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IPv6 Adoption Will Grow With Smart Grid Adoption, Hopes Cisco
darthcamaro writes "A lot of people in the US have not seen a use case for the use of IPv6 yet, since we've got plenty of IPv4 addresses. But what happens when the entire electrical grid gets smart? The so-called Smart Grid will need a networking transport mechanism that will connect potentially hundreds of millions of people and devices. Networking giant Cisco sees IP (internet protocol) as the right transport and IPv6 as the logical choice for addressing. 'Pv6 is an interesting discussion and one that occupies a lot of bandwidth at Cisco,' Marie Hattar, Cisco's vice president of network systems and security solutions marketing said. 'Some people say that for smaller deployments, we could get away with IPv4, but the smart grid has a number of parts. The point is that if you're looking to build this [smart grid] out, why not build it out on the scalable protocol from the get-go?'"
Hallelujah! If IPv4's resilience proves anything, it's that millions of people and the thousands of companies we run/work in will do the less we have to do no matter what. That's like some days I wake up and wonder how I'll do all the things I think I have to do. Then at the end of the day I've only done one thing cause all the rest didn't matter that much.
That's how it works for IPv6. 99% of companies gain ABSOLUTELY NOTHING from being among the first 50% to move to IPv6. That's some basic game theory for you, I'll let you guess what that means for the adoption of IPv6 by companies. What do they have to lose? Few of them even need a single public IP address of their own, and everyone will still be able to reach them long after the majority have moved to IPv6. The main flaw of IPv6 (despite its technical flaws, I mean seriously, 16 bytes addresses? What's your average Internet packet like, barely a hundred bytes?) is that as explained above there's no reason it could possibly compel anyone to move to it. To do so it would have needed some killer feature, like broadcast or something like that.
Here's what I think will happen. Everything NATed. Even servers. You know how a single IP can host many domains? Well there you go. Now I don't know how it would work for non-HTTP protocols (can the frontline router remember which domain was asked for and always route to the correct NATed server?), but if we can't change the IP protocol (after such wide adoption you can't be surprised that the task would be so arduous) then we can have a higher level solution. None one wants to use more numbers than in an IPv4 address anyway, and even that was a PITA. Domain names are the way to go, and if the current DNS isn't good enough for it, maybe a DNSv2 can have the answer to all our problems? If someone with a better clue than me about networks and protocol could tell me if that wouldn't work out or if it actually would I'd appreciate.
Bottom line is, IPv4 isn't broken, it's our vision of it (one public IP for everyone!) that is.
You just got troll'd!