Thursday, 8. May 2008
The Internet is full
At ZDNet - AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010Oh goody, I thought.
Here's a relatively Big Gun from a globally significant telco taking, or perhaps making, an opportunity to draw media attention to a critical issue.
Mistakenly you see, based only on my reading of the headline, I had concluded that the critical issue in question was the imminent exhaustion of IPv4.
That is, after all, a problem which will reach a critical level in around 2010.
On reading the article I was therefore saddened to see that the topic being aired has nothing at all to do with IPv4 or IPv6. It has to do with increased demands on bandwidth brought about by rich content and increased use of streaming and P2P.
You see, the Internet is a series of tubes...
If only it were that simple.
Bandwidth shortages can and will be solved by the market. If customers aren't getting adequate bandwidth from their ISP, they'll move to one that delivers.
Address space exhaustion is however a greatly more troublesome issue.
It won't be solved by the market, because end users don't generally feel that they need IPv6 or even know of its existence. ISPs, given a choice between building fatter IPv4 tubes or building IPv6 tubes (which, don't forget, will have to coexist alongside IPv4 tubes for quite some time) will probably end up making their decisions based on short term commercial self-interest.
That is, there's more money to be made in the short term by improving IPv4 than by deploying IPv6 alongside the existing IPv4 network.
And with no IPv6 plan, no incentive, no market pressure and not even a great deal of public awareness, I am now more convinced than ever that IPv6 will arrive too late.
It's probably too late already.
Category: T'Internet
Technorati: IPv4 IPv6
Comments :
1. Turtle08/05/2008 15:56:09
Homepage: http://www.weightlessdog.com/609.html
I guess that explains this error message I got the other day:
http://www.weightlessdog.com/609.html
2. Bruce09/05/2008 02:08:33
So, if an ISP started implementing IPv6, they would be in a position to make a killing when the crunch comes?
3. Steven14/05/2008 21:37:54
They have the internet on computers now? D'oh!
Unable to post a comment? Please read this for a possible explanation...
- 
