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rfc:rfc1686

Network Working Group M. Vecchi Request for Comments: 1686 Time Warner Cable Category: Informational August 1994

     IPng Requirements: A Cable Television Industry Viewpoint

Status of this Memo

 This memo provides information for the Internet community.  This memo
 does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of
 this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

 This document was submitted to the IETF IPng area in response to RFC
 1550.  Publication of this document does not imply acceptance by the
 IPng area of any ideas expressed within.  The statements in this
 paper are intended as input to the technical discussions within IETF,
 and do not represent any endorsement or commitment on the part of the
 cable television industry or any of its companies.  Comments should
 be submitted to the big-internet@munnari.oz.au mailing list.

Table of Contents

 1. Executive Summary ..........................................   2
 2. Cable Television Industry Overview .........................   2
 3. Engineering Considerations .................................   5
 3.1  Scaling ..................................................   5
 3.2  Timescale ................................................   5
 3.3  Transition and deployment ................................   6
 3.4  Security .................................................   7
 3.5  Configuration, administration and operation ..............   7
 3.6  Mobile hosts .............................................   8
 3.7  Flows and resource reservation ...........................   8
 3.8  Policy based routing .....................................  10
 3.9  Topological flexibility ..................................  10
 3.10 Applicability ............................................  10
 3.11 Datagram service .........................................  11
 3.12 Accounting ...............................................  11
 3.13 Support of communication media ...........................  12
 3.14 Robustness and fault tolerance ...........................  12
 3.15 Technology pull ..........................................  12
 3.16 Action items .............................................  13
 4. Security Considerations ....................................  13
 5. Conclusions ................................................  13
 6. Author's Address ...........................................  14

Vecchi [Page 1] RFC 1686 A Cable Television Industry Viewpoint on IPng August 1994

1. Executive Summary

 This paper provides comments on topics related to the IPng
 requirements and selection criteria from a cable television industry
 viewpoint. The perspective taken is to position IPng as a potential
 internetworking technology to support the global requirements of the
 future integrated broadband networks that the cable industry is
 designing and deploying. The paper includes a section describing the
 cable television industry and outlining the network architectures to
 support  the delivery of entertainment programming and interactive
 multimedia digital services, as well as telecommunication and data
 communication services.
 Cable networks touch on residences, in addition to campuses and
 business parks.  Broadband  applications will reach the average,
 computer-shy person. The applications will involve a heavy use of
 video and audio to provide communication, entertainment and
 information-access services. The deployment of these capabilities to
 the homes will represent  tens of millions of users.  Impact on the
 network and the IPng requirements that are discussed include issues
 of scalability, reliability and availability, support for real-time
 traffic,  security and privacy, and operations and network
 management, among others.

2. Cable Television Industry Overview

 Cable television networks and the Internet are discovering each
 other. It looks like a great match for a number of reasons, the
 available bandwidth being the primary driver. Nonetheless, it seems
 that the impact of the cable television industry in the deployment of
 broadband networks and services is still not fully appreciated. This
 section will provide a quick (and simplified) overview of cable
 television networks, and explain the trends that are driving future
 network architectures and services.
 Cable television networks  in the U.S. pass by approximately 90
 million homes, and have about 56 million subscribers, of a total of
 about 94 million homes (U.S. TV CENSUS figures, 9/30/93). There are
 more than 11,000 headends, and the cable TV industry has installed
 more than 1,000,000 network-miles. Installation of optical fiber
 proceeds at a brisk pace, the fiber plant in the U.S. going from
 13,000 miles in 1991 to 23,000 miles in 1992. Construction spending
 by the cable industry in 1992 was estimated to be about $2.4 billion,
 of which $1.4 billion was for rebuilds and upgrades. Cable industry
 revenue from subscriber services in 1992 was estimated to be more
 than $21 billion, corresponding to an average subscriber rate of
 about $30 per month (source:  Paul Kagan Associates, Inc.). These
 figures are based on "conventional" cable television services, and

