--On Wednesday, 05 April, 2006 13:53 -0600 John Calcote
<jcalcote(_at_)novell(_dot_)com> wrote:
I'll just jump in here for a second and mention also that
vendors offer what they have to, not what they can. They want
to provide the most "bang for the buck", so to speak. These
companies don't offer the multiple-static-ip-address option
today because most ISP's don't offer it to home users and home
(SOHO) users represent the target market. That said, they
*would* offer these features if SOHO users were constantly
frustrated about the fact that they can't make use of the
multiple static addresses that their ISP provides them because
of limitations in their router equipment...
I mostly agree with this, but point out that at least some of
the problem is that it is not clear that many of these vendors
would actually understand how to offer boxes and support for
multiple static addresses if they decided they wanted to. It is
clear, as discussed in my earlier note and Iljitsch's comments,
that there are real problems out that. It is also clear that,
at the price point ("bang for the buck" point) of most SOHO
equipment, providing customer support for static routing or
split-subnet configurations would be insane.
The fact is, _when_ IPv6 becomes truly mainstream and ISP's
begin to offer multiple static addresses because they can,
then these companies will offer the features on their routers.
Well, I question your "fact". Opinions clearly differ, but I
would suggest that the evidence so far is that ISPs could offer
multiple static addresses today.
All of the RIRs claim that they have not turned down any
well-documented requests for IPv4 address that are actually
justified on the basis of network designs and hosts in use. If
that is true, then, if an ISP wanted to give every household
with machines for each of the parents and one or more for the
children, network-addressable TVs, etc., four or eight public
addresses as appropriate, they could do so. In general, they
don't, not because they cannot, but because they have
profitability incentives to tie static public addresses to
higher charges and/or commercial services and/or support
concerns about the management of multiple public addresses in
households with multiple machines but a routing-clue deficit.
So, first, I would suggest that, unless the RIRs are lying, ISPs
"can" provide multiple static addresses today. And they don't,
I believe precisely because of their "bang for the buck"
considerations.
Conversely, one of the reasons those ISPs don't offer multiple
static addresses is that equipment to make them work, and work
well, in the hands of casual users of the Internet is in scarce
supply. If there are hardware vendors and devices that have all
of the issues figured out --in either IPv4 or IPv6 -- I haven't
been able to find them. Now, that might be my deficiency, but
it is also the case that the capabilities don't seem to be the
sort of things that are featured, in clear language, on package
labels and spec sheets. As Paul Hoffman points out, you can't
always believe what you find in the latter, or at least can't
believe that what you think you are reading really reflects
product capabilities.
So there is, at best, a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here:
The ISPs don't offer multiple static addresses inexpensively
because the profit (and support-minimization) incentives lie
elsewhere, partially because hardware that handles them smoothly
isn't available at a plausible price (see below). And the
vendors don't provide the boxes at least in part because there
isn't market demand from the ISPs and users who don't have those
addresses.
Note also, for whatever it is worth, that the devices Michel,
Paul, Iljitsch, and I have been discussing are fairly high-end
as SOHO/ small-enterprise equipment goes, with retail prices in
the range of several hundreds of dollars. The devices the ISPs
want to supply or recommend for their versions of the SOHO
market tend to be a factor of two or three (or more) less
expensive, support NAT and only NAT, and provide a much more
attractive price point, especially if one is going to bundle the
device into the monthly price of the service.
Let's not mistake what the world wants, for what it is
successfully living with today.
Let's not mistake what the world will pay for, and even what it
wants, for what it is likely to get under current scenarios
(with either IPv4 or IPv6).
john
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