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

[Alex Balashov]

My thoughts and prayers are with ordinary hard-working German families as they navigate this unprecedented national calamity together. May they find tranquility and calm, and may there be peace on this earth.

—
Sent from mobile, apologies for brevity and errors.

> On Apr 1, 2023, at 10:59 AM, Markus via VoiceOps <voiceops at voiceops.org> wrote:
> 
> 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."
> 
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