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  • Human Infrastructure 453: 1.6 Terabit Switching, Random Cabling Is Faster (?!?) + Motorola Bricks

Human Infrastructure 453: 1.6 Terabit Switching, Random Cabling Is Faster (?!?) + Motorola Bricks

Author

Ethan Banks
June 18, 2026

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Here We Go Again - permit ip andy andy
https://www.permitipandyandy.com/blog/here-we-go-again

Andy Lapteff, host of The Art of Network Engineering podcast and all-around excellent human, made me tear up in the middle seat at 36,000 feet.

Throughout history, one reason we resist change is our attachment of mastery to identity.

Henry Ford famously said, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Imagine being a master horseshoe maker, watching the world shift beneath you. Their resistance to change would come from watching a lifetime of hard-earned expertise slowly lose its place in the future.

A veteran network engineer doesn’t just know BGP.
They became someone through years of learning BGP.

A developer doesn’t just write code.
They derive meaning from the act of problem-solving.

When a new abstraction layer appears, it doesn’t merely threaten workflow efficiency. It threatens our source of competence, pride, creativity, and identity. That’s a much deeper psychological effect than most technology conversations acknowledge.

The words I bolded got me right in the feels. Poetry. - Ethan

James Hamilton shares research that finds a “randomly” (we don’t mean entirely random when you look at the details) interconnected data center fabric outperforms a traditional leaf-spine. There’s a lot more to the RNG network story, but that’s the basic idea.

If you find that as counterintuitive as I did, read James’ piece along with the research paper he references. I didn’t grasp all of the research at first glance, as it’s too academic for my practically trained mind. But the results (however they got them) are interesting enough that I feel it’s worth understanding better to see if something is there. James says Amazon defaults to this topology now, so I am assuming there’s actual production data to back up the research.

One detail that I suspect is important is scale. James suggests that in a sufficiently large fabric, you’ll lose some switches. Those are simply the odds. When you do, your fabric is trending closer to a “random” topology as the system converges around the failures. Therefore, an RNG network and a really, really large leaf-spine aren’t as dissimilar as you might think.

Ivan Pepelnjak took a look at RNG and shared his analysis. His bullsh!t meter was triggered along the way, which made me feel a little better. - Ethan

Tom Hollingsworth bemoans the state of Cisco Live US in 2026 compared to its former glory. I attended CLUS this year for the first time in several cycles, and it was…sort of unfamiliar. Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Convention Center hall was too big for what was in there. The Cisco Live team did their best to fill up the space with really wide aisles plus lots of sitting areas, and by holding some sessions in the World of Solutions. But it seemed obvious that there was a lot of square footage unsold.

The feeling of “everything in networking is happening right here, right now” as I have felt at CLUS in the beforetimes was absent. CLUS is very much a Cisco-focused show now. Don’t get me wrong—it always has been (it’s in the name), but each year Cisco disallows an increasing number of vendors they feel compete with them in some way or other to exhibit in the World of Solutions. I don’t fault Cisco for that. Cisco has several lines of business to run, each massive in their own right. They will play the game however they must. Wall Street is demanding in a way that the networking community is not, and Chuck has proven to be absolutely phenomenal at making the Street happy. Hard to argue with the current CSCO stock chart and investor targets, and not for nothing. Well done.

But that stance of rejecting more and more exhibitors makes networking feel as if it’s shrinking when, in fact, networking is the connective tissue of modern society. What’s more, a shrinking, exclusionary Cisco Live somehow makes Cisco feel lesser. Like they’re playing defense against encroaching enemies instead of being magnanimous lords of the packet realm welcoming a vast ecosystem under their enormous, $60+ billion tent.

If CLUS is on your bucket list as a “must attend” before your networking career is over, I’m not sure what to say. CLUS is still the biggest trade show networking has by far. It’s just not what it was. The industry would benefit from an inclusive show again. - Ethan

MORE BLOGS

TECH NEWS 📣

The MotoSync+ management app has been borked at least since May 12 according to Reddit, a noted Internet source of truth 😎. Is it down temporarily, or is it gone? No official word yet, but here’s a clue from the article.

Motorola recently removed all of its routers and modems from the Motorola Network online store, and product pages now return a 404 "Page not found" error or redirect to the home page. An archive of the site shows that Motorola was still selling routers up until at least May 18, roughly one week after the app stopped working.

I think we can read between those lines. - Ethan

Brian Jenney offers hope for those who think AI will replace CS grads.

