Basically, scattered across the globe are seven key holders who must come together and combine their powers to summon Gozer recreate the Domain Name System (DNS) security root key, a security measure that ensures websites are authentic and not just pirate copies. Because when you go to www.hungryforwaffles.com, you want it to really be your number one source for waffle information, not just some poseur copy.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) wants to secure the DNS, which is basically like the internet version of a phone book -- it takes domain names and translates them into IP addresses for the Internet to understand. Of course, since we're talking about technical Internet matters, their methods get dorky real fast, with lots of acronyms and "ceremonies" and unnecessary capitalization befitting the lifestyle of somebody who would volunteer to help protect the Domain Name System.
The seven mythical key holders are just one third of 21 Trusted Community Representatives (TCRs) who are necessary for root key generation and signing ceremonies. These guys were selected based on "Statements of Interest" solicited from the "Internet Community," yet, somehow, Pedobear is nowhere to be found among their numbers. ICANN was looking for "Persons of integrity, objectivity, and intelligence, with reputations for sound judgment and open minds." We didn't even know there were 21 people like that on the Internet.
The 14 TCRs who aren't Recovery Key Share Holders (or Keymasters, as we like to call them for dramatic flair) are called "Crypto Officers." They get the "cool" name because they have to do all the actual work, rather than having the Internet fall in love with them for keeping a smart card in a Ziploc baggie somewhere.
The Crypto Officers (a name which suggests that this really is just a bunch of AV guys who want to feel awesome) get a key to a physical deposit box in an ICANN facility that contains the credentials needed to enable the security measure that contains the private half of the root the 7 Keymasters come together to create the other half of. They are divided up equally between East and West coast facilities and actually have to travel and do stuff a few times a year without splitting our country in half via hip hop feuding.
The mythical keymasters are divided up across the globe, and each possesses a smart card that has been encoded with a part of the root key. Five of the seven members have to meet in the U.S. in the event that the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) has had to sever the connections between important servers to contain the damage caused by fancy-free, rollerblading hackers. As proof that they haven't lost the cards in a poker game, the key holders must send in a picture of the card along with a special secret phrase once a year.
We'd love to imagine that the people who hold these keys -- one each in the U.S., U.K., China, Trinidad and Tobago, Burkina Faso, the Czech Republic, and Canada -- are all mysterious men in long, dark, face-concealing robes whose identities must remain forever secret to protect the Internet.
Truthfully, however, they're more like Paul Kane -- an old blond guy in a suit. So typical of the Internet -- always building up our hopes for something awesome, and then dashing them against the ground without a moment's hesitation. For another example, www.hungryforwaffles.com isn't even a website, it's just something we made up as a joke. Lousy Internet.
In the middle of one of America's poorer cities, residents are about to get an unexpected gift: one gigabit per second Internet access over fiber optic cables courtesy of Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University.
According to the school's vice president for Information Technology Services, Lev Gonick, 72 percent of the homes around campus have no Internet access of any kind; 60 percent are on food stamps. "On a national scale, neighbors of the University have as much Internet access as Panamanians or Vietnamese," he wrote last year in a blog entry announcing the school's new project.
That's slowly changing as the university embarks on an ambitious research project to roll out 1Gbps Internet access to the immediate neighborhood, possibly extending this testbed network to 25,000 total Cleveland residents in total.
While most of the US has to live without any fiber at all, residents near University Circle are getting two strands apiece.
How much will it cost the residents? Nothing. The project is a research-driven attempt to find out if broadband can deliver more than e-mail and Web browsing. Can it provide what the community truly needs—public safety, more educational opportunities, and better medicine?Case Western Reserve doesn't yet know, but within a year, it plans to find out.
Fiber: can it make a neighborhood safe?
The school has a long history of working with fiber internally. Back in networking's Dark Ages—1989—the school had gone so far as to wire fiber to every outlet, offering 10Mbps Ethernet connections at a time when Cat3 was still the main twisted pair standard.
