overlay.
Future g six,
who knows? But the thing is, they were
able to deploy
high speed network technology in the case of
China mobile segment,
Vietnam, their fiber fabric, their national fiber plan.
They were able to avoid the pitfalls Korea
had walked into. They deployed equipment
that was late stage dual stack capable,
and they were able
to leverage all of the lessons of other
people to do an phenomenally
rapid deployment.
Vietnam,
they actually had like a caucus of all
of the ISP's,
And they chose FPT Telecom
as the lead provider nationally to go into
their own plan and put out a sixth
deployment and lead the way. And then VIRTEL
and VNPT
leveraged all of the experiences they had and
were able to bring things up. China, it
was a little more different. You had China
Mobile, China Unicom,
and China Telecom.
And the three of them
run
a federated network. Each of them operates effectively
a local cell in each of the provinces
of China.
And so they had to make decisions how
were they would deploy into a two tier
hierarchy.
They didn't have a single point decision.
They were able to look at large metro
areas that were doing a rollover in, say,
China Unicom's
four g deployment.
They were able to do massive v six
rollout for that market segment almost immediately.
But then you get to other parts of
the national Chinese network, perhaps further west, where
things are a lot more sparse, a lot
more like Greenland.
The technology decisions there have to last fifteen
or twenty years.
Things are looking a little different.
Yeah. That's the same in the Midwest US,
by the way. Yeah. I mean, technology
is not evenly distributed.
Yeah. It's not. Yeah. Another interesting thing about
this that that occurs to me is that
there was a solution designed for this
problem
many way, way back
called ATM
and then which rolled over into MPLS
with the idea being that you would have
a fixed label.
And therefore, you could put v six or
v four on top of any switching hardware
because the switching hardware became transport,
basically transport agnostic,
and it was all hop by hop. And
so you switch your label every hop.
All the work goes to the control plane
to figure it out
where things are on the transport side and
everything.
It makes the control plane much more complex,
but it was actually designed
in part to solve this problem. And it
came not out of v four v six.
It came out of, believe it or not,
VINES,
I I IPX,
and IP, and OSI. Yeah.
So the other part of this story, which
I find fascinating,
is that ATM, when people like you, who
were functional engineers in the field, it wasn't
necessarily your happy time,
functional engineers in the field, it wasn't necessarily
your happy time deploying ATM networks. These were
quite strange beasts. I only worked very briefly
on an ATM switch, and I found it
a very confronting and strange machine to work
with. There was this idea there was gonna
be this thing called the NNI,
the number scheme that was gonna be the
way to do this label forwarding.
And people just ran for the hills and
did their own schemes. There was no constructed
state because of the lack of central planning
amongst the people who were deploying this to
do interprovider
NNI. Whereas if you look at that deployment
in a planned economy,
that would have been like their day one
decision.
China Unicom's number one. China Telecom's is number
two. China Mobile is number three. The state
wireless is number four. The airline's number five.
They'd have just handed them out rationally in
some scheme, and the whole thing would have
worked.
The other thing I like is that when
the ATM chip owners realized we weren't gonna
get ATM cards in our IBM PCs at
home,
they actually have to find a market for
this chip.
And the market they found was home routers.
The logic that drives ADSL and VDSL
is leveraging
the same FPGA and chip designs that ATM
run on.
It's an Fantastic. And another market they came
up with, a lot of people don't realize,
is router is is chassis router backplanes.
Yeah.
Cell based chassis router backplanes
operate on the same
and we don't have a lot of cell
based routers anymore that I know of. But
way back, we had tons of cell based
back backplanes.
Yeah. And
that was all basically ATM.
That was it wasn't ATM per se, but
it was
pretty much I mean, even the Cisco 8,500
was nothing but an ATM switch with Ethernet
Yeah.
Line cards. So yeah. So so
Tom, you've run a network. Right? Mhmm. You've
run a few.
And I guess you got a few reporting
lines.
Mhmm. And I'm guessing that you've occasionally had
people in suits,
from the Dilbert cartoon saying to you, if
you can't measure it,
you can't know it or something equally
asinine.
Yep. Yep.
Well, it just so happens with a national
plan, there's a second burden coming along the
story here.
Because with national plans, you have to measure
progress to plan.
Yeah.
It becomes
enormously
important
to understand
your trajectory
as a player
in the national plan.