Vecchi [Page 2] RFC 1686 A Cable Television Industry Viewpoint on IPng August 1994

 are expected to grow as the cable industry moves into new interactive
 digital services and telecommunications.
 The cable industry's broadband integrated services network
 architecture is based on a hierarchical deployment of network
 elements interconnected by broadband fiber optics and coaxial cable
 links. In a very simplified manner, the following is a view of this
 architecture. Starting at the home, a coaxial cable tree-and-branch
 plant provides broadband two-way access to the network.  The local
 access coaxial cable plant is aggregated at a fiber node, which marks
 the point in the network where fiber optics becomes the broadband
 transmission medium. Current deployment is for  approximately 500
 homes passed by the coaxial cable plant for every fiber node, with
 variations (from as low as 100 to as many as 3000) that depend on the
 density of homes and the degree of penetration of broadband services.
 The multiple links from the fiber nodes reach the headend, which is
 where existing cable systems have installed equipment for
 origination, reception and distribution of television programming.
 The headends are in buildings that can accommodate weather protection
 and powering facilities, and hence represent the first natural place
 into the network where complex switching, routing and processing
 equipment can be conveniently located. Traffic from multiple headends
 can be routed over fiber optics to regional hub nodes deeper into the
 network, where capital-intensive functions can be shared in an
 efficient way.
 The cable networks are evolving quite rapidly to become effective
 two-way digital broadband networks. Cable networks will continue to
 be asymmetric,  and they will continue to deliver analog video. But
 digital capabilities are being installed very aggressively and a
 significant upstream bandwidth is rapidly being activated. The
 deployment of optical fiber deeper into the network is making the
 shared coaxial plant more effective in carrying broadband traffic in
 both directions. For instance, with fiber nodes down to where only
 about 100 to 500 homes are passed by the coaxial drops (down from
 tens of thousands of homes passed in the past), an upstream bandwidth
 of several MHz represents a considerable capacity. The recent
 announcement by Continental Cablevision and PSI to provide Internet
 access services is but one example of the many uses that these two-
 way broadband capabilities can provide.
 The cable networks are also rapidly evolving into regional networks.
 The deployment of fiber optic trunking facilities (many based on
 SONET) will provide gigabit links that interconnect regional hub
 nodes in regional networks spanning multiple cable systems. These
 gigabit networks carry digitized video programming, but will also
 carry voice (telephone) traffic, and, of course, data traffic. There
 are instances in various parts of the country where these regional

Vecchi [Page 3] RFC 1686 A Cable Television Industry Viewpoint on IPng August 1994

 networks have been in successful trials. And given that compressed
 digital video is the way to deliver future video programs (including
 interactive video, video on demand, and a whole menu of other
 applications like computer supported collaborative work, multiparty
 remote games, home shopping, customized advertisement, multimedia
 information services, etc.), one can be guaranteed that gigabit
 regional networks will be put in place at an accelerated pace.
 The cable networks are evolving to provide broadband networking
 capabilities in support  of a complete suite of communication
 services. The Orlando network being built by Time Warner is an
 example of a Full Service Network(TM) that provides video, audio and
 data services to the homes. For the trial, ATM is brought to the
 homes at DS3 rates, and it is expected to go up to OC-3 rates when
 switch interfaces will be available. This trial in Orlando represents
 a peek into the way of future cable networks. The Full Service
 Network uses a "set-top" box in every home to provide the network
 interface. This "set-top" box, in addition to some specialized
 modules for video processing, is really a powerful computer in
 disguise, with a computational power comparable to high-end desktop
 workstations. The conventional analog cable video channels will be
 available, but a significant part of the network's RF bandwidth will
 be devoted to digital services. There are broadband ATM switches in
 the network (as well as 5E-type switches for telephony), and video
 servers that include all kinds of movies and information services. An
 important point to notice is that the architecture of future cable
 networks maps directly to the way networked computing has developed.
 General purpose hosts (i.e., the set-top boxes)  are interconnected
 through a broadband network to other hosts and to servers.
 The deployment of the future broadband information superhighway will
 require architectures for both the network infrastructure and the
 service support environment that truly integrate the numerous
 applications that will be offered to the users. Applications will
 cover a very wide range of scenarios.  Entertainment video delivery
 will evolve from the current core services of the cable industry to
 enhanced offerings like interactive video, near-video-on-demand and
 complete video-on-demand functions. Communication services will
 evolve from the current telephony and low-speed data to include
 interactive multimedia applications, information access services,
 distance learning, remote medical diagnostics and evaluations,
 computer supported collaborative work,  multiparty remote games,
 electronic shopping, etc. In addition to the complexity and diversity
 of the applications, the future broadband information infrastructure
 will combine a number of different networks that will have to work in
 a coherent manner. Not only will the users be connected to different
 regional networks, but the sources of information - in the many forms
 that they will take - will also belong to different enterprises and

