Thoughts on Google Fiber for Appleton / ISPs

Tonight I attended a public hearing at Appleton City Hall (PDF) regarding the city's consideration to submit a response to Google's request for information on the Google Fiber for Communities experiment. (Don't miss Google's project overview and other linked pages.) Also, please join the Google Fiber for Appleton Facebook group.

I was pleasantly surprised to see this public hearing bring the attention of Green Bay TV stations WFRV / CBS channel 5 and WGBA / NBC channel 26. The public hearing started late due to another meeting in the same room. There were probably a few more than 20 people in attendance, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. This echoed the current status of the City of Appleton's Survey, which was mentioned to also be overwhelmingly in favor of submitting a proposal. In general, the responses given at the hearing were mostly focused on the points that Appleton should proceed with submitting a favorable proposal in order to remain competitive as a community, to bring additional competition and choices for Internet service, and many other convincing reasons.

There were only 3 responses against: 2 from AT&T representatives in attendance for somewhat obvious reasons in concern for their business, and 1 gentleman concerned with the physical cost necessary to connect to connect gigabit networking to his Apple computer. (He apparently assumed that the fiber would need to be connected directly to his computer. Most computers sold in the past few years already have gigabit Ethernet cards, or they are readily available for less than $50. Additionally, there are many potential uses beyond a computer, such as video and other multimedia.) As also mentioned by another resident at the meeting, even being able to connect at only 100 Mbps (vs. the 1 Gbps / 1,000 Mbps being advertised) would still be about 10x faster than most consumer broadband connections available today.

My Own Thoughts

In general, additional competition for residential Internet service can only be a good thing - whether that competition is from Google or another provider. At my current residence in an apartment just outside the official city limits (in Grand Chute, near the Fox River Mall), my choices for broadband Internet are currently limited to Time Warner Cable and DSL. Wireless / "3G" was tried, and is not current viable for primary / serious use as previously detailed. Interestingly, the reps from AT&T at the hearing used their wireless network as one of their primary arguments against submitting a proposal to Google. After looking into Time Warner Cable, they presented themselves as one of the shadiest operations in town, at least based upon my experience at their local office. I'm currently using AT&T's DSL. While I would like to sign-up for AT&T U-Verse, I'm told that it is not available to my particular building, despite several of my neighbors in very close proximity having the service.

Unlike many of the comments and hype, I would hope that Google's offering is not all about the speed - even though, unfortunately, this is all many residential consumers are aware of or take into consideration. A few questions to consider of any ISP:

• In addition to the speed, what is the latency (or lag)?
• What is the support for IPv6?
• Are industry standards properly followed, such as RFC 2308 - Negative Caching of DNS Queries? Or is the ISP involved in DNS hijacking?
• Is service advertised as "unlimited" truly unlimited, or are there limits involved that are only shown in fine print, if at all?
• What is the ISP's stance on network neutrality?
• What support / allowance is there for operating as a server - either a web server, or something more "residential" such as allowing remote desktop connections, allowing for peer-to-peer file transfers, or playing games that require being able to accept incoming network connections?
• What are the results from the ICSI Netalyzer hosted by UC Berkeley, which tests for most of the above as well other issues?

Google, in particular, has a positive record for properly supporting the above requirements and avoiding the listed issues:

• In order to help solve the issues that many ISPs cause with their crippled DNS servers, Google started offering their own public DNS, promising to improve performance, security, and to keep strict adherence with standards.
• Google is embracing and supporting IPv6:
  • Looking towards IPv6 (Lorenzo Colitti and Erik Kline, 2008-05-13, googleblog.blogspot.com)
  • Google over IPv6 (google.com)
  • Google: IPv6 is easy, not expensive (Carolyn Duffy Marsan, 2009-05-25, networkworld.com)
• Google is an outspoken proponent (googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com) of network neutrality.
• Google has demonstrated the proper way to provide transparency around issues, such as the reports around their recent app engine outage: Google App Engine downtime postmortem, nearly a perfect model for others (Lenny Rachitsky, 2010-03-05, transparentuptime.com) and When the Power Goes Out At Google (2010-03-08, hardware.slashdot.org).

I can't imagine that Google wouldn't uphold the same principals in providing their own Internet service.

(On a humorous note, I can't help but recall Google's previous ISP / fiber offering: Google TiSP.)

Even if Appleton submits a proposal for and is accepted as a location for Google Fiber, there is no guarantee that I would be in the service area - especially being in a neighboring town. However, I have no doubt that I would still benefit from the increased competition. Additionally, once we're back in the market to buy a a house in the area, the availability of Google Fiber would be a serious consideration. (Someone please buy our house for sale in Wausau! - which happens to be wired with Cat-6 for Gigabit networking.)