So if you've spent
five years with your co peers in industry
arguing that there should be a national cohesive
plan to deploy IPv6 by
2030
across the whole of Mainland China,
sometime
around
'25,
'26,
'27,
you're going to be asked to account for
your rate of uptake.
And people are gonna put three dots dots
on a
line and draw the line between them and
see if the trajectory at 2030
is gonna do the do. Right?
So
this question, how are they doing to plan,
is a really hot topic.
And by the way, this is not this
is not unique
to planned economies.
It's just that we handle it differently
in non planned or unplanned economies.
But we don't do very much of it
today, but but we used to where you'd
see pictures
of
the White Star Lines type people who ran
Titanic.
And they would have all of their cruise
ships
lined up coming out of New York Harbor
or something,
like, equally spaced, you know, like, in this
really cool formation.
And people could look at the picture and
go, oh, look how much progress they've made.
Oh, look at all those ships.
And the same thing with railroads. They did
the same thing with railroads. They did a
they did a 32 switch or 32 track
switching yard, and they put 32
big, big engines pulling long trains
that would never actually fit in that yard
unless you spent a lot of time
jockeying things
to make it work. And then they take
the picture. It's like, oh, look at that.
So it becomes a lot. The airline would
have the 747
and the 737
and the 777
flying side by side. Yep. Exactly. For sure.
Yeah. So
that message
is about confidence and ability to hit target,
and it's directed at the shareholder.
Yeah. It's directed at the institutional
shareholder and the people who paid the money
to get you where you're going. It's to
maintain belief that you're gonna hit target
and pay
on your stockholders
what you committed to do. You can cover
your bonds. Right? That's how we deal with
it in the West.
So in the planned economy,
it's kind of different. I mean, you still
have stockholders
because
they're all planned
sort of mixed market economies and they still
have shareholders.
But the people you're reporting to aren't the
shareholders,
they're the government.
And failure is not a comfortable word around
this table. It's not.
Road.
So, Tom, you were gonna jump in there
a second ago. Oh, I just so, I
mean, it's not like planned economies are the
only people who ever made mandates. Right? The,
Department of Defense in The United States has
done this and readjusted a few times when
Yeah. You know, when we're working on that.
Change the plan, but changing the plan has
consequence.
So
this is a niche that I have a
very small amount a small amount of involvement
in because I have worked with Geoff Huston
and APNIC
Labs building
the measurement system that is being used to
track I p v six uptake worldwide. And
it's based on a really simple technique. It's
blocks. It's the measurement blocks in adverts.
You see an advert. There's a blot behind
it. If you can fetch that blot, you
saw the advert. Well, if you take that
technology and you make the blot be a
dual stack and you measure how many people
come on v six, you're tracking how many
people can do six.
And on 25,000,000
adverts worldwide
a day, you're getting a fairly accurate sense
of what's going on in the world with
v
six. And the problem for the planned economies
is that those charts from Akamai
and from Cloudflare
and from Google and from Apenic,
they all agree.
I'm not saying they agree a 100%,
but in the main, they all agree. And
what they're saying about China is you are
not on track to make your goal of
deployment of a fully national v six fabric
with no v four dependencies
by 2030.
You're off base.
And by the way, this is this is
the problem with the measurements
to me, is that
we talk about Tom was talking about DOD.
I I was in the US Air Force
when
the DOD said OSI only.
Yep.
And you know how that works.
That didn't work.
No. Absolutely. That was me. I was coding
that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. The same thing when
they said we're only gonna do ADA.
No more any other languages you're gonna do
ADA. So you'd get these you'd get these
pieces of software.
And at the very beginning of the eight
of the of the software, the the code,
it would say, pound define
c,
and there will be a bunch of c
code.
And then it would say pound undefined c.
And then you could compile it in an
ADa compiler so it counted as eight aligned
to code.
Yeah. That's what that's what actually happens.
So the temptation
in any measurement exercise
is to track measurement plan and show that
you are on plan because the measurements confirm
it. And if you ask people who work
for large national providers
what their v six deployment stats look like,
of course, they're going to point to the
large metro areas with a modern five g
deployment of mobile, which is 98%
active in v six and say, look at
us. We're 98%
active in v six. Nobody says, yeah. But
what about your rural and remote?
What about the other customer?
Is that, like, 20% of your customer base?
Is that 50%, or is it actually only
5%? No. No. No. We're 98%
v six. You are, but in highly
constrained
context.