Vecchi [Page 4] RFC 1686 A Cable Television Industry Viewpoint on IPng August 1994

 may be located in remote networks. It is important to realize from
 the start that the two most important attributes of the architecture
 for the future broadband information superhighway are integration and
 interoperability. The Internet community has important  expertise and
 technology that could contribute to the definition and development of
 these future broadband networks.

3. Engineering Considerations

 The following comments represent expected requirements of future
 cable networks, based on the vision of an integrated broadband
 network that will support a complete suite of interactive video,
 voice and data services.
 3.1  Scaling
    The current common wisdom is that IPng should be able to deal with
    10 to the 12th nodes. Given that there are of the order of 10 to
    the 8th households in the US, we estimate a worldwide  number of
    households of about 100 times as many, giving a total of about 10
    to the 10th global households. This number represents about 1
    percent of the 10 to the 12th nodes, which indicates that there
    should be enough space left for business, educational, research,
    government, military and other nodes connected to the future
    Internet.
    One should be cautious, however, not to underestimate the
    possibility of multiple addresses that will be used at each node
    to specify different devices, processes, services, etc. For
    instance, it is very likely that more than one address will  be
    used at each household for different devices such as the
    entertainment system (i.e., interactive multimedia "next
    generation" television(s)), the data system (i.e., the home
    personal computer(s)), and other new terminal devices that will
    emerge in the future (such as networked games, PDAs, etc.).
    Finally, the administration of the address space is of importance.
    If there are large blocks of assigned but unused addresses, the
    total number of available addresses will be effectively reduced
    from the 10 to the 12th nodes that have been originally
    considered.
 3.2  Timescale
    The cable industry is already making significant investments in
    plant upgrades, and the current estimates for the commercial
    deployment indicate that by the year 1998 tens of millions of
    homes will be served by interactive and integrated cable networks
    and services. This implies that during 1994 various trials will be

Vecchi [Page 5] RFC 1686 A Cable Television Industry Viewpoint on IPng August 1994

    conducted and evaluated, and the choices of technologies and
    products will be well under way by the year 1995. That is to say,
    critical investment and technological decisions by many of the
    cable operators, and their partners, will be made over the next 12
    to 24 months.
    These time estimates are tentative, of course, and subject to
    variations depending on economic, technical and public policy
    factors. Nonetheless, the definition of the IPng capabilities and
    the availability of implementations should not be delayed beyond
    the next year, in order to meet the period during which many of
    the early technological choices for the future deployment of cable
    networks and services will be made. The full  development and
    deployment of IPng will be, of course, a long period that will be
    projected beyond the next year. Availability of early
    implementations will allow experimentation in trials to validate
    IPng choices and to provide early buy-in from the developers of
    networking products that will support the planned roll out.
    It is my opinion that the effective support for high quality video
    and audio streams is one of the critical capabilities that should
    be demonstrated by IPng in order to capture the attention of
    network operators and information providers of interactive
    broadband services (e.g., cable television industry and partners).
    The currently accepted view is that IP is a great  networking
    environment for the control side of an interactive broadband
    system. It is a challenge for IPng to demonstrate that it can be
    effective in transporting the broadband video and audio data
    streams, in addition to providing the networking support for the
    distributed control system.
 3.3  Transition and deployment
    The transition from the current version to IPng has to consider
    two aspects: support for existing applications and availability of
    new capabilities. The delivery of digital video and audio programs
    requires the capability to do broadcasting and selective
    multicasting efficiently. The interactive applications that the
    future cable networks will provide will be based on multimedia
    information streams that will have real-time constraints. That is
    to say, both the end-to-end delays and the jitter associated with
    the delivery across the network have to be bound. In addition, the
    commercial nature of these large private investments will require
    enhanced network capabilities for routing choices, resource
    allocation, quality of service controls, security, privacy, etc.
    Network management will be an increasingly important issue in the
    future. The extent to which the current IP fails to provide the
    needed capabilities will provide additional incentive for the

