[VoiceOps] Germany unsure about whether Kamailio will survive next winter

[Markus]

Saw the conference. It's all over the news here right now.

Tough times ahead. Good luck to us.

Greetings from Germany.


:-D

Am 01.04.2023 um 10:24 schrieb Alex Balashov via VoiceOps:
> For immediate release:
> 
> ATLANTA, GA (1 April 2023)--The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and
> Energy of Germany was forced to disclose today that it has been tasked with
> assessing whether Germany will be able to operate its Kamailio through the next
> winter.
> 
> This initiative comes amidst considerable uncertainty, shared in some other EU
> member states, about whether the enormous fossil fuel energy footprint of
> Kamailio is sustainable after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
> 
> Pioneering Atlanta energy market analysts Evariste Systems were tapped to
> assist with forecasting whether German strategic natural gas reserves and
> liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports could keep Kamailio's enormous turbines
> spinning under a variety of stress-test scenarios outlined by regulators,
> including SIPP and SIPVicious.
> 
> Alex Balashov, Evariste's principal, said in a news conference earlier this
> week:
> 
> "Simply put, the political leadership wanted a dispassionate, technocratic kind
> of analysis, data-driven and the rest, free of the inflection of ideological
> bias and tendentious policy angles in charged German domestic
> politics. Whether it's the centre-right or the Greens, there are strong ideas
> about what to do with energy-greedy megaprojects like Kamailio."
> 
> Florida-based energy turnaround vet Fred Posner, parachuted in to assist with
> the fast-tracked study, agreed:
> 
> "It's well-understood that the German GDP is almost a perfectly linear function
> of gross annual SIP packets routed. The Nord Stream 1 shut-off situation in
> September only exposed Germany to further Kamailio-related energy
> vulnerabilities."
> 
> At issue are the basic physics of SIP message routing in Kamailio. Due to a
> fixed-size worker process pool, Kamailio routing consumes about 1500 BTUs per
> packet-kilometre travelled.  While 1500 BTUs/packet-kilometre is efficient in
> distance terms as compared to a typical automobile, which consumes roughly 3800
> BTUs of fossil fuel energy per passenger-kilometre travelled (at typical load
> factors), the dizzying number of SIP packets routed through German territory in
> a typical business day greatly outstrips passenger-kilometres travelled.
> 
> Balashov noted that sometimes, the activation energy requirement can be higher
> than 1500 BTUs when INVITEs with large SDPs are launched toward the next hop,
> though this varies with the altitude of the destination above mean sea level,
> wind direction, weather and other factors involved in ballistics.
> 
> "It's a bit of a fool's errand to play these guessing games with averages. The
> energy budget can vary enormously depending on whether there is DTLS, video
> codecs, PASSporTs and other stuff. I find it helpful to think in kilowatt-hour
> terms: sometimes it's less than half a kWh, so like US $0.20 if you're counting
> the beans, and sometimes it's more like $0.38, we just don't know. The
> Bundestag always wants these big, round numbers, but if you've ever looked at
> the TM module, you know that's not how this works."
> 
> A milder-than-expected winter, a 9% year-over-year increase in US LNG exports
> (to about 300 million cubic metres per day) in 2022, dependable imports from
> Norway and the Netherlands, and other favourable factors gave German SIP
> regulators a reprieve. Despite energy market volatility, premium LNG spot
> prices, and occasional 408 Request Timed Out scenarios, the country dodged a
> widely-feared Kamailio energy crisis. However, it is difficult to say whether
> energy market conditions will be as propitious next year.
> 
> "Then there's the whole climate change goals thing. Nobody even wants to talk
> about that, especially for the WebRTC gateway side," says Posner.
> 
> "There's a persistent fantasy that we can just power Kamailio with solar or
> wind if we just had enough generating capacity. I think that's really missing
> the forest for the trees. The worker processes stay running whether you need
> them or not, it all depends on how many listeners you have set and what the
> children config value is. Either way, I've got two words for you: base load.
> Even if we completely ignore that the energy density is just not there per
> hectare of solar or wind installation, how do you provide the constant power to
> the child processes?"
> 
> Past feasibility studies published jointly by Balashov and Posner support this
> assessment. One such study, initiated in 2018 and concluded during the COVID-19
> global pandemic, found that an area equivalent to the size of the entire state
> of North Rhine-Westphalia would need to be devoted to batteries, even using the
> latest lithium ferrous phosphate (LFP) technology.
> 
> "But wait, there's more!" says Posner: "Show me the amperage."
> 
> "The packet forwarding mechanism is similar to a railgun, at least if you're
> doing stateful. Where are you going to get the millions of amps? It's either
> setting up huge banks of capacitors god-knows-where, or the pulsed power system
> that's undergirded by the original OpenSER turbines. I think we already know
> the answer to that."
> 
> Balashov noted that, even beyond the political and economic challenges that
> Kamailio downtime would introduce, there are other tightropes to walk. As the
> most economically dynamic, export-oriented EU member state, Germany is prone to
> flirt with SIP proxy privatisation schemes in its national discourse, all while
> messaging a stronger Euro to the ECB.
> 
> "There is a vocal minority," says Balashov, "who push for research into more
> modular, regionally sited SIP gateways. They're always talking about sclerotic,
> unresponsive federal regulations and listless, bumbling Brussels bureaucrats
> and making it all smaller and leaner. Listen, I'm all for the Invisible Hand,
> but setting the Request URI and adding custom headers requires a truly
> integrated, national-scale infrastructure. It's the stuff of public-private
> partnerships and megaprojects. Even if you're a market zealot who is not sold
> on basic INVITEs as a public good, think about Presence or IMS. You really need
> the full capacity of a nation-state on deck for that."
> 
> If devolution to smaller, more numerous SIP routing sites is not feasible--at
> least, at the unit cost and reliability level demanded by advanced
> economies--then excessive complexity offers a cautionary tale from the opposite
> extreme.
> 
> In a particularly notorious example of technical and policy failure, the
> Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), following the guidance of
> northern Californian advisors Unicorn & Moonshot, attempted to scale down
> traditional Kamailio turbine blades into newer, so-called Kubernetes "Pod"
> chasses to increase exhaust recapture. This made for a much more intricate
> installation with an exponential growth of moving parts, telemetry and site
> support skill requirements. This proved unmanageable, and the now-famous
> explosion that followed the deterioration of the site led to unprecedented
> casualties in US history. Furthermore, it also resulted in the long-term
> humidification of large expanses of East Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and
> southern Alabama, rendering most of these areas uninhabitable. These events
> discredited the Unicorn & Moonshot approach in the eyes of most industry
> analysts.
> 
> While it will take some months for Evariste to reach a conclusion regarding the
> resilience of the German Kamailio through the winter and beyond, and it will
> take still longer to issue policy recommendations, one factor is universally
> agreed upon already: this prolonged test of Germany's resilience is part of a
> Russian strategic calculation.
> 
> A conservative MP from the CDU/CSU faction of the Bundestag, speaking on
> condition of anonomity, offered this summary: "The Russians think they can wait
> this out. They are waiting for us to fold and switch to an OpenSIPS reactor,
> knowing full well this will keep us busy with troubleshooting and diminish our
> ability to support Ukraine militarily."
>