Let me tell you a story.
The cell phone service at my house stinks. On a good day, if I walk out on the porch and lean against the rail, I can get one bar of signal. If it’s raining and the middle of the summer, where the trees have a good covering of leaves, well, maybe you can get signal, maybe you can’t. AT&T says they can’t build new towers in the area, and since I sometimes get one bar, I’m covered.
But then along comes this brilliant little idea for a local cell using VOIP to carry your calls back into the AT&T network —the AT&T Microcell (also called a femtocell). It’s made by Cisco (says so right on the side), so I thought, “how bad could this be?” Twenty years in the networking industry, and I’m still asking, “how bad could this be?” As if I don’t already know the answer.
I picked up a Microcell and connected it behind my router. Of course it didn’t work. How long did you wonder? Long enough to serialize a 128 octet packet onto a Gig/E link?
The friendly AT&T folks said it must be some problem with my router, “you need to open some ports up so it can communicate.” I scratched my head over why a Microcell might be hosting inbound connections of any sort, and scratched my head over why this thing doesn’t have any sort of a management interface (so I could at least assign it a static address on my little network), configured a static DHCP mapping, put the Microcell in the DMZ, and tried again. Nothing.
So I went out and bought another router. I tried three different Cisco routers and one Netgear. Nothing. I called AT&T. “Apparently, your Microcell is only going to work if it’s connected in front of the router.” This raised a new host of questions. How much throughput does this little device support? How often do they fail? Is it a router? If it consumes the IP address my provider gives me, it must be a NAT device —how does that work? But AT&T doesn’t know the answer to any of these questions, so it’s not going in front of my router.
Next step –I went through months of trying to convince someone, anyone, at my cable provider to let me to pay for a second IP address, so I could connect the Microcell directly to their network. After getting that all set up, I rebooted everything and plugged the Microcell in.
In case you haven’t guessed already: nope. It still won’t work.
So I called AT&T again. “Sorry, it’s not connected to the Internet.” I scratched my head again, and plugged a PC into the back of it. I can browse through the device (though it does cut down my connection speed a good bit). I reached someone else at AT&T, who then told me… Microcells don’t work with the brand of cable modem I have installed.
“It’s not getting free flow through the Internet, sir, you need to put it behind a router.” Huh? What, precisely, is “free flow.” I’m a network engineer; tell me what protocols are failing to make it through the network. The AT&T techs don’t know. I even sent packet traces to some Cisco folks. They don’t know what it’s doing, either. And it didn’t work the last time I put it behind a router. Does anyone read case notes?
Why is this all so hard?
Because the protocols required to get VOIP running are complex. Because IPsec is complex, and VOIP on top of IPsec is even more complex. Because there is no way to actually see what the microcell is doing on the network, so there’s no way to determine where its getting hung up. Because no-one at AT&T knows enough about networks to look at what’s happening on their end and say, “the microcell isn’t accepting HTTPS connections,” or provide any other sort of proper diagnosis. Because no-one at my local provider knows enough about microcells to know how to do whatever is needed on their network to allow the right sort of traffic through.
In short, this is a case of complexity biting back. Complexity lets us do all sorts of neat things with networks. But it also allows us to break things in a way that simply makes them impossible to fix. Maybe it’s time to start thinking in terms of making networks simple (again). Maybe there’s a limit to how much complexity we can layer on top of complexity and still expect things to actually work.
Maybe we should take to heart RFC1925. “(6) It is easier to move a problem around (for example, by moving the problem to a different part of the overall network architecture) than it is to solve it. … (6a) (corollary). It is always possible to add another level of indirection.” Indirection is another form of complexity, after all.
The Microcell? Because I really want my cell phones to work, I’ve ordered another cable modem. Will it work? Who knows? It’s almost embarrassing being reduced to random acts of engineering.
About Russ White
