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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."

4 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. 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?