The Need for IPv6

Almost a year ago, I brought IPv6 connectivity to my home network / LAN.

Background

Similar to the past Y2K issue, the Internet is facing a similar issue that just hasn't been publicized too much in the mainstream media yet: Exhaustion of the IPv4 addresses currently being used. I found a very interesting and detailed IPv4 Address Report by Geoff Huston that is auto-generated daily. There are various estimates as to the numbers and dates, but all the predictions are currently falling in the range of years 2011-2012. This shortage of IPv4 addresses will certainly be a much larger issue than other predictions and myths for the year 2012.

The only real solution to the IPv4 address shortage is upgrading to IPv6. IPv4 allowed for 2³², or 4,294,967,296 addresses. With most computers, servers, and even cell phones each being assigned a unique address, the shortage should not be surprising. However, back when the IPv4 specification was published back in 1981 (RFC 791), I'm sure 4+ billion addresses was considered more than sufficient. IPv6 solves this shortage by increasing the number of possible addresses to 2¹²⁸, or 3.4×10³⁸. Written out, this is 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. Beyond the increased address space, IPv6 also brings a number of other features, including mandatory support for advanced security, simplified processing, and support for network mobility.

IPv6 became active for production use on the Internet in June 2006. Unfortunately, it seems that many organizations and much of the Internet has not yet committed to converting, and the shortage will have to be dealt with. I see this causing more problems for regular at-home users than anyone else. Most individuals are not aware of the issue, and have little choice than to accept however their ISP handles the issue - short of possibly switching providers. Already, most consumers are only leased one IP address per Internet account, which usually must be shared between several computers and other Internet-connected devices. This is almost always accomplished through network address translation (NAT). This already causes complications and issues with file transfers, remote assistance applications, VPN software, online gaming, and many other typical Internet uses. As the shortage becomes more significant, expect for an increasing number of ISPs to no longer lease a public IP address at all, but instead only lease a private IP, where multiple private IPs share one public IP - essentially nesting one NAT network within another, and will only further complicate matters. The same "public IP per Internet account" that we are accustomed to today may still be available - but only for an added fee.

Use of NAT and private IPs are also in conflict with the fundamental design of the Internet and prevent end-to-end connectivity. Overall, it increasingly seems that Internet providers are only guaranteeing limited "web access" vs. fuller "Internet access". I.E., if it doesn't run in a web browser, it is probably not supported. I already experienced this first-hand in my previous dealings with Alltel / Verizon in regards to my wireless Internet issues. Consumers need to start demanding more from their ISPs, and need to know and have a limited understanding of the facts to do so. One tool that can help with this is the ICSI Netalyzer hosted by UC Berkeley. Guarantee of a public IP - either IPv4 or IPv6 - is also something that should be investigated and demanded.

IPv6 Choices

The best and easiest way to utilize IPv6 is by connecting to an ISP that provides IPv6 support. Unfortunately, finding such an ISP is still a nearly impossible task - especially when limited to those that provide local access. There are a number of transition mechanisms that should be able to provide IPv6 even without ISP support, but all have their own issues. For example, Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows 7, and most other modern operating systems support 6to4, Teredo, and ISATAP as tunneling mechanisms. However, I have not had any real success with any of these - at least not under Windows and while behind a NAT.

6to4 actually seems like an ideal solution to provide IPv6 access to a LAN, as long as there is a capable device to serve as a router that also has access to a public IPv4 address. Unfortunately, the address of the IPv6 subnet is based on the IPv4 address. While this may be a feasible solution for those with static IPv4 addresses (rare, more expensive, and only becoming worse), use on a dynamic IPv4 address requires an insanely short lifetime on IPv6 addresses, and requires the entire LAN to be re-addressed whenever the hosting IPv4 address is updated.

This pretty much leaves me with tunneled IPv6 access through a tunnel broker, using either configured 6in4 or AYIYA protocols. The best I have found - at least for free - are Hurricane Electric's Tunnel Broker, SixXS, and gogoNET (previously go6.net).

SixXS has the largest list of available "Points of Presence" - 35 over 18 countries. However, access pretty much requires the AICCU client, which is becoming a bit outdated and has a number of issues under Windows. (As of this writing, the last update for Windows was 2008-05-25.) Additionally, while free, SixXS has had much difficulty maintaining uptimes - particularly the one in Chicago as well as other POPs in the US.

gogoNET currently has much better support for Windows (using their gogoClient - with versions for most *nix versions as well), but the available tunnels are limited to 3, and with nothing local to the US: Montreal, Amsterdam, and Sydney.

Overall, I've had the most success with Hurricane Electric. HE provides 24 tunnels across 10 countries, including 12 within the US. However, unlike SixXS and gogoNET, HE provides no visible support for use behind a non-owned firewall, such as for mobile use on other public networks.