Everything IP

[Fruguy101]

You hear so much stuff about how people and companies should be preparing for the switch to IPv6. Power companies are wanting to do it so they can have an IP address for every meter and be able to read it over the net. Phone companies(AT&T) are wanting to go to an all packet switched phone system where everybody has an IP address for their phones, and cut out all the POTS systems all together.

I'm in school right now majoring in networking. I've been working on computers for a long time before i started school, and i'm learning a lot of stuff i kinda knew about, but didn't know how it worked. Saying that, i know that there are stories out there about how IANA is running out of IPv4 addresses to hand out, and more IPv6 addresses are being used every day. We know that with IPv4 there are approximately 4.3 billion addresses available, not counting the private network addresses which are replicated endlessly. With IPv6 we have 3.4028236692093846346337460743177e+38 number of addresses available, not counting the private network ranges that may or may not be reserved. Considering the number of addresses available and the way in which the network and host parts of the address are separated, there may be no need for private network ranges as in IPv4.

Now, having said all this, i come to my main point. Will we see anything in the near future where every electronic device in our house has its own ip address? I'm talking about every single tv, computer, watch, clock, stove, fridge, dishwasher, microwave, phone, cell phone, pda, netbook, and anything else you can think of. Could this potentially happen in the US, Japan, China, or another highly technologized country.

Thinking about this, it potentially brings up the all important privacy and security thoughts and concerns. Identity theft being what it is already, think about what it could be if the world as we know it is fully connected to the network. You can load a page on your browser and tell your dishwasher to go ahead and wash everything so it'll be done when you get home, the stove could be preheated so all you have to do is pop the dinner in and wait for it to be cooked. A web app could be used to select the pictures you are viewing in the digital photo frames on the walls of your home. The possibilities are endless when it comes to this.

Stories of people who literally waste their lives away being on the internet for various things could be an everyday news story. How would personal communication suffer if we were connected at this level?

Another caveat to this line of thinking is that everybody would have to have at least some form of high speed internet. dsl and cable would be a thing of the past. 802.11n would be ancient compared to the 802.11super that would be used for that kind of connectivity. what would the standard be? gigabit connections at a minimum for everybody? what about ten gigabit connections for everybody? what hardware costs thirty grand today would cost a benjamin at that level of networking. The possibilities are there. just look at what we can do today as to only ten years ago.

food for thought.

[admin]

[Just a note that I moved this here from another area on the site, since it fits better here (it isn't an announcement of a project but is a thought about the future). --aburt]

[admin]

Yes, it seems inevitable that most things will get an IP# on them. In this forum I posted a wish for every item I own to have something like an RFID tag on it (private to me) -- it's possible that every RFID tag (or suchlike technology) will have a unique network address as well. In which case I could ping each sock in my sock drawer. And, whoa, we would learn where lost socks go!

On the privacy aspect, that's very important (to me anyway). There was an interesting article on cnet, Why won't people pay for privacy? commenting how people sort of, well, don't seem to care about privacy. I have my own data point in that realm, the virtid.com anonymous email service that I started. Never had stellar numbers of users (though I use it all the time and love it).