______________________________________________________________________ DRAFT TRANSCRIPT SIG: Routing Date: Wednesday 1 March 2006 Time: 4.00pm Presentation: Complexity: The Internet and telco philosophies Presenter: Randy Bush ______________________________________________________________________ PHILIP SMITH: Welcome to the second half of the Routing SIG. Before I actually introduce Randy, our first speaker, as you probably noticed, the network has gone down and, yep, it is being fixed as we speak. So it just means you'll have to pay attention. You really will have to pay attention rather than just pretending to pay attention. Anyway, second session, we have three speakers. First up is Randy Bush, then Greg Hooten and then finally Henk Uijterwaal. Henk is just fresh off a flight from Amsterdam so I've put him last on the agenda so he can recover from that experience. First up is Randy. RANDY BUSH: You picked the worst time to lose the Net, huh? Then, people would have something to do instead of having to listen to me. Still, you win some, you lose some. OK, this talk is really a few years old, but Philip asked me to give it because I think he thinks it's still relevant. It's about complexity and really what it's about is simplicity. The Internet actually does work. Right? I know this will come as a shock to most people here but, you know VINCENT FULLER: It's not working in this room right now. NARELLE CLARKE: Trust me, it's still out there. RANDY BUSH: It is still out there. IP forwarding really works. MPLS switching is a label, look-up, IP forwarding is an IP look-up. It's all done with T-cams, it's all the same story. Actual measurements show the quality of service is just fine. If you remember Steve Casner's measurements of transcontinental-US VoIP, Jitter, etc, etc, on just connected up to the commercial network, it works. OK. Anyway, QOS is a decision of which packets to drop. I don't know about you, but I get paid not to drop packets: So there are reasons that the Internet has taken over the data world and has taken over the communications world and so trying to turn it back into the other seems to be swimming up stream. Reliability and resiliency are the core strengths of the Internet. The Internet was designed to provide reliable service over unreliable infrastructure. Somebody was talking about the reliability - Geoff was talking about the reliability issue. The idea is components are going to be unreliable. They will be almost as unreliable as humans. OK? But the Internet handles routing around problems. Right? Our weakness is security, as it was once the telcos' by the way. If you remember, they used to mix controlling data and 2600 and Captain Crunch and all that stuff, OK? IP routing yields as good a service as MPLS switching and better in cases of multiple failures. Routing will find a way around. MPLS - you better have configured it. To quote Mike O'Dell, the hero of many of us, the real problem is scaling. All other problems come from that. If you can make it scale, the game's over, OK? Complexity is the arch-enemy of scaling and this is key. Because, if you do something complex, your costs are non-linear as you scale. The telco culture started to glorify complexity as a competitive tactic in the 1970s and into the '80s. They wanted to compete with each other so the big 500kg gorillas added feature, feature, feature and hung boxes on the sides of switches and boxes on the sides of boxes in order to provide perceived features to compete with each other. But look what it did to them - Geoff showed you this morning the wonderful chart of those people are dying on the profit and loss statements and they're dying on the earnings per share and they're dying on the capital market. OK? And we're all in a commodity market. We all buy from the same vendors as the competition. Right? Making things complex will only raise your operational costs and raise your capital costs. I do have to remind you of RFC 1925 section 2.3 - "With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." The question is, do you want to pay for the fuel? Out of your income statement? I don't. And who cares about flying pigs anyway? 'The Hitchhiker's Guide' has a wonderful saying about the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, their products - "It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement that you get from getting them to work at all." LAUGHTER How many of us are working with networks that we're amazed when we get it to work. Well, maybe we've put junk in there we shouldn't. "In other words - and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the corporation's galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws." OK? Stop building artificial make-believe circuits on top of switching on top of circuits. OK? I have worked for a number of - I have worked for the world's largest telco and I've worked for the world's fourth - ex-fourth-largest telco which no longer exists because they pursued this path. And so I'm now anonymously going to tell you which place I learned this. But the optics people in the telco, the people who are responsible for fibre, said, "We can give them all the real circuits they want." Building circuits on top of layer 2 is costly to the company and damaging to the company. The problem is two things - one is the internal cost model and that company had an internal cost model which, if you were the first user of fibre, you just wanted one line of that fibre, you had to pay for the whole thing and this is very common in the