November 25, 2023 archive

6:23 am

It is so easy to get so used to how the Internet works*, that sometimes we forget to pause and just think about how amazing this technology can be. We just expect that it will work – and for the most part it does.

I’m had some experiences this week… and plenty of time to think… that reminded me about how magical the Internet can be at times.

* – for those of us privileged enough to have appropriate levels of affordable Internet connectivity. About 1/3 of the world still has NO connectivity, and some % who have connectivity available.. cannot afford it.

Why? Well… because I’ve been doing what so many other people have done – isolating because of testing positive for COVID-19. Yes, indeed, after 1,350 days of being COVID-free (since the time of the WHO pandemic declaration), the day before US Thanksgiving I tested positive. It was not a huge surprise since my wife had been sick on the previous weekend and then tested positive on Sunday.. but we were hoping that I and our 14yo daughter would stay negative. Our daughter still IS negative, and so our focus is on keeping her that way. So my wife is staying in our second-floor bedroom, and I’m down in our basement. Our 14yo is spending most of her time in another room away from us.

We are all fully vaccinated and boosted, including with the latest shot, and so far I’ve had very few symptoms – just a runny nose and occasional sneeze. I’m hoping it stays that way!

But in the meantime.. how do you communicate when you are all isolating from each other? For, you know, things like planning meals or dealing with other household activities?

The answer these days is of course a group chat, or, when it’s a bit more involved… a group video call… using any of the many messaging / communication services.

Being DEEP down the Apple rabbit-hole as a family, we’ve just been firing up Apple FaceTime calls between the three of us, with people answering on their mobile or laptop depending upon what is most convenient.

And it works.

Boom… after we all accept we can be speaking from different parts of our house about whatever we need to discuss.

But have you thought about HOW this video communication actually works?

Back in the early 2000s, I was a product manager at Mitel Networks in Canada and at one point was responsible for the video conferencing products. Later, video was being added into “softphone” products, and I learned an incredible amount from various IETF working groups that worked to make this all work – securely – through a wild number of network configurations.

This stuff is *HARD* to do right!

And while Apple uses a bunch of proprietary technology, some of it is known to be based on open standards – and also there are just certain ways that video communication works. (Side note: that Wikipedia article could use some help – if you know about FaceTime and want to edit it, updates would be welcome!)

Each time one of the three of us launches a FaceTime call, a whole bunch of connections get made:

• A control connection using Apple Push Notifications (APN)
• An identity connection (to also share encryption keys)
• Multiple video streams (I’m assuming… the usual model is to have one sending and one for receiving from each participant)
• One or more audio streams (unless that is in the video)
• Potentially additional supporting data streams
• And all of this is encrypted, which adds additional layers of Transport Layer Security (TLS) and other encryption technologies. (See this page about FaceTime security to dive deeper)

All of that… for every single FaceTime call!

And… they have to do it in a way that navigates the MANY possible ways of connecting, with almost always network address translation (NAT) being involved, and often NAT at an ISP level (i.e. carrier-grade NAT / CGNAT). And connecting from mobile networks, WiFi, other technologies.

And… what makes it wilder is that in the case of the three of us here in the same house doing a group call, we’re doing all that three times!

Although the good news is that the actual video and audio streams should be staying local if we are all on the same WiFi network. If we’re not (I’m a networking geek – we have multiple WiFi networks!), those media streams are going out to Apple’s infrastructure and then coming back into our home network. (Thankfully we have a high speed connection!)

One one level, with so many variations, it’s amazing that this even works!

(But of course Apple has spent thousands and thousands and thousands of staff hours making it work.)

And… all of this complexity is INVISIBLE to the regular user. I just hit the button to call my wife and… ta da… we’re talking from two different floors of our house. I hit another button and our daughter is looped in.

It just works.

Back in the 1960s, Arthur C Clarke articulated three laws, of which the third was:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C Clarke

On one level, I think this kind of video communication does get into the magical area. You push buttons. People appear and you can talk them in real-time with usually no real lag / latency.

It’s magic!

It’s the stuff that was only possible in sci-fi novels or TV shows when I was growing up. It’s amazing.

Except… of course… we (with appropriate connectivity) have gotten SO used to it that it’s lost any “magic” and just become “mundane”.

We don’t even think about it anymore.

We just EXPECT it to work.

And most of the time… it does.

And when it does not, we get very cranky and grumpy very quickly.

We expect to be able to make video calls. We expect to be able to order food and have it arrive at our door 20 or 30 minutes later. We expect to be able to share incredibly large image files with the 37 other people in the group chat we are in. We expect to be able to order something online and have it delivered within a day or two. We expect… We expect…. We expect…

Any “magic” is sadly gone.

Still … amidst the chaos and madness of our regular lives… amidst all the expectations we have now for how things should “just work”…

… I hope we can pause occasionally and just reflect for a moment on how amazing these experiences can be. What we can do… what we can learn… how we can communicate… how we can earn money… what we can create… how we can collaborate… how we can connect with each other…

Jump back 40 years and show these experiences to someone of that time and, yeah, they’d definitely think of them as *magic*!

(And then, yes, after that brief moment of reflection… you can get right back to cursing the application because it tells you your connection in unstable or because there’s a slight lag to one person’s video or whatever…)

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

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Until the next time,
Dan

Connect

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.