In 2001, Gonick became CIO and the university decided that the future was 1Gbps. It set about upgrading every outlet on campus to that speed.
By 2009, it realized that this bandwidth bounty could be pushed into the surrounding community and used as a testbed to find out just how a transformative truly high speed broadband might (or might not) be.
Given the school's location, public safety was the first priority for the deployment. No less than six separate public safety communities exist right in University Circle, and a fast broadband network could make it easier for them to share video feeds, share dispatching technology, and improve their coordination. In the neighborhoods around the school, a fat broadband pipe could make it easy to do remote video monitoring—in fact, two local apartment building owners have already told Gonick that they plan to use the new fiber build to help monitor each other's buildings. (See a video tour of the neighborhoods around the school below.)
Case Western Reserve researchers also want to see how the network is used for health care, education, and power. Smart grid technologies are one key component of the deployment; residents will have access to high tech thermostats, for example, which can display their home's energy use compared to that of their neighbors or to the neighborhood. On health care, providers like the Cleveland Clinic will use the network to see what sort of cost savings and care benefits might be wrung out of HD video conferencing with patients and automated home health monitoring gear.
The school has partnered with a host of community institutions on the project, encouraging each to develop its own "killer app" for the network within the next 18 months that the project will run. After that, the university hopes to get out of the business of running the network.
The entire network is being run on the "open access" model in which any provider—clinic, pay-TV operator, education network, power company—can access the connection. Gonick tells Ars that three video providers are already interested in selling their services over the link, providing a perfect example of how open access fiber can sever the link between infrastructure and provider that exists in most current cable and telco deployments.
The result, if all goes well: competition.
The buildout
The network build is now underway. The first "beta block" of 104 homes is currently being wired, while a second block has already been identified for future service. A demonstration center is already lit and running, with the official ribbon cutting for the beta block scheduled for May 23.
When it comes to the commercial competitors, such as traditional ISPs and pay-TV providers, the reception has been a bit cooler. Gonick stresses that this is a research program and is totally appropriate for a university to do, and he notes that the school has not "hidden this project at all" from local ISPs.
Jeff Gumpf, the IT architect for the school, tells Ars that the system is meant to last three decades or more, a decision that dictated the network design. Case Western Reserve first consulted with Herman Wagter, who ran Amsterdam's CityNet fiber-to-the-home build (and just described that process in great detail for Ars), about the architecture. Gumpf and Gonick took his advice: two fiber strands to every home, each running back to the main equipment room (point-to-point, rather than shared, fiber).
This approach costs more in the short term due largely to the cost of all that additional fiber, but compared to the cost of digging up the streets to lay more fiber in the future, doing it first is a terrific bargain. Only one strand will be lit initially, with the second strand in place simply to future-proof the deployment.
Case Western Reserve had trouble finding the gear that each home would use to terminate the fiber connection. Here, Wagter helped them out again, hooking them up with European equipment maker Genexis, which makes power-efficient, installer-friendly home gateways that take a fiber connection on side and spit out voice, data, and video connections on the other.
The plan has already garnered attention from Washington; indeed, it is the first example cited in the National Broadband Plan's "Research and Development" chapter. In essence, Case Western Reserve is doing the research to find out how one of the plan's key priorities might affect local communities—the plan to wire up all "anchor institutions" in the US with 1Gbps fiber, then treat them as "middle-mile" ISPs who can help push that bandwidth out into the surrounding community by partnering with companies and municipalities.
Gonick has already done his homework when it comes to working with the politicians; he wants the entire deployment to be "mayor-proof," not tied to any particular politician whose successor might kill the scheme. The City of Cleveland is on board with the deployment, as are local hospitals, equipment vendors, and community groups, but none can simply veto the plan.
When it comes to the commercial competitors, such as traditional ISPs and pay-TV providers, the reception has been a bit cooler. Gonick stresses that this is a research program and is totally appropriate for a university to do, and he notes that the school has not "hidden this project at all" from local ISPs.
