EdTech: Lee Howard of IPv4.Global by Hilco Streambank On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact On Education

Market, test, adapt. Every once in a while I stumble across a solid technology that never succeeded because nobody knew about it. Or people heard of it, but nobody knew anybody who was using it. Not just technologies — I see this with standards and best practices, too. So you need a basic case study, a reference case for others. You need to test your technology repeatedly and iterate based on effectiveness and user input. There’s a risk of overbuilding, where you try to put too much into a new offering, but that’s a great chance to test how commonly needed a technology is, and potentially spin off new solutions.

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course, many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. In this particular installment, we are talking to leaders of Education Technology companies, who share how their tech is helping to improve our educational system. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lee Howard.

Lee has 30 years of experience in networking. A thought leader in Internet Protocols, he has served on the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the Board of Trustees of the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN), and as a working-group co-chair of IPv6 Renumbering and IPv6 Operations working groups at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). His analysis of the costs of network address translation, IPv4, and IPv6, welcomed skeptical network engineers to the IPv4 address market. He has held technical leadership positions in large and small internet service providers, hosting, and enterprise IT.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

We moved around a couple of times when I was a kid. There was a bit of culture shock in moving from suburban St. Louis to suburban Los Angeles to suburban Washington, D.C. and I never completely adjusted to that final move. I was a wholesome nerd, becoming an Eagle Scout, doing school plays, playing Dungeons & Dragons, and learning about computers.

When I first got to college, having your own personal computer was still pretty rare. By the time I graduated, many schools were connected to the Internet, and that’s where I felt like I found my tribe. I realized that the power of the Internet to connect people and to build communities that were not constrained by location was important, and that somehow that’s what I wanted to do with my life.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

First, a little technical background. The Internet Protocol defines the rules and syntax for how devices communicate on the Internet. Part of the definition is an address: every data packet has a source address and a destination address, and they have to be unique, at least within that network, so intermediate devices can figure out where to forward those packets.

But version 4 of the Internet Protocol — IPv4 — only defined 4.3 billion possible addresses, which seemed like a lot of computers in 1979! With the Internet boom of the 1990s, we knew we were going to run out. People developed several technical solutions, but around 2007 the exhaustion of the pool of unassigned IPv4 addresses was looming.

ARIN is the American Registry for Internet Numbers. In North America, parts of the Caribbean, and a few outlying islands, it’s the registry that gives out unique Internet Protocol addresses. I was on their Board at the time, and people started trying to convince us to allow a market for addresses. There was a lot of resistance within the community. Those Internet pioneers were often academics, who have strong ideals about collaboration and the public good.

So I’m at an ARIN meeting in Albuquerque, trying to find a consensus among strongly opposing sides. We’re all planning to head to a social event, but we have to get on a bus to get there. Ben Edelman, then a professor of economics at Harvard Business School, sits next to me, and wants to understand the community objection to a market.

The biggest objection to this potential market is that it just felt wrong and unfair that organizations who got these numbers essentially for free would be able to profit from them. That feeling was pretty strong for some people, but it really was an emotion. And Ben said, “So it’s unseemly.”

That one word stopped me. It just didn’t look right. But if the logic made sense, does it matter what it looks like? In fact, maybe some of these addresses weren’t completely unused, but they could be freed up with a little work. Who’s paying for that work? Why should a university, for instance, spend even a few hours of time to free up addresses just to give them back to ARIN? Shouldn’t that be compensated work?

And from there, my vote turned around.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My first thought is Mike Bradshaw, who was my direct manager for just a short time. He taught me about setting KPIs and the dangers of averages — how they obscure what may be significant outliers. He also taught me how to give a great employee review.

But let me tell you about a colleague I met before that. Vijay Gill was cool. And he looked cool to me with his motorcycle jacket, industrial music, and his attitude. At the time, I was always hiring, and I interviewed many, many people, and I always asked a stumper of a question, so I could tell them the answer, and see if they remembered it later. But I couldn’t stump Vijay. So I hired him.