Scored across unemployment, underemployment, and early-career earnings together, CS and computer engineering still rank among the top fields for overall labor market outcomes. The degree is not the problem. The hiring pipeline is.

He points out the ghost job problem, where there’s supposedly a job, but the company never fills the opening. How to break through? Brian has several suggestions on the click. - Ethan

Doug Dawson covers several current mergers and acquisitions in the worlds of ISPs, middle-mile, vendors, and satellite Internet, as well as market speculation that a merger between Comcast and Charter could work. - Ethan

MORE NEWS

  1. The White House’s shambolic AI policy (less self-congratulatory ranting & more thoughtful analysis from Gary this time) - Marcus on AI

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Anton Lönnerbro sharing lived experience in the community Slack. 😭

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Jerome introduces this first of two posts like so.

I recently passed the CCDE practical exam at Cisco Live. I am now CCDE #2026::37. During my preparation, I gathered insights from fellow candidates, seasoned CCDEs, and instructors, including Zig Zsiga, Russ White, Orhan Ergun, Mark Holm, and others. I combined them with my own experience on exam day: it took me three attempts to pass, so I have some experience. This post is my attempt to distill all of that into a practical guide for anyone sitting for the CCDE lab.

He continues with a well-organized set of practical tips well worth your time if you’re on the CCDE track.

Huge congrats Jerome on #2026::37, and thanks for sharing! - Ethan

From the GitHub README. The security firewall for agents. Claw Patrol sits between your agents and prod, parses their traffic at the wire, and gates each action against rules you write in HCL. For example, you can block destructive SQL, or pause kubectl delete pod until a human approves it before the request reaches Kubernetes.

Like Claw Patrol, there are a number of security designed to provide guardrails for AI activities. The usual suspects such as PANW have offerings, as well as growing startups like TailScale. A good space to keep your eye on, as these products should help reduce AI footguns. - Ethan

MORE RESOURCES

UPCOMING LIVE EVENTS 🍕🍻

A curated list of near-future meatspace events of interest to network engineers. Sometimes a Packet Pusher or two will be there (noted below).

Subscribe to events.packetpushers.net in your calendar software.

JULY 2026

Wi-Co Lyon
2 July | Lyon, France

NetUK3
6-7 July | London, England

SharkFest’26 | WireShark User Conference
18 - 23 July | Nashville, Tennessee

IETF 126 | Internet Engineering Task Force
18 - 24 July | Vienna, Austria

(PA)NUG | Pennsylvania Networking User Group (USNUA)
23 July | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

AUGUST 2026

SEPTEMBER 2026

NLNAM Meetup 3 | NL Network Automation Meetup
9 September | Utrecht, Netherlands

Wi-Co Manchester
9 - 10 September | Manchester, UK

Zeek Workshop
10 - 11 September | Berkeley, California

Wi-Co Cleveland
24 September | Cleveland, OH

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

TL;DR. This new monster switch has lots of bandwidth and fanout with a claimed “up to 25% lower power than competitive solutions” and targets AI data centers, because of course it does. That’s where all the money is. Supports SoNiC and SAI. Connect all the GPUs. Power to the LLMs. - Ethan

The Arista 7060XE7 Series has entered the chat. There are three models that, like the switch above, can move so much traffic I can’t honestly get my head around it. From the press release.

The portfolio includes distinct configurations to meet different data center needs:

  • 7060XE7-64PS and 7060XE7-64PRS Rack Switches: Air-cooled systems providing support for both Integrated heat sink (IHS) and Riding heat sink (RHS) optics, giving deployment flexibility in a 4RU form factor.

  • 7060XE7-64PRS-RV3-L: A specialized 2OU liquid-cooled platform for high-density clusters, utilizing 224G SerDes. This system utilizes DC power from the ORv3 rack and contains no internal fans, integrating with liquid-cooled XPU servers to maximize power efficiency.

  • 7060XE7-128PE: Provides 128 800G ports in an air-cooled 4RU design, utilizing 100G SerDes, for environments requiring deployment flexibility and backward compatibility.

We are building astonishing highways for the robots. - Ethan

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

  1. Consciousness likely not unique to earthlings, paper says - UC Riverside News

  2. Epigrams In Programming (1982) - Alan J. Perlis of Yale University

  3. C64IDE: Powerful, Free Mac Commodore 64 IDE Review - Retro Game Coders

  4. Tangible Media - Removable Storage of Image, Sound, Motion and Data: A Collection

  5. Old’aVista - The Most Powerful Guide To The Old Internet

LAST LAUGH 😆

Kaj Niemi shared the stock buyer’s paradox in the community Slack.