Vecchi [Page 6] RFC 1686 A Cable Television Industry Viewpoint on IPng August 1994

    transition to occur, since there will be no choice but to use IPng
    in future applications.
    It is very important, however, to maintain backwards compatibility
    with the current IP. There is the obvious argument that the
    installed technological base developed around IP cannot be
    neglected under any reasonable evolution scenario. But in
    addition, one has to keep in mind that a global Internet will be
    composed of many interconnected heterogeneous networks, and that
    not all subnetworks, or user communities, will provide the full
    suite of interactive multimedia services. Interworking between
    IPng and IP will have to continue for a very long time in the
    future.
 3.4  Security
    The security needed in future networks falls into two general
    categories: protection of the users and protection of the network
    resources. The users of the future global Internet will include
    many communities that will likely expect a higher level of
    security than is currently available. These users include
    business, government, research, military, as well as private
    subscribers. The protection of the users' privacy is likely to
    become a hot issue as new commercial services are rolled out. The
    possibility of illicitly monitoring traffic patterns by looking at
    the headers in IPng packets, for instance, could be disturbing to
    most users that subscribe to new information and entertainment
    services.
    The network operators and the information providers will also
    expect effective protection of their resources. One would expect
    that most of the security will be dealt at higher levels than
    IPng, but some issues might have to be considered in defining IPng
    as well. One issue relates, again, to the possibility of illicitly
    monitoring addresses and traffic patterns by looking at the IPng
    packet headers. Another issue of importance will be the capability
    of effective network management under the presence of benign or
    malicious bugs, especially if both source routing and resource
    reservation functionality is made available.
 3.5  Configuration, administration and operation
    The operations of these future integrated broadband networks will
    indeed become more difficult, and not only because the networks
    themselves will be larger and more complex, but also because of
    the number and diversity of applications running on or through the
    networks. It is expected that most of the issues that need to be
    addressed for effective operations support systems will belong to

Vecchi [Page 7] RFC 1686 A Cable Television Industry Viewpoint on IPng August 1994

