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You are never too old to be what you might have been - George (Mary) Eliot (Evans)
Smart grid is a way to push US IPv6 upgrade
WHILE EVERYONE in the US is enthusiastic about plans to upgrade the nation's electric power infrastructure to a 'smart grid' there could be a spinoff benefit for Internet IPv6 adoption.
According to Internet News, Cisco has started its own smart grid push as an effort to peddle its products.
Cisco's cunning plan seems to focus on smart grid services and solutions to secure the electrical system from potential 'terrorist' attacks, which the US seems obsessed with but have very seldom if ever happened.
The networking giant is chasing what it thinks is a $20 billion a year industry. It is a pretty good plan because the US Department of Homeland Security is investigating a report about potential threats to the West Coast power grid.
Marie Hattar, Cisco's vice president of network systems and security solutions marketing, said that the smart grid is likely to further IPv6 adoption. With changes to the network there will be a large number of new devices added that will require connectivity, so they will need to use IPv6.
IPv6, the successor technology to IPv4, has a 128-bit addressing space, enabling it to handle far more addresses than its predecessor, which uses 32-bit addresses. If utilities adopt IP-enabled power metering for millions of subscribers connected to the electrical grid there could be problems addressing them all over IPv4.
However Ipv6 has shedloads of addresses and is therefore future proof, as Cisco obviously is keen to point out. µ
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I'd think that setting up the grid ON the network would make it more vulnerable than the way it is now. Uh oh, DDOSed power lines!
Oh