The Internet is full, please get off

happygeek 0 697 Views

Speaking at the Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 in London, the VP of legislative affairs with AT&T, Jim Cicconi, has claimed that without investment the Internet's current network architecture will be at full capacity by 2010. That's just 24 short months from now, and with the ever increasing volume of video and user-generated content that is constantly being uploaded it is hardly surprising.

VeriSign, are certainly not surprised, and have been arguing for some time that the Internet is full and we need to get off - or at least get on with increasing capability to cope with this increased capacity requirement. It has already announced an expansion to its initiative designed to strengthen, protect and make structural upgrades to the Internet's infrastructure and increase its internet infrastructure ten fold by 2010.

Among the upgrades announced are:

  • Adding additional network operations centers in the eastern United States and Northern Europe to manage and provide increased redundancy for Internet traffic. These sites expand VeriSign's data center capacity and diversify its locations to improve Internet traffic management and counter region-specific cyber attacks and threats.
  • Increasing its daily Domain Name System (DNS) query capacity from 400 billion queries a day to more than 4 trillion queries a day and scaling its proprietary constellation of resolution systems to increase their bandwidth from over 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) to greater than 200 Gbps.
  • Distributing its infrastructure to more than 100 locations around the globe to provide redundancy and reduced latency that improves the experience for users by reducing bottlenecks and increasing speed.

"VeriSign is working to stay ahead of the constantly changing demands on its Internet infrastructure and threats to its security," said Ken Silva, chief technology officer at VeriSign. "The first stage of Project Titan was focused on the speed of the Internet and range of our infrastructure. This next stage will focus on ensuring that the level of security exceeds demands, such as new attacks coming from wireless devices, to keep the infrastructure stable and operational."

Dani AI

Generated

This thread captures the 2008 panic that "the Internet is full" and the sensible pushback from pointing at address exhaustion. The short historic fact: the IANA free pool of IPv4 addresses was exhausted in early 2011 when the remaining /8 blocks were allocated to the Regional Internet Registries — that event is what forced the industry into transition planning, not a catastrophic bandwidth collapse in 2010. (nro.net)

Capacity pressure since then has been handled with engineering, not magic: large-scale backbone upgrades, peering and caching, CDNs, and distributed/anycast DNS deployments reduced hotspots and latency. The DNS root system itself now runs many hundreds (and growing) anycast instances to spread query load and improve resilience — that architectural change mattered as much as raw pipe upgrades. (blog.apnic.net)

IPv6 is the long-term technical fix (it was standardized in RFC 8200), but rollout has been uneven and gradual; many networks are dual-stack while some rely on address-sharing (Carrier-Grade NAT) as a stopgap. CGN solves short-term scarcity but introduces tracing, port exhaustion and application-compatibility problems; RFC 6888 documents why CGN is a compromise and what to watch for. For up-to-date deployment snapshots see recent IPv6 deployment surveys. (rfc-editor.org)

Practical checklist for operators and admins:

  • Plan dual-stack (IPv4+IPv6) for hosts and edge services; add AAAA records for public services.
  • Audit firewalls, IDS/IPS, logging and monitoring for IPv6 (rules and logs are different).
  • Test reachability (use public IPv6-capability tests and APNIC/industry measurements).
  • Avoid depending only on CGN for new services; design for end-to-end connectivity when possible.

Example (DNS + simple firewall) — adapt to your platform:

; zone file snippet
www     IN      AAAA    2001:db8::1

# basic Linux ip6tables examples
ip6tables -A INPUT -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT

For deployment guidance and country-level summaries consult the IPv6 deployment literature and operator guides from the IETF/APNIC/Internet Society. (internetsociety.org)

Member Avatar for jwenting
jwenting 1,905 duckman

As you say, nothing new.
And had the responsible agencies and companies that manage the core infrastructure not been vigilant and constantly increasing capacity we'd have hit the limit years ago.

As it is the main problem we're facing today is not that the capacity of the network in bandwidth is getting critically congested, but that the address space if filling up rapidly.
And with IPv6 adoption still going at a glacial pace I don't see that problem going away any time soon, in fact it may not go away until people are pressed into it with their noses when they can't acquire an IP address because there are none to be had.

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