    higher layers than IPng, but some aspects should be considered
    when defining IPng.
    The area where IPng would have most impact would be in the
    interrelated issues of resource reservation, source routing and
    quality of service control. There will be tension to maintain high
    quality of service and low network resource usage simultaneously,
    especially if the users can specify preferred routes through the
    network. Useful capabilities at the IPng level would enable the
    network operator, or the user, to effectively monitor and direct
    traffic in order to meet quality and cost parameters. Similarly,
    it will be important to dynamically reconfigure the connectivity
    among end points or the location of specific processes (e.g., to
    support mobile computing terminals), and the design of IPng should
    either support, or at least not get in the way of, this
    capability. Under normal conditions, one would expect that
    resources for the new routing will be established before the old
    route is released in order to minimize service interruption. In
    cases where reconfiguration is in response to abnormal (i.e.,
    failure) conditions, then one would expect longer interruptions in
    the service, or even loss of service.
    The need to support heterogeneous multiple administrative domains
    will also have important implications on the available addressing
    schemes that IPng should support. It will be both a technical and
    a business issue to have effective means to address nodes,
    processes and users, as well as choosing schemes based on fair and
    open processes for allocation and administration of the address
    space.
 3.6  Mobile hosts
    The proliferation of personal and mobile communication services is
    a well established trend by now. Similarly, mobile computing
    devices are being introduced to the market at an accelerated pace.
    It would not be wise to disregard the issue of host mobility when
    evaluating proposals for IPng.  Mobility will have impact on
    network addressing and routing, adaptive resource reservation,
    security and privacy, among other issues.
 3.7  Flows and resource reservation
    The largest fraction of the future broadband traffic will be due
    to real-time voice and video streams. It will be necessary to
    provide performance bounds for bandwidth, jitter, latency and loss
    parameters, as well as synchronization between media streams
    related by an application in a given session. In addition, there
    will be alternative network providers that will compete for the

Vecchi [Page 8] RFC 1686 A Cable Television Industry Viewpoint on IPng August 1994

    users and that will provide connectivity to a given choice of many
    available service providers. There is no question that IPng, if it
    aims to be a general protocol useful for interactive multimedia
    applications, will need to support some form of resource
    reservation or flows.
    Two aspects are worth mentioning. First, the quality of service
    parameters are not known ahead of time, and hence the network will
    have to include flexible capabilities for defining these
    parameters. For instance, MPEG-II packetized video might have to
    be described differently than G.721 PCM packetized voice, although
    both data streams represent real-time traffic channels. In some
    cases, it might be appropriate to provide soft guarantees in the
    quality parameters, whereas in other cases hard guarantees might
    be required. The tradeoff between cost and quality could be an
    important capability of future IPng-based networks, but much work
    needs to be advanced on this.
    A second important issue related to resource reservations is the
    need to deal with broken or lost end-to-end state information. In
    traditional circuit-switched networks, a considerable effort is
    expended by the intelligence of the switching system to detect and
    recover resources that have been lost due to misallocation. Future
    IPng networks will provide resource reservation capabilities by
    distributing the state information of a given session in several
    nodes of the network. A significant effort will be needed to find
    effective methods to maintain consistency and recover from errors
    in such a distributed environment. For example, keep-alive
    messages to each node where a queuing policy change has been made
    to establish the flow could be a strategy to make sure that
    network resources do not remain stuck in some corrupted session
    state. One should be careful, however, to assume that complex
    distributed algorithms can be made robust by using time-outs. This
    is a problem that might require innovation beyond the reuse of
    existing solutions.
    It should be noted that some aspects of the requirements for
    recoverability are less stringent in this networking environment
    than in traditional distributed data processing systems. In most
    cases it is not needed (or even desirable) to recover the exact
    session state after failures, but only to guarantee that the
    system returns to some safe state. The goal would be to guarantee
    that no network resource is reserved that has not been correctly
    assigned to a valid session. The more stringent requirement of
    returning to old session state is not meaningful since the value
    of a session disappears, in most cases, as time progresses. One
    should keep in mind, however, that administrative and management
    state, such as usage measurement, is subject to the same

Vecchi [Page 9] RFC 1686 A Cable Television Industry Viewpoint on IPng August 1994

