Thomas Narten writes:
| I don't know about you, but it scares me to read the various forecasts
| about how wireless will transform the landscape over the next few
| years.
It scares me how much people buy into hype.
I seem to recall reading forecasts about many bright shiny trendy
things would change transform the landscape over the next few years,
if only you invest in it.
What you are asking for is investment in IPv6 based on your
fear and uncertainty about an explosion in the number of end-systems
that will need to communicate with the Internet as a whole,
rather than within an individual addressing domain (or set thereof),
with gateways if and as necessary between these addressing domains.
| E.g., more wireless phones with internet connectivity than
| PCs. The numbers are just staggering and the associated demand for
| addresses will be astonishing. We ain't seen nothing yet.
Wireless phones? Dead technology. My prediction: zero phones,
but rather alot of pocket-sized computers which run a variety of
local and network applications, with voice simply being one of those.
IETF-conference-like wireless LANs instead of cellular base-stations,
DHCP, connections which can survive renumbering when moving from place
to place (or which are short/stateless enough not to care), something
IMPP-like for registering at a rendezvous point to accept incoming
connections, and whatever evolves out of these technologies will simply
kill GSM, UMTS and the like, all without forcing a dubious fundamental
change upon the rest of the Internet.
IPv6ification is one such dubious fundamental change, driven in
part by people who have succumbed to the fear that the hypesters
behind many of the claims of these soon-to-be-dead bellhead systems
really would like everyone to believe in. It inflates their
share prices, and deflates critical analysis of various approaches
to Internet scalability on ALL metrics (not just size of header fields).
Sean.