And Vijay worked hard. Vijay said, “It’s not enough to be good, you have to kick ass.” It was the first time I thought about effort being cool, and he inspired me to step up my game.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I was in my garden this morning and I thought about the gardener’s maxim, “The best fertilizer is the gardener’s shadow.”

That refers to how a garden is more likely to thrive if the gardener is there. You pull weeds sooner, so they don’t compete for water or nutrients. You notice that the garden needs water or is water-logged. You find bugs before they can cause too much damage, and your presence scares off the critters that would take your food.

I was thinking about how that applies to other parts of life. When learning piano, or Spanish, a little bit of attention every day is better than a lot of attention once a week. When cultivating work relationships, regular attention does more to foster connection and trust than an annual outing.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

The first characteristic is Curiosity. I hate feeling ignorant, and I’m simply curious about what other people are spending their time and energy on. Early on, when I was working on a large network, I realized that I only understood the little bits that I touched. So I got into the configuration repository — the location that housed the configuration for every device on the network — and I read the configuration for every type of device. I spend a lot of work figuring out how different parts related to each other, and looking up commands I didn’t know, and asking myself why someone built it that way. I became a much better engineer for that work.

Similarly, I wanted to understand why my budget requests were getting denied. So I made friends with people in accounting and finance, and attended some meetings I probably had no business being in, so I could understand how those decisions were made. I recommend this for everyone early in their career: understand how the purse strings are controlled, including budgets, purchase requests, purchase orders, and payments, and you will uncover a power your cohort doesn’t have.

Finally on curiosity, I often open conversations with potential clients by asking, “What are you working on?” People love to talk about themselves and their passions, and it gives me insight into what’s driving them right now. If I can dig into their work and describe their problem, I can usually help them solve it.

Second would be Preparedness. The Scout Motto is “Be Prepared.” In work contexts, I often think of it as doing my homework. At the end of every day, or at worst at the beginning of the day, I’ll look at my schedule, and I make a point of reading relevant materials before each meeting. That gives me an advantage over everyone who’s coming to the meeting unprepared. I wish everyone would do this — so many meetings are spent absorbing information, when if everyone had done their homework, we could spend the time making decisions. I like Amazon’s meeting format, where a meeting organizer prepares a six-page brief for every meeting, and the first 20 minutes are always spent quietly reading it.

Inclusion. I’m not the greatest meeting manager or facilitator, but I try to keep track of contributors. In most organizations or teams, there are key participants who, for whatever reason, don’t volunteer opinions or information. I try to ask them specific but open-ended questions around two thirds of the way through the meeting. This isn’t a hard rule, but it’s kind of amazing how many times a meeting has completely restarted based on the quiet person’s input.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our educational systems. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?

Let’s face the grim truth. Enrollment in many educational institutions is down, so budgets are down. Schools everywhere are tightening their belts, and some are facing major funding crises.

Many educational institutions are currently facing financial challenges due to declining enrollment, leading to shrinking budgets and cost-cutting measures across the board.

In the early days of the internet, several universities were among the first to get involved. Some major research universities (known as R1s) worked with the U.S. Department of Defense to develop ARPAnet, which was the first version of the internet. ARPAnet started as a way for government and academic institutions to share information quickly over long distances.

Later, when the project moved to the National Science Foundation (NSF), the network evolved into NSFnet, which allowed more schools to connect and collaborate. The NSF helped build a more widely accessible internet that many more educational institutions could join. As part of this early involvement, these universities were assigned large blocks of internet addresses (IPv4 addresses) — typically 216 or 65,536 addresses per institution.

Fast forward to today, where the Internet has run out of unassigned addresses. That means that organizations whose networks are growing (developing ISPs, cloud companies, and so on) need more addresses. They are willing to pay for those addresses, which helps organizations who have more than they need (such as universities) to do the work necessary to make them available.

