IPv6 – the discussion continues
28 Sep 2009
It’s fascinating what does and doesn’t generate discussion among us geeks. Still, we were pleasantly surprised by both the amount of discussion and continued wide range of opinions that our posing the question of the business case for IPv6 brought about. And since some of you may not have visited the discussion pages for the prior two newsletters and continued discussion at the Webtorials Water Cooler, this week’s newsletters will summarize some of the comments.
We’ll start with the comments that were in favor of IPv6. One of the first people to comment stated flatly that “I will NEVER buy another router that doesn’t support IPv6. One more [garden variety home router]? No thank you! These guys are already losing my business…” This was countered by a statement that many home routers already support IPv6.
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Please note: e-address will most likely expire before I do. I therefore suggest using my global name (wot I created eons ago cos it wuz obvious the conventional person naming system was flawed) to find my current communication method.
Am I just blind or is it others who believe IPv4 and IPv6 are REAL ? My guess is that both don’t exist really but just in the minds of the hardware that uses them – like, er, routers. Methinks therefore the only failure routers are those that can’t have their firmware updated to cope with the ‘next generation’ of addressing.
I’ve not yet found the technical details of IPv6 but assume it’s based on an expansion of IPv4 and is therefore similarly flawed.
Apart from roaming hardware, I see no ‘real’ advantage of having dynamic IP addresses – other than it being a cheap option to provide a potentially flawed network.
Why don’t ‘we’ do what’s been done with postal addresses and just concatenate increasing amount of detail to each address as necessary ? A letter addressed to me would need quite a lot of detail, whereas one addressed to ‘President Obama’ wouldn’t need anything more than that; wherever in the world it was posted.
Working on this basis while sticking to the familiar IPv4, why can’t this PC’s address be:
81.141.44.25
192.168.1.25
and written:
81.141.44.25.192.168.1.25
So basically the first half of this finds my global IP (i.e. router) and the second half the router uses to find the individual piece of equipment.
Taking it a stage further, the first number could be a country code, then county/state, then place, then organisation – based on the organisation’s head office – so that if they have offices in many countries, overseas (from Head Office) offices would appear to be in the Head Office’s country – as physical location doesn’t matter.
Anyway, have a think about a better addressing system before implementing IPv6
Mike.