However, when Case Western wrote to those local ISPs for letters of support... it didn't get a single one. Anchor institutions around the country, take note.
Together with Google's similar 1Gbps fiber testbed announcement, such research projects have important roles to play when it comes to policy decisions. Just how important is it to run super-fast fiber to US homes? What will people do with it? Can it truly transform poor or crime-ridden areas? And just how important is an open-access network?
Apart from the Google announcement, similar research is only being done by universities and by those few municipalities who run their own community networks. Case Western Reserve's is one of the most ambitious, and its data should start rolling sometime in 2011.
If the idea works, and if other schools, libraries, and community centers across the US start rolling out similar projects, the landscape for Internet access could change dramatically over the next decade. If it doesn't... well, better to find out now.
If you get excited about the prospect of really, really fast broadband Internet service, here’s a statistic that will make heart race. Or your blood boil. Or both.
Pretty much the fastest consumer broadband in the world is the 160-megabit-per-second service offered by J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan. Here’s how much the company had to invest to upgrade its network to provide that speed: $20 per home passed.
The cable modem needed for that speed costs about $60, compared with about $30 for the current generation.
By contrast, Verizon is spending an average of $817 per home passed to wire neighborhoods for its FiOS fiber optic network and another $716 for equipment and labor in each home that subscribes, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.
Those numbers from Japan came from Michael T. Fries, the chief executive of Liberty Global, the American company that operates J:Com.
His larger point: “To me, this just isn’t an expensive capital investment,” he said.
The experience in Japan suggests that the major cable systems in the United States might be able to increase the speed of their broadband service by five to 10 times right away. They might not need to charge much more for it than they do now and they’d still make as much money.
The cable industry here uses the same technology as J:Com. And several vendors said that while the prices Mr. Fries quoted were on the low side, most systems can be upgraded for no more than about $100 per home, including a new modem. Moreover, the monthly cost of bandwidth to connect a home to the Internet is minimal, executives say.
So what’s wrong with this picture in the United States? The cable companies, like Comcast and Cablevision, that are moving quickly to install the fast broadband technology, called Docsis 3, are charging as much as $140 a month for 50 Mbps service. Meanwhile other companies, like Time Warner Cable, are moving much more slowly to upgrade.
Competition, or the lack of it, goes a long way to explaining why the fees are higher in the United States. There is less competition in the United States than in many other countries. Broadband already has the highest profit margins of any product cable companies offer. Like any profit-maximizing business would do, they set prices in relation to other providers and market demand rather than based on costs.
Pricing at Liberty varies widely by market. In Japan, its 160 Mbps service costs 6,000 yen ($60) per month. That’s only $5 a month more than the price of its basic 30 Mbps service. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, it charges 80 euros ($107) for 120 Mbps service and 60 euros ($81) for 60 Mbps. Mr. Fries said that he expected these prices would fall over time.
“Our margins go up,” he said. “But we are delivering more value.”
Cable executives have given several reasons for why many cable systems in the United States are going very slowly in upgrading to Docsis 3. There’s little competition in areas not served by Verizon’s FiOS system, which soon will offer 50 Mbps service. And some argue there isn’t that much demand for super-high speed.
Mr. Fries added another: Fear. Other cable operators, he said, are concerned that not only will prices fall, but that the super-fast service will encourage customers to watch video on the Web and drop their cable service.
The industry is worried that by offering 100 Mbps, they are opening Pandora’s box, he said. Everyone will be able to get video on the Internet, and then competition will bring the price for the broadband down from $80 to $60 to $40.
Aren’t you worried that the prices will fall too? I asked.
“Maybe,” he said very slowly. “We’ll see how it happens. We want to keep it up there for now. It is a premium service.”
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All you art collectors out there. Here is a chance to get a Giclee copy of some of Ian M Sherwin work. Ian is planning on doing a whole series of Marblehead, Massachusetts paintings. His work is amazing.
When that fateful day comes where you find yourself suddenly unable to harp on your fantasy league because the Internet has been hijacked, fear not. There's a plan for that.
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