All of that was to say that we can unlock millions of dollars to many institutions of higher education. That can go to IT projects, or the general fund, or salaries, or scholarships: it’s up to the school to decide.

How do you think your technology can address this?

In talking with a lot of colleges about selling their IPv4 addresses, I kept hearing the same questions. People either didn’t have confidence in how or whether every address was used, or they didn’t have the staff hours to clean up the normal clutter that had accumulated over thirty years.

So we build a tool we call ReView. We thought about everything a network administrator or system administrator might look at to figure out how their addresses were being used and put it all in one tool. We thought about the security concerns that an IT person would have and built the tool it so it can be run on a local desktop or virtual machine, where all of the data stays local. And it builds a report of every IP address in use on the network.

Then we addressed the clutter. I don’t mean that people are sloppy. It’s more that when you have a mansion with 250 rooms, you may dedicate one room to printing and one room to chemistry experiments and one room to accounting, and those rooms may not even be near each other. But if you want to go sell or lease part of your mansion, there’s no single wing that’s uninhabited.

Using ReView is like bringing in a professional team to first figure out who is living where, then provide any support the IT team needs. Sometimes that’s as simple as “think about these things as you move people.” Often we do the project management, coordinating who’s moving where (and in what order), and maybe some technical checks on planning. We can go as far as bringing in the movers, if the IT team is willing to give us the keys.

The final step can be deployment of the new protocol, IPv6. Part of being more efficient with IPv4 is sharing addresses among multiple users. But IPv6 with its vast pool of addresses takes us back out of that, so every user has their own address. This helps position universities, and their students, for the Internet protocol that is already 50% deployed worldwide.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about education?

Isn’t everyone? I think all of us, when considering “What do I want to be when I grow up?” consider the jobs we see adults doing, and of course, the job we see someone doing every day is teacher. I only went as far as taking the first prerequisite for a teaching certificate before deciding that wasn’t my path. Later I worked at a company that was constantly hiring entry level people, and I learned the power of training. I also worked at a well-known ed tech company for a time.

It’s only in later years that I’ve begun to appreciate the power of education compared to training. I can train an employee on a technology, but until they are educated in the principles underlying that technology, I haven’t really enabled them to learn anything new.

That’s what’s exciting to me about education: enable people build enough foundational knowledge and allow them to learn how to learn, and then their ability to do things that matters snowballs.

How do you think your technology might change the world?

The next few iterations of our tools are poised to change how IT people engage with networks. Consulting companies are exciting to use ReView for network discovery, because it sets them up to know what a university (or other network operator) needs. We’re going to make it much easier to deploy IPv6 and to work off technical debt, helping the IT department focus on the critical student outcomes they support, and we’re going to do it all without the university having to spend any money out of pocket.

Keeping the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

I mentioned Network Address Translation (NAT), which allows one IPv4 address to be shared among multiple users. Some believe NAT offers security by hiding the real addresses being used. While it’s true that one form of NAT can block incoming connections until an outgoing one is made, which enhances security, that’s not always how it’s used. More commonly, NAT supports activities like online gaming or managing multiple sessions. Once an outbound connection is made, it leaves the device exposed to inbound connections, which can open the door to attacks. This is the current situation with IPv4

Since IPv6 means we no longer need NAT, people may roll it out assuming they’re getting the strict NAT protection, when they should really be using firewalls for protection. It’s not that IPv6 is less secure, it’s just that a misunderstanding of IPv4 security can be made worse without understanding IPv6 security.

How do you envision the landscape of education evolving over the next decade, and how does your technology fit into that future?

We will be feeling the impacts of the pandemic for at least the next decade. It changed the way students evaluate whether to go to college, and it changed how prepared they are. I don’t just mean they “lost” a year or two of education, I mean that the experience of remote learning has fundamentally changed how students engage with their educational experience. They expect greater autonomy and a different presentation method.

At the same time, the impact of AI is only just beginning, and we don’t know yet where that will take the educational experience.

