Subject: RE: Regarding the Options headers

From: "Thomas Eklund" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 14:05:00 +0100

Francis, just a short comment -
if you would like to continue to misunderstand me thats fine, but  I'm
telling you that there are people having problems out there TODAY.

What we do have in common is that we share the same vision about ipv6 but I
think that we are experincing different problems and to be frank I dont
think you understand my concers buts thats fine - there are others that do.

>    If you look at figures from Garter Group, IDC, DellOro,
> you see a trend that
>    GE will enter the LAN market very fast...
>
> => where? I know GE for campus backbones but GE is not very common for
> hosts (for three reasons today: fibers are expensive (will change when
> copper GE will be common), boards are expensive (will change
> when GE will
> spread enough) and PCI bus is too slow (will change when chipsets will
> be improved but (this is a shame, I agree) this seems to take time)).

And if you look in my answer I was talking about campus backbones!

As a side note, many operators are bulding a new infrastructure for
residential access and they are using fiber in many cases to the
household...

-- thomas

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From: Francis Dupont <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 14:58:40 +0100

In your previous mail you wrote:

=> what I have understood of your issue is the IPv6 protocol with
its extension header chain defined today makes layer >= 4 classification
hard or impossible at very high speed. This is true (then I don't
really misunderstand you :-) but the real question is whether it is
a real issue (ie. something we need to solve) or not, my argument
is the classification should be done by edge routers and not by
core routers.
Then there are two different points:
 - does the issue remain if edge routers are closed enough to hosts:
   * an interface only (for direct connections)
   * line speed limited at least by available stock hardware
   * low or at least reasonable number of flows?
  I believe the issue doesn't remain just because for many reasons
  stock hardware had, has and will have poor I/O performances
 - is it possible to put edge routers closed enough:
  * technical constraints: I can't see one?
  * price constraints: with ASICs we are supposed to do it cheaply?
  * policy constraints: I am sorry to have to say that but it is the job
    of a ISP to look at inside packets of its customers. It is why
    I said ESP will save us. Of course this should be the point where
    we have a very different opinion, in the past my current ISP decided
    the Web was mainly pornography and tried to limit the bandwidth
    for a particular TCP port...
I have talked about firewalls because:
 - they shared the same issue but they have to do something a bit harder
   (BTW I think a solution which works for routers and not for firewalls
    will have a problem in the future: there are (too) many ISPs which
    put firewalls to protect (against) customers)
 - they (will?) use ASICs when high performances are needed
 - they share the management issue, security policies are even more
   critical than QoS policies (a mistake for instance has worse consequences).

=> do you want a private or a public answer (:-)?

=> I don't believe they want to give a cheap giga Ethernet per access
with an usable 1Gbits/s (or I'll move to this place).

[email-masked]