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Five Billionth Device About To Plug Into Internet

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the how-many-fingers-is-that dept.

alphadogg writes "Sometime this month, the 5 billionth device will plug into the Internet. And in 10 years, that number will grow by more than a factor of four, according to IMS Research, which tracks the installed base of equipment that can access the Internet."

8 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. devices... by alphatel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If there was a race to plug in the most, what would be the cheapest method of getting several million "devices" online? Also, what would we win?

    --
    When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
    1. Re:devices... by jd · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The cheapest method is to not have physical hardware. Get a single box, plug in the CLICK software routing element for the kernel and the routing element to pipe onto a network simulator like NS-2 or NS-3. Have your simulated network contain a million virtual nodes, all with their own IP address. You now have a million nodes on your network and there's nothing even a simple portscan could do to tell you that they were not physical devices.

      If you're really clever, have some of the terminal nodes on the virtual tree connect to a virtual machine running on the Linux box. For any one of those nodes, you can even demonstrate the existence of applications, login prompts, etc.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    2. Re:devices... by commodore64_love · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Find your old PCs, install some dialup software (like NetZero)*, and give it away to anyone who does not have a computer. That's how I got my brother, then my niece, then a poor neighbor online. So +3 additional devices. If all the geeks did this with old PCs or laptops, we could add several million internet devices within a year.

      *
      *If they have DSL, use that instead.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  2. This is confusing.... by mark-t · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's only 4 and some odd billion IP addresses, so this number would suggest that they are included NAT'ted devices... except how can they have a remotely accurate count of the number of NAT'ted devices?

    Or are they including places that have migrated to IPv6?

    --
    File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
  3. Re:We'll know soon enough by DarkKnightRadick · · Score: 2, Interesting

    SkyNet is slated to go online later this month too. Coincidence? :p

    --
    "There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
  4. Paging Dr. IPv6 by schmidt349 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    5 billion devices is, let's face it, outside the capacity of an addressing scheme (IPv4) that originally only anticipated a shade over 4 billion possible devices. Why are we not moving over to IPv6 faster? I don't know much about networking and related issues; what are the big challenges for IPv6 going forward?

    1. Re:Paging Dr. IPv6 by Pentium100 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Incompatibility with v4.

      IPv4 devices will not be able to access IPv6 devices, which means that if you have devices with old OS in your network, you will have to use both v4 and v6.

      Also, there is that chicken-and-egg problem. There is only a small amount of servers that support v6 and even smaller number of them support only v6.

      1.There is no reason for a user to upgrade to IPv6 (they may need to change their router, the new IP address is almost impossible to remember etc) because little would be gained from it (very few servers support only IPv6). A IPv6-only connection wold be almost useless.
      2.There is no reason for a company to upgrade to IPv6 because all of their clients can use IPv4. Goto 1.

    2. Re:Paging Dr. IPv6 by loufoque · · Score: 2, Interesting

      First, you've got the whole chicken-and-egg thing going on. There isn't a compelling reason for businesses to roll out IPv6 because most of the world is still on IPv4. Nobody will be visiting you v6 website. There isn't a compelling reason for ISPs to roll out IPv6 because most of the businesses are still on v4. There are no v6 websites to visit. Nobody wants to go first.

      As an employee working on upgrading some network products to support IPv6, let me add on that.
      There is simply no real demand whatsoever for IPv6 on the market. The only reason we're doing this is because this is necessary for sell our products to the US government, but even them do not use it.

      IPv6 is not implemented because no one asks for it, and those that do only do so for "political" reasons and don't even use it, so it doesn't matter if the support is any good or not.