What I see is new generations of students expecting to make use of campus resources to explore topics of interest to them. That means we need to secure our networks and teach them a healthy skepticism about technology.

Which brings me back to ReView. It isn’t revolutionary: there’s no individual data set that it gathers that can’t be gathered another way. What’s new is that it brings it together in a useful way. That kind of audit is resilient to skepticism. Populating an IP address management tool with known-good data gives us a good start to having reliable data, and that in turn is a start in securing the network.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

1 . Start where you are. Take what technological basis you have, whether it’s knowledge or existing tech, rather than starting with an empty piece of paper. Otherwise, you’ll lose time (and impact) to learning basic principles. A coder probably shouldn’t try to learn enough electrical engineering to build drones from scratch. A poet probably shouldn’t decide to build a world-changing app. Not that these aren’t noble pursuits for them — I absolutely encourage learning new fields. “Start where you are” means taking advantage of what already exists.

2 . Find problems. There’s no shortage of problems in the world. Many of them are too big to be solved by one person, company, or technology. Understanding causes can help narrow the set of problems that might be helped by your technology. Talking with people in similar situations to each other can help you understand common problems, and identify the root causes of those problems.

3. Decide on impact. This step marks the beginning of problem-solving. By exploring a variety of challenges, staying curious (as I mentioned earlier), and engaging in conversations with people who face similar issues, you begin to see potential solutions. It becomes easier to connect “where you are now” with “the problem” you’re trying to solve, and from there, possible solutions start to emerge.

4 . Partner. No matter where you are, you’re probably not going to make a significant impact without the collaboration of other people. As potential solutions emerge, bring in partners to help evaluate them and test them. If you don’t already have a network of partners who know enough about the space to help, and if you’re not the expert, go back to the people with similar problems. They can help test potential solutions and may be able to suggest development partners.

5 . Market, test, adapt. Every once in a while I stumble across a solid technology that never succeeded because nobody knew about it. Or people heard of it, but nobody knew anybody who was using it. Not just technologies — I see this with standards and best practices, too. So you need a basic case study, a reference case for others. You need to test your technology repeatedly and iterate based on effectiveness and user input. There’s a risk of overbuilding, where you try to put too much into a new offering, but that’s a great chance to test how commonly needed a technology is, and potentially spin off new solutions.

In the realm of EdTech, there’s often data collection involved. How do you ensure the ethical handling of user data, especially when it concerns students?

In many places, IP addresses are considered PII (Personally Identifiable Information). That’s especially true of any logging of connections: “IP address 192.0.2.15 connected to 203.0.113.194” is very nearly the same thing as “This student viewed this web site.” The privacy implications are huge.

Fortunately, that data is saved as DHCP logs or firewall logs and it is only accessible by a very few people in most IT organizations, and by policy usually only released by subpoena.

IPv6 makes that a little more interesting. To complicate tracking across web sites, many IPv6 devices use “privacy extensions.” It’s simple: of the many billions of possible addresses on one Wi-fi network, a device can choose one address, use it for a little while, and then choose a new one. If the network administrator needs to track down a particular device, they will have to log the connections on the Wi-fi network, establishing the association at the hardware address.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

I think young people already want to make a positive impact. People in school or who have recently joined the work force are full of energy and purpose. They want to create a world where everyone has opportunities to do well, and for that world and society to be sustainable for future generations. I find it inspiring.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Honestly, the most fun for me is to talk to the top technologist at a university, or I suppose any organization, and hear about their primary problems and projects. It’s especially great if we have enough time for me to ask questions so I can learn something. I think we’re only beginning to identify ways we can help, and if I could spend every breakfast and lunch for a week hearing from top technical folks, I think we’d start to find where to position the fulcrum under the lever.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lee-howard-ipv6 is probably best, since I’ll generally share any blog or article or webinar I’m doing there.

On X, follow @ipv4g.

Or go old school: sign up for our monthly email newsletter at https://ipv4.global/contact-us/

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.