On 17/02/2007, at 10:12 PM, Joe Abley wrote:
On 16-Feb-2007, at 17:00, Nathan Ward wrote:
End-to-end IP connectivity is so passe.
But it's arguably what allowed the Internet to grow and flourish. If the network controls the applications that users can deploy, then either the provider will be permanently playing catch-up, the user will be permanently disappointed, or (if the disease is sufficiently widespread) people will stop dreaming up new applications for users to run, and will instead concentrate on packages they can sell to carriers and ISPs. This all starts to sound a bit like the telco network.
Which is a problem if we are reliant on the telco's to move to IPv6. Why would any sane [NZ] telco spend serious money changing to a technology which further relegates them to a common bit pusher? There is an argument here that IPv4 exhaustion provides a technical rational for telcos to provide walled garden, proxy-style services. So if we want the Internet to further grow and flourish, we need to retain end to end connectivity, which means we need IPv6 (or some other solution providing similar outcomes), which means we need the telcos to play ball, or we need lots more independent infrastructure. Oh, and an economic incentive to do such :). At this stage I can't figure out a way forward, other than to get as many people playing with IPv6 as possible in the hope that it will actually become the transport of choice in the not so distant future. Alternatively, we accept our fate as one of multiple global IPv4 VRF tables and MPLS aware endpoints, using DNS trickery and multiple next hops to select between these meta-internets. (That is very tongue in cheek.) So post IPv6, what should be the scope of the 'global' routing table? As the internet keeps expanding, should we be striving for end to end connectivity for ever after? At some point it's likely to fracture - at what point should we accept it is inevitable? Perhaps having multiple IPv4 and IPv6 internets with re-used number space and some form of complex NAT on the boundaries between them isn't such a bad alternative. Cheers, Jonny.