Subject: [MMUSIC] Re: [Sip] RE: [BEHAVE] Re: ICE deployment data before LC for RFC

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:43:54 -0400

On 7/18/07 2:13 PM, "David Barrett" <[email-masked]> wrote:
> For example, regarding the "hole punching" approach (by which I assume you
> mean "opening a hole and trying to keep it open" versus ICE's "open a hole
> 'on demand' for each connection"), it's been demonstrated to work at large
> scale with at least 90% direct peer connectivity across the internet, today,
> with a much simpler message flow and implementation.

ICE makes me want to pound red-hot nails into my eye sockets.  That said,
90% really isn't nearly good enough for residential deployments.  For
cheap-o residential equipment, the margins are so thin that a support call
or two is sufficient to wipe out the profit on that sale.  Part of the
reason that ICE is the mess it is is that the group has been iteratively
fixing the various failures by adding more tests and probes and messages
and whatnot.  There are certainly a lot of other ways to achieve reliability
but regardless of which one you choose, reliability really does have to be
a priority.  Ancillary to that is that when you fail you should fail in
a way that can be diagnosed with reasonable ease and transparency
(auditability is good!), and I think we all know what happens when
traditional NAT hole-punching fails - stuff just doesn't work.

Melinda

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From: "David Barrett" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 15:38:52 -0700

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Melinda Shore [mailto:[email-masked]]
> 
> 90% really isn't nearly good enough for residential deployments.

Incidentally, 90% is where my stats come out today -- this doesn't include
restricted-cone/symmetric and symmetric/symmetric penetration, which has
been prototyped but not added to the production system yet.  The hope is
this will get us much close to the 99% range, but it remains to be seen by
how much.

Furthermore, I'd wager that for most applications (such as VoIP), even
routing 1 in 10 calls through a central relay isn't going to break the bank.
(Or for mega-discounts, use the full-cone and non-NAT'd clients (>30%) to
act as "free" relays for their peers.)

Thus while NAT penetration using what I guess we're calling the "hole
punching technique" has been demonstrated to work at 90%+ on a very large
scale (hundreds of thousands of clients tested) we should expect that it's
possible to get even better still.  If ICE can show how it'd do better,
that'd be great.  But we can't tolerate ICE being any worse than that, and
thus before rushing ahead with standardizing an unproven ICE, we should just
take the time to prove it.

-david