[Keith Moore on a "KMart box"]
| take it home, plug it in to your phone line or whatever, and get
| instant internet for all of the computers in your home.
| (almost just like NATs today except that you get static IP addresses).
No, not "or whatever" but "AND whatever".
Otherwise this is a nice but insufficient device,
since there is an implicit presupposition that only
one provider will be used by any given owner/lessor
of this K-Mart box.
If one makes a broad policy decision that it should be possible
and simple for all very small users to be serviced simultaneously
by multiple providers, then you must be very careful about the
static IP address constraint.
Personally, I think _at least_ individual households should be
multihomed -- adjust your K-Mart box so that it can support multiple
interfaces. Perhaps you might end up with a plug for your DSL or
POTS connection, a plug for your cable connection, and a plug for
your wireless or electricity-grid connection.
Traditional multihoming has some significant features:
-- all the hosts in the multihomed entity have a fixed
set of addresses relative to one another
(i.e., hosts don't care about the "remote" topology)
-- traffic is balanced in both directions in some fashion
across the set of multiple providers' connections
-- if there is a partition in the network which
breaks connectivity through one provider, the
connectivity will automatically back-up through
the remaining provider(s) who are unaffected
by the partition
Unfortunately, IPv6's current addressing architecture makes it very
difficult to do this sort of traditional multihoming if one is not
a TLA. This is a significant step backward from the current IPv4
situation, where one can persuade various operators to accept
more-specific prefixes (coloured with appropriate community
attributes) in order to optimize return traffic from particular
parts of the Internet.
Therefore, in order to support IPv6 house-network multihoming, so
as to preserve at least these three features of traditional
multihoming, either the current IPv6 addressing architecture's
restrictions on who can be a TLA must be abandoned (so each house
becomes a TLA), or NATs must be used to rewrite house-network
addresses into various PA address ranges supplied by the multiple
providers.
If it is reasonable to want to support multihoming individual
SMEs, households, or even "smd"s, IPv6's overall addressing and
routing architecture seems much ill-suited to the task WITHOUT
the presence of NAT.
IPv6's larger address space is merely a necessary piece of an
Internet which will not run out of numbers.
NATs and NAT-like translators appear to be more and more a
fundamental tool in the IPv6 arsenal, and it unfortunate that
people position IPv6 as an alternative to NAT.
Sean.