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 [email protected] 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: [email protected]
































Vecchi                                                         [Page 14]