    conventional requirements of recoverability that database systems
    currently offer.
 3.8  Policy based routing
    In future broadband networks, there will be multiple network
    operators and information providers competing for customers and
    network traffic.  An important capability of IPng will be to
    specify, at the source, the specific network for the traffic to
    follow. The users will be able to select specific networks that
    provide performance, feature or cost advantages. From the user's
    perspective, source routing is a feature that would enable a wider
    selection of network access options, enhancing their ability to
    obtain features, performance or cost advantages. From the network
    operator and service provider perspective, source routing would
    enable the offering of targeted bundled services that will cater
    to specific users and achieve some degree of customer lock-in. The
    information providers will be able to optimize the placement and
    distribution of their servers, based on either point-to-point
    streams or on multicasting to selected subgroups. The ability of
    IPng to dynamically specify the network routing would be an
    attractive feature that will facilitate the flexible offering of
    network services.
 3.9  Topological flexibility
    It is hard to predict what the topology of the future Internet
    will be. The current model developed in response to a specific set
    of technological drivers, as well as an open administrative
    process reflecting the non-commercial nature of the sector. The
    future Internet will continue to integrate multiple administrative
    domains that will be deployed by a variety of network operators.
    It is likely that there will be more "gateway" nodes (at the
    headends or even at the fiber nodes, for instance) as local and
    regional broadband networks will provide connectivity for their
    users to the global Internet.
 3.10 Applicability
    The future broadband networks that will be deployed, by both the
    cable industry and other companies, will integrate a diversity of
    applications. The strategies of the cable industry are to reach
    the homes, as well as schools, business, government and other
    campuses. The applications will focus on entertainment, remote
    education, telecommuting, medical, community services, news
    delivery and the whole spectrum of future information networking
    services. The traffic carried by the broadband networks will be
    dominated by real-time video and audio streams, even though there

Vecchi [Page 10] RFC 1686 A Cable Television Industry Viewpoint on IPng August 1994

    will also be an important component of traffic associated with
    non-time-critical services such messaging, file transfers, remote
    computing, etc. The value of IPng will be measured as a general
    internetworking technology for all these classes of applications.
    The future market for IPng could be much wider and larger than the
    current market for IP, provided that the capabilities to support
    these diverse interactive multimedia applications are available.
    It is difficult to predict how pervasive the use of IPng and its
    related technologies might be in future broadband networks. There
    will be extensive deployment of distributed computing
    capabilities, both for the user applications and for the network
    management and operation support systems that will be required.
    This is the area where IPng could find a firm stronghold,
    especially as it can leverage on the extensive IP technology
    available. The extension of IPng to support video and audio real-
    time applications, with the required performance, quality and cost
    to be competitive, remains a question to be answered.
 3.11 Datagram service
    The "best-effort", hop-by-hop paradigm of the existing IP service
    will have to be reexamined if IPng is to provide capabilities for
    resource reservation or flows. The datagram paradigm could still
    be the basic service provided by IPng for many applications, but
    careful thought should be given to the need to support real-time
    traffic with (soft and/or hard) quality of service requirements.
 3.12 Accounting
    The ability to do accounting should be an important consideration
    in the selection of IPng. The future broadband networks will be
    commercially motivated, and measurement of resource usage by the
    various users will be required. The actual billing may or may not
    be based on session-by-session usage, and accounting will have
    many other useful purposes besides billing. The efficient
    operation of networks depends on maintaining availability and
    performance goals, including both on-line actions and long term
    planning and design. Accounting information will be important on
    both scores. On the other hand, the choice of providing accounting
    capabilities at the IPng level should be examined with a general
    criterion to introduce as little overhead as possible. Since
    fields for "to", "from" and time stamp will be available for any
    IPng choice, careful examination of what other parameters in IPng
    could be useful to both accounting and other network functions so
    as to keep IPng as lean as possible.

Vecchi [Page 11] RFC 1686 A Cable Television Industry Viewpoint on IPng August 1994