telcos. So instead of buying another fibre, they buy more router, switches, or whatever you call these monsters these days, and build MPLS on top of them. And the second one is what Geoff referred to this morning, is the convergence game, which really isn't convergence. It's one department who's been at political war with the other departments for the last 150 or 100 years saying, "We can provide this converged network and therefore we will subsume the people, the ATM People, the Voice people, the IP people, etc and we will give you one network and, oh, we'll manage it all." Now, what's interesting is what they did was they took a profitable frame relay business and actually even - hard to believe, still as it was, late in the '90s and into the 2000s, a profitable ATM business and turned it into an unprofitable MPLS business. Where the smarts are is the big difference. Traditional Voice had stupid edge devices - the telephone instrument we all know and love with that dialler button on it and a very smart core. These monstrous switches that are very sophisticated. The Internet has smart edges - this computer, undoubtedly it's smarter than I am, but that's easy. With sophisticated operating systems, applications, etc, etc, and a very simple stupid core which does packet forwarding. And a key thing here, which Geoff was pointing out this morning, underlining innovation, which is critical, is adding an entirely new Internet service, such as Skype, such as HTTP, etc, etc, is just a matter of distributing an application to a few consenting desktops - let's forget NATs. And you fielded it. You do not have to change the core. Think about what it takes if you want to add a service to the telco Voice networks - massive time, massive money and you have to change the whole core of the network. Where is the reliability? The Voice network has very smart central organs which are heavily armoured and have rooms full of battery backup, etc, etc. The Internet assumes component failure and achieves reliability through the redundancy in the protocol designs. For instance, the root servers can be seriously attacked without anyone noticing they were and people have to actually show measurements of which ones weren't reachable when because none of the users knew. Right? The protocols find a working one and remember it until it fails. Great ones - carrier class reliability. We've got fibre 69s, we can give it to you. The famous 5ESS switch regularly has five nines in operation and has even hit six nines in the field. We think we want that in routers and other Internet boxes. Can we achieve this? Let me tell you a secret about the 5ESS. The 5ESS somebody designed with a poor (pause) - there goes another noun - relational breakdown of its data structure. So the data is redundant round inside the switch. So there has to be a supervisory function which continuously runs and cleans up the internal inconsistencies in those data structures. It is the majority of the code. And, if it's removed, the switch crashes in a few hours. And that's your five-nines reliability. Can you imagine this approach scaling to Internet routing? You can't distribute that? OK? Does not play here. Spread it across the layers. Again, RFC 1925 - "It is always possible to agglutinate multiple separate problems into a single complex interdependent solution." In most cases, this is a bad idea." Don't do it. This is why ATM-1 failed in the Internet. It tried to solve QOS, traffic engineering, circuit simulation, all that stuff. RFC 1925 again says, "Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and a different presentation regardless of whether it works." And we are now facing ATM-2. Trade-offs across the layers or how to get power and simplicity. L 2/L3 technologies such as Frame, IP, MPLS, have costs proportional to software costs. They drop very slowly. Fibre bandwidth and pricing seems to follow Moore's law - it's much like hardware cost. Which do you want to bet on? OK? So, instead of increasing the L2/L3 cost with pseudo-muxing, DWDM is your friend. Every year, they get twice as many bits out of the same piece of glass. Bet on it. The cost of bandwidth is falling faster than 32 feet per second squared. Routers aren't costing less. They're costing more. My OPEX is going up because of the complexity. Get a clue. What do you do? Bet on simple and cheap. Layer-1 costs are driven by hardware. Layer-2 is driven by software. Provision the bandwidth you need. What happens when fibre keeps falling and Google, and Yahoo, etc, provide cheap transport and the last monopoly is broken and peer-to-peer dominates? And VoIP keeps exploding, even though it's not bandwidthed? There's only so long the government and lawyers can save the telcos. The second question I wanted to ask Geoff this morning - and I'll ask it now - is I think I see a game being played. It's especially visible in the States but it's leaked here and it's leaking to Asia, and that is that the trademark and copy right lawyers on the right hand are trying to label content as property so that, on the left hand, the entrenched carriers who are being protected can sell the transport of a commodity product instead of a commodity service. So that that's what's being called - what was it? Oh, God - he asked the question... um, the whole thing where they're doing, "We'll charge Google for carrying their bits but we'll carry our bits better." Net neutrality issue, etc. So what's happening is, on the right, they're productising content, the motion pictures association, the