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?'"

Comments

Re:Wishful thinking

[solevita]

NAT/IP Masquerade has worked well for scaling IPv4 in every conceivable application to date

Except, of course, that isn't really true. I've had to try and run a VPN endpoint on a NAT'd host because our ISP wasn't giving us what they'd advertised. That wasn't fun and if more people are going to want to run VPNs in the future, we're going to need more IP addresses.

The smart grid doesn't need public IPs

[Desert Tripper]

Most grid control systems are on private (192.168 style) networks not connected to the general Internet for obvious reasons, and "smart-grid" meter-reading systems that are currently implemented or planned use other methods of addressing (packet-radio protocols, etc.) So, the "smart grid" argument in the article is misguided at best.

Re:Get a Clue!

[tsotha]

• an artificial scarcity of ip numbers and ip names that the ISP's can rort a fortune out of their users for a service that costs them less to provide than the cost of billing their customers for it.
• the vast majority of machines being dumb emasculated drones begging for content from the big media industries.
• an a tightly controlled web where peer to peer traffic is being squeezed out.

Only your first point has anything to do with IPv6. Switching to a new protocol isn't going to make your machine any less "emasculated", and P2P is being suppressed over bandwidth costs (though I'm not even sure how much that's true - I use bittorrent all the time). People who aren't running some kind of web service aren't going to see any benefit from IPv6.