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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Google wants to be your Internet
In response to my saying: > I'd love to hear the business case for why my home electrical meter > needs to be directly IP-addressable from an Internet cafe in Lagos. "Jay R. Ashworth" <[email protected]> responds, concisely: > It doesn't, and it shouldn't. That does *not* mean it should not have > a globally unique ( != globally routable) IP address. and Jeroen Massar <[email protected]> presents several hypothetical scenarios. Note that the original goal was for electrical companies to monitor electrical meters. Jeroen brings up backyard mini-nuke plants, seeing how much the power plug in the garden is being used, etc. These may all be desirable goals, but they represent considerable mission creep from the originally stated goal. None of Jeroen's applications requires end-to-end, packet-level access to the individual devices in Jeroen's future (I assume) home. You can certainly argue that packet-level connectivity is better, easier to engineer, scales better, etc., etc.; but it is not *required*. In fact, there are sound engineering arguments against packet-level access: since we've dragged in the backyard nuke plant, consider what happens when everybody has a backyard mini-nuke, with control software written by Linksys, and it turns out that sending it a certain kind of malformed packet can cause it to melt down .... No matter. Reasonable people can disagree on the question of whether every networkable device benefits from being globally, uniquely addressable. The burden on the proponents is higher than that: there are *costs* associated with such an architecture, and the proponents of globally unique addressing need to show not only that it has benefits, but that the benefits exceed the costs. Coming full circle, the original assertion was that IPv6 was required in order for electric companies to use IP to monitor US electric meters. That assertion is false, and no amount of hand-waving about backyard nuke plants will make it true. The history of IPv6 has been that it keeps receding into the future as people's use of IPv4 adapts enough to make the current benefit of switching to IPv6 smaller than the cost to do so. Perhaps after a decade or so, we're nearing the end of that road. Or perhaps, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote about IPv6, it is: the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further.... And one fine morning - We'll see. Jim Shankland
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