At 02:19 PM 11/28/01, Fred Baker wrote:
At 04:05 PM 11/27/2001, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
You'd think that an ISP, cable-company or not, would tend to charge by
volume or
connection time rather than the number of IP addresses in use.
dumb question.
I see a longish thread about "so why does one need IPv6, there is in fact
no shortage of IP addresses, and IP addresses are not in fact a scarce
resource in the network today".
I see a longish thread about the fact that some cable companies apparently
are desperate to charge per IP address (something one can only do if IP
addresses are in fact a scarce resource) and want to nullify a technology
that might mask the scarceness of that resource.
It seems to me that these two can't both be true. IP Addresses cannot at
once be scarce enough to charge for and non-scarce enough that scarcity is
a non-issue.
Does anyone else see something schizoid about this discussion?
Yes.
To add even more of a schizoid flair, ATT Broadband is selling a "business
service" in New England now (and probably elsewhere). For a few hundred
bucks a month, and a one time charge for equipment, they set you up with a
router of some sort running NAT which they can remotely manage, an SLA that
says they'll possibly support you better than they do the home users, and
the option of paying more for extra downstream bandwidth. So here we have
the cable company SELLING the NAT box... I'd hoped they'd offer routed
subnets when they got to offering business service, but no.
The other interesting oddity about the discussion threads is the assumption
on the part of many that the only way it'd be useful for a water meter,
kitchen appliance or other device in the house to interact with the
Internet is for it to be polled from outside. It's quite feasible for
devices to initiate the communication instead. Interestingly, if the device
initiates, this would just happen to work with most NAT boxes on the
market. Of course that eliminates the address-space-shortage argument, so
it's more fun to talk about polling the devices, even if impractical at
present.
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Daniel Senie dts(_at_)senie(_dot_)com
Amaranth Networks Inc. http://www.amaranth.com