And
the second part of the measurement problem is
that measurement
comes with error bars.
And when you have a planned economy that
has a very strong sense of boundary
around its outside
and polices packet flow across that boundary,
not all measurement techniques can do an equalised
job of dealing with what they're seeing.
So there's a component of can we even
measure
going into some of these places?
And
it's not a totally happy story.
I'd love to think that we were going
to be able to say this is definitely
going to work because I don't like the
idea that these people are going to have
sunk a large amount of effort to deploy
something that doesn't achieve the outcome,
particularly when I actually think a dual stack
network is kind of fine.
I'm actually pretty impressed with how things work.
I don't know about you, Russ, but I'm
pretty sure that I'm doing 80% of my
flow on v six
and fall back to four is like for
the margins of what I do.
Yeah. I don't know about that because I
don't know about my local provider. And, you
know, again,
here in The US,
people built up v four stuff and
the deployment of v six has not been
as strong for various reasons. So that's that's
No. Maybe it's because you guys were early
adopters. Tom, are you in a v six
rich network?
Yeah. Yeah. My providers,
it's all it's it's all standard.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's not like you're disconnected
from the net because you made a v
six decision. It's not like you're having a
bad hair day because of six. Right? Right.
So there are components of behavior that don't
work well. Like the fact we made the
two protocols not talk to each other.
That's kind of a weird outcome. Right? So
we're actually running two
strands of dialogue with boxes in between that
put four in one side and six out
the other to glue things together. But
it's kinda working. Right?
So
I'm I've reached this weird point of apostasy
in the v six religion that I no
longer believe we're necessarily gonna hit 90%,
99%
total v six in my lifetime. I don't
actually think it's gonna happen. And I also
think
maybe it doesn't matter.
Yeah. I mean, it's your statement of it's
kinda working. Like, that's a that's a pretty
good description of the Internet in general. Like
so why would we need to move beyond
it? Right?
Well, maybe to get TCO down again. I
mean, let's face it. Running those c g
nets is a pretty expensive business. We're paying
big money to Juniper and Cisco to keep
the bits flying inside the steam engines that
run the c g nets.
If we didn't have to do that, there
would be tighter margins
on their boxes and there'd be more profit
in the bit shipping business. So I could
argue that it's inefficient.
Yeah. It is inefficient, but it's not inefficient
enough for anybody to care. Like, I remember
doing these doing evaluating CGNET specifically for for
a big network, and it was like, well,
it's gonna cost this much to do CGNET.
It's gonna cost this much to buy four.
Just buy four.
Like and I and I'm sure I'm sure
those and and those will change, obviously, as
the four supply dries up if it does.
Yeah. But it but it just isn't compelling
right now. It's not to the deployment for
customers. It's to the core of the network
for people who are running DCs,
CDNs,
other functions so that they can have stable
four addresses that are not on a CG
NAT. And then us, the clients, the people
on the edge, we go through CG NAT
to access them. Now that is not the
kind of Internet that originally really excited me.
That's a classic
center provides, I consume
model of networking.
And it kind of annoys me that we've
taken away the end to end component.
So for me, having six at home, putting
names into the public DNS that point to
six addresses
so I can come back to my own
Plex server,
my own home file store, I just love
that stuff. Right? I love being able to
do that without an intermediary.
But, you know,
maybe I'm an edge case.
Or maybe the solution to that is DNS,
unfortunately.
Yeah. I I So the network
steers by DNS.
Yeah. I you know, I say unfortunately because,
again, I don't like that we do this
where we
throw lots of stuff at a protocol that
wasn't really designed to do that
and say, but the problem's been solved. So
so be it. It's fine.
DNS wasn't really designed to be dynamic that
way, but,
you know, it works.
Well, just just call it just call it
application routing. See, that's cool. Yeah. That's new.
Yeah. There you go. Oh, that sounds good.
Is it coming v six?
Yeah. So it would come as no surprise
that there's a field of discourse
around
routing packets based on the names of things.
And it's called
named data networking. Yeah. Yeah. And it should
come as no surprise that of the two
economies
I've been talking about that are planned economies
in my region, one of them is extremely
active in the field of named data networking.
They see real opportunities in this model of
doing things. Yeah. So
you might have something there, Tom. Yeah. I
mean, it's not yeah. It's not even so
much that a server contains your data. It's
that every router becomes a server,
a data store.
And so you you search for things via
their names,
and the closest this becomes like this whole
CDN
on steroids.