 3.13 Support of communication media
    The generality of IP should be carried over to IPng. It would not
    be an advantage to design a general internetworking technology
    that cannot be supported over as wide a class of communications
    media as possible. It is reasonable to expect that IPng will start
    with support over a few select transport technologies, and rely on
    the backwards compatibility with IP to work through a transition
    period. Ultimately, however, one would expect IPng to be carried
    over any available communications medium.
 3.14 Robustness and fault tolerance
    Service availability, end-to-end and at expected performance
    levels, is the true measure of robustness and fault-tolerance. In
    this sense, IPng is but one piece of a complex puzzle. There are,
    however, some vulnerability aspects of IPng that could decrease
    robustness. One general class of bugs will be associated with the
    change itself, regardless of any possible enhancement in
    capabilities. The design, implementation and testing process will
    have to be managed very carefully. Networks and distributed
    systems are tricky. There are plenty of horror stories from the
    Internet community itself to make us cautious, not to mention the
    brief but dramatic outages over the last couple of years
    associated with relatively small software bugs in the control
    networks (i.e., CCS/SS7 signaling) of the telephone industry, both
    local and long distance.
    A second general class of bugs will be associated with the
    implementation of new capabilities. IPng will likely support a
    whole set of new functions, such as larger (multiple?) address
    space(s), source routing and flows, just to mention a few.
    Providing these new capabilities will require in most cases
    designing new distributed algorithms and testing implementation
    parameters very carefully. In addition, the future Internet will
    be even larger, have more diverse applications and have higher
    bandwidth. These are all factors that could have a multiplying
    effect on bugs that in the current network might be easily
    contained. The designers and implementers of IPng should be
    careful. It will be very important to provide the best possible
    transition process from IP to IPng. The need to maintain
    robustness and fault-tolerance is paramount.
 3.15 Technology pull
    The strongest "technology pull" factors that will influence the
    Internet are the same that are dictating the accelerated pace of
    the cable, telephone and computer networking world. The following

Vecchi [Page 12] RFC 1686 A Cable Television Industry Viewpoint on IPng August 1994

    is a partial list: higher network bandwidth, more powerful CPUs,
    larger and faster (static and dynamic) memory, improved signal
    processing and compression methods, advanced distributed computing
    technologies, open and extensible network operating systems, large
    distributed database management and directory systems, high
    performance and high capacity real-time servers, friendly
    graphical user interfaces, efficient application development
    environments. These technology developments, coupled with the
    current aggressive business strategies in our industry and
    favorable public policies, are powerful forces that will clearly
    have an impact on the evolution and acceptance of IPng. The
    current deployment strategies of the cable industry and their
    partners do not rely on the existence of commercial IPng
    capabilities, but the availability of new effective networking
    technology could become a unifying force to facilitate the
    interworking of networks and services.
 3.16 Action items
    We have no suggestions at this time for changes to the
    directorate, working groups or others to support the concerns or
    gather more information needed for a decision. We remain available
    to provide input to the IPng process.

4. Security Considerations

 No comments on general security issues are provided, beyond the
 considerations presented in the previous subsection 3.4 on network
 security.

5. Conclusions

 The potential for IPng to provide a universal internetworking
 solution is a very attractive possibility, but there are many hurdles
 to be overcome. The general acceptance of IPng to support future
 broadband services will depend on more than the IPng itself. There is
 need for IPng to be backed by the whole suite of Internet technology
 that will support the future networks and applications. These
 technologies must include the adequate support for commercial
 operation of a global Internet that will be built, financed and
 administered by many different private and public organizations.
 The Internet community has taken pride in following a nimble and
 efficient path in the development and deployment of network
 technology. And the Internet has been very successful up to now. The
 challenge is to show that the Internet model can be a preferred
 technical solution for the future. Broadband networks and services
 will become widely available in a relatively short future, and this

Vecchi [Page 13] RFC 1686 A Cable Television Industry Viewpoint on IPng August 1994

 puts the Internet community in a fast track race. The current process
 to define IPng can be seen as a test of the ability of the Internet
 to evolve from its initial development - very successful but also
 protected and limited in scope  - to a general technology for the
 support of a commercially viable broadband marketplace.  If the
 Internet model is to become the preferred general solution for
 broadband networking,  the current IPng process seems to be a
 critical starting point.

6. Author's Address

 Mario P. Vecchi
 Time Warner Cable,
 160 Inverness Drive West
 Englewood, CO 80112
 Phone: (303) 799-5540
 Fax: (303) 799-5651
 EMail: mpvecchi@twcable.com

Vecchi [Page 14]

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