Vint Cerf On Broadband, Wireless, IPV6 And More

Carnage4Life writes: "There's a very interesting interview on Upside with Vint Cerf ^[?] who is currently senior vice president for Internet architecture and technology at MCI Worldcom. In the article he discusses the problems facing the current specifications for wireless protocols, UUNet and how it will be adapted to face the future (maybe by becoming an optically switched network), his home wireless network, IPv6 ^[?] and his expectations of how broadband will change the Net. " Ya ever think what the world owes these guys? Wow.

Comments

IPV6 transition

[Nicolas MONNET]

IPV6 has been out for years. 5 years? 6 years? And we still haven't got a transition strategy. I mean, the questions Cerf raises in this article are the same that 5 years ago! They are the same than in the IPNG RFC! The truth is: nobody has any idea how to do the transition.

Because, simply, the problem is NOT in infrastructure. Putting IPV6 in the backbones is almost trivial -- I mean, it could be done now already, you just encapsulate IPV4 in some way.

Now ... on the client side, it's another story. There is NOTHING ready on the client side. Absofuckinglutely nothing ready. Oh yeah, a whois client, and a name daemon. Maybe a telnet and FTP. And that's it.

Now, I have to ask myself, as a programmer, how would I do to support IPV6 in my programs? I don't have the slightest idea. I would'nt even be able to test them properly. Would there be an IPV6 compatible Apache, I would'nt be able to use a whole bunch of Perl modules with it. Of course, I would need an IPV6 enabled Perl. Etc, etc ...

This is a BIG problem. A lot of cash has to be thrown into this, like in a consortium or something .. but who will have the incentive to do this?

geeks of the century award

[stickytar]

For what it's worth, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn came here to Montana a while back and in a small packed conference room at the university we were able to field some questions to these guys.

I was intrigued by what they had to say about the history of them developing TCP. The whole ipv4 that we have now comes from their original general assumption that at most only 9 network nodes at most (colleges, and research centers) would ever be using this silly thing. Now the much needed? shove towards ipv6 has even our toaster beeming with glee. What impressed me the most wasn't Vinton Cerf, but Robert Kahn. Cerf took the money and ran so to say. He has a BIG job at MCIWorldcom and is highly recoginized, but the real meat and potatoes programmer, Robert Kahn, does not have the big glitz job. He is quietly doing research as we code away at nights. This is the man that deserves recognition for the internet. He did the majority of the coding for the stack and was the driving force at it's implementation. Not to down on Cerf because they are both brilliant minds, but it seems the real coders out their never get their due share. For what it's worth...

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refrig: copy that toaster:2 transmitting butter now.

Ooh yeah...

[Sharkey [BAMF]]

"You've got your fiber layer, and you're going to carry some number of wavelengths on each fiber -- the term that is used is lambda for wavelength, so lambda means color, really. One fiber can carry a number of colors -- there could be as many as a hundred, maybe even more. Each color might be transporting as much as a terabit of capacity"I'm sorry, but did that give anyone else an erection, or is it just me?Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com

IPv6 is more than addressspace

[jd]

One of the reasons it ISN'T more widely deployed is that that is all it is perceived as being, by the PHB's with all the cash.

Usually, though, NAT and firewalling give you essentially the address space you want, with no extra deployment costs. Hence, the total lack of interest.

BUT, IPv6 also offers:

• Speed (simpler headers and simpler routing)
• Mobility (mobile IPv4 has relied on all stations involved having forwarding systems)
• Autoconfiguration (no more messing with DHCP or BOOTP configuration files)
• Security (IPSec is mandatory)
• Optimised Connections (anycasting allows you to locate the nearest active server of the type you want)
• Quality of Service (another mandatory feature)
• Multicasting (yet another mandatory feature)

I dunno about you, but I think ISPs that can get a feature list like that would be far more interested than if they're told they get more IP space to sell. There are only a finite number of customers in an area.