Yeah. It's kind it's kind of what what
it comes down to. So there's two other
things about the large six deployment that are
kind of floating around in my mind. One
of them is a thing I heard about
when I was at a meeting in Paris
quite a while ago, and it's actually been
deployed at scale by networks like Deutsche Telekom.
It's using bit fields in the v six
address
to construct
a ring model of protection
over your various subnetworks
in your schema. If you imagine that you
reserved 16 or 24 bits in the middle
of your address field, then we've got a
128
bits. So we do have the space to
do this.
You can actually mark bits and say, if
you've got these bits set,
your packet can only lie within this particular
network's behaviour.
You can start to segment packet flow based
on aspects of the address. Now this is
horrible.
Overloading something that is only meant to be
a unique string more than having a prefix,
not a good model. But it turns out
you can do a lot of stuff with
this.
So I'm sure the same argument was made
about Nat in the nineties. This exact same
argument. Yeah. It's horrible. We shouldn't. But you
could do some cool stuff with it.
And we did.
So the second thing
is something that I have always felt passionately
was a road not taken that is interesting.
And that is the idea that the location
could determine the address,
not the provider.
So
there's a lot of people who really dislike
this model. Right? But geographic addressing, the idea
of an overlay of some form of cell
size that is aerial in sense,
and if you live inside that space, your
address marker says
this box is located at this point on
the surface of the network,
is actually getting some traction
in China.
There's a town that's being developed
that is a complete new build out to
the million plus population,
and the entire city
has a single v six address plan.
They're going to segment it for multiple providers.
If you want to take service from one
of their different providers, you get an address
class within that. But all the addresses in
the entire rollout in that
city
lie in one address schema.
And so they're going to have IoT devices
checking if waste bins are full or not.
They're gonna have air conditioning systems that operate
as a demand load management
to control power.
All of these things are being done, and
all of it is using
single central address management techniques,
which, by the way, is exactly how we
used to run telephone networks before the Internet
came along.
So it's not like we can't do this.
It's just
we don't do this. But in China,
they're thinking quite seriously
about doing this.
Yeah. There are there are lots of limitations
to such a thing though. But, yeah,
that is that is
something we used to do on the telephone
network. And nowadays, we have the EID,
which is your telephone number has nothing to
do with where you are physically any longer.
And how do we route those
EIDs around the world?
Alright. So
I know I have a hard stop in
ten minutes, so maybe we should wrap up.
Anything else, George?
No. I just I just thought this was
a fascinating point. I'm not I'm not here
to criticize anyone for a decision to plan
a national endeavor.
I'm concerned about whether they'll hit target and
the consequences
for people I work with and like. It's
a different model to the one we're used
to. It's interesting.
Yeah. It is. Anything you wanna add, Tom?
No. No. Great discussion. Yep. Awesome. Alright.
So, George, where can people find you? I
know you are upside down and quasi retired.
So are you still blogging?
I am. You can find things I'm writing
at the APNIC website and blog, and I'm
also recording
a fortnightly
podcast called Ping.
Alright.
Fortnightly.
Wow. Okay. Yeah. That's that's a burden. Don't
do that.
I don't know. The hedge is every week.
Fortnightly.
I don't know. We may have to we
may have to come up with a different,
like, wow. Fortnightly.
Okay.
Oh, I assumed you were monthly.
No. No. No. No. No. We're weekly.
So cool.
Alright.
And
so that people can also find you where
on social media, George, if they want to?
They can find me at the same place
I'm blogging. I don't I I have a
very small social media presence. If you see
the initialism
g g m, it's probably me. Alright. Cool.
And
Tom.
LinkedIn.
The pause And
Gardeners Weekly.
That's right.
Plant cam. Plant cam.
You should be call you should rename it
already to the green cam. And for us,
if people would like to follow your words
and thoughts, where do they look?
Oh, Oh, people can always find me here
at the heads. They can find me on
rule11.tech
and LinkedIn.
And, occasionally,
I log in to x. Not very often.
Very, very rare.
But yeah.
I'm not a huge social media
either, honestly.
So,
anyway, alright. Well, thanks for taking the time
to listen to us. We know we live
in an attention driven economy.
And,
so your attention is really what's important in
the in the world as it is. It
may not seem that way, but that's the
way it is. And we thank you for
listening all the way to the bitter end
of this episode of The Hedge, and we
will catch you next time.