Google wants to be your Internet

Tue Jan 23 19:59:21 UTC 2007

On Tue, 23 Jan 2007, Chris L. Morrow wrote:
> globally unique addresses
>
> I have an electic company, it's got 2500 partners, all with the same
> 'internal ip addressing plan' (192.168.1.0/24) we need to communicate, is
> NAT on both sides really efficient?

What do you do when the electric companies split up again, renumber the
meters into different network blocks?

Satellite set-top boxes don't need to be assigned unique phone numbers to 
report pay-per-view events back to Dish/DirecTV.  They just wake up every
few weeks, use the transport identifier already available on the 
customer's phone line and sends the data, with an embedded identifier
independent from the network transport.  If the satellite STB ever knew
its telephone number, it is probably out-of-date after a few area code
changes.  The same thing happens with burgerler alarm reporting, and lots 
of other things.

I think network engineers are too quick to use network identifiers for
applications.  Electric meters, set-top boxes, alarm systems, ice-boxes,
and whatever else you want to connect to the network don't need to have
the same permanent identifier for the application and the transport.  Most
of the time they don't need a permanent transport identifier.