record association, etc, and, on the left, they're nailing it as, OK, "Now, we will give you differentiated carriage of that." GEOFF HUSTON: I'll have a quick response to that. Yes, that is plan A from the media industry and plan A isn't working. Expect movies to have more insidious product placement because plan B is distribute the movie more but pack the ads inside so you actually can't filter them out. My suspicion is that movies will be sponsored by various media outlets - Coca-Cola, etc. And that's their plan B. This whole issue of the telcos defending their space - because they employ a lot of people and otherwise the Department of Social Security would have a huge problem on their hands - is now this last desperate card they're playing. The media stuff - Google I think has proved that the media industry is strippable and they are working through it. BitTorrent is proving that the traditional distribution systems are inefficient but that doesn't mean there's still a strong industry there. There is. You just place the ads in different spots. RANDY BUSH: That's what's happening with the whole media thing. The newspapers are losing the ad revenues. The newspapers are going online and now Google is ahead of them and they're going to be in deep yoghurt. So the lawyers aren't going to save it but they're working hard to muddle it in the meantime. Telcos have to save themselves. They're going to try and climb up the stack but what they need to do is get in front of the technology. If VoIP is so cheap, then provide it already. Provide innovative services and not video on demand but mediated peer-to-peer, right? And do it as a commodity service with simplicity, not complexity. Because, if you complicate your network, you're just going to take any money you might have made and throw it right down the drain. OK? Going back to the cannibalisation of the frame relay business by the MPLS, what happened to the profit side, the margin of the frame relay business was it got turned into capital expenditure to put in more and more MPLS routers and into the OPEX to manage a very difficult technology. And so your margin went down the tubes by complexity. OK? So I think with enough complexity we strongly suspect that we can operate an approximate Internet in polynomial time and dollars. That's a researcher's joke. Sorry. We are working on a proof that operating the Internet can be made to be NP-hard and then we'll just wonder where the profits went. Just like the voice network. Never learn. The United States didn't learn from Vietnam and we didn't learn from the telcos. I think that's the show. ED LEWIS: I agree with what you're saying about complexity. But there are some things that the telco companies have, some services like emergency phone calls - we have 911 in the States. I don't know the number here - looking at trying to put that stuff into the Internet, you start seeing a lot of really complex solutions that are above the telco line in the software now. It looks like we're just pushing the complexity around sometimes to achieve some of the services that we've had for years in the telephone system. RANDY BUSH: I think Geoff is going to do a better job of this one than I. GEOFF HUSTON: When you start arguing with desperate people who see the problem about if they're going to be in business next year and they start bringing up a whole bunch of reasons why they're socially useful and you should fund their continued existence, most of the stuff about 911 is actually nonsense. Indeed, realistically comes the issue of where and why is there a rollout there. The telcos actually operate a damn fine SDH switch with Voice at the moment and they'll continue to operate for some time yet. This is not a here and now problem. What they're truly trying to argue is deregulation is hurting a lot because other people are taking niche points and taking money away from them. You're seeing desperate people clutch at straws and argue why their role is still necessary and important and why the money should come in this way. I'm not sure it's believable but that's the case they're making. RANDY BUSH: Another way of looking at it is why isn't the demand being made of my television that I should be able to make an emergency thing over it? Why isn't the demand being made of my car? Why is it being made of the Internet service? All you're trying to do is stack stuff on top of it because, oh, my God, I can make it look like a circuit. But, if you don't do that, your head won't hurt so much. ED LEWIS: This isn't an essential service we've provided for years and now the Internet has to do it. I'm looking at it as someone using the Internet and watching us trying to replicate the same service. RANDY BUSH: Don't do it. If it hurts, stop. Trying to solve the wrong problem or else in a disastrously wrong way. ED LEWIS: The comment that led me to this was the comment about battery back-up with telephones. People say when we have power outages, you can pick up the old pots line and call someone. RANDY BUSH: Go pick it up. Just because I bought a car doesn't mean I'm going to let go of the pots line so, if you want that service, get that service. Don't try to impose it on automobiles or televisions. ED LEWIS: Sometimes we take having no complexity too far, making it too simple. RANDY BUSH: I wouldn't do something like that. PHILIP SMITH: Any other questions for Randy. NARELLE CLARKE: Item number 8 in RFC 1925 says "It is more complicated than you think." RANDY BUSH: 1925, yeah. PHILIP SMITH: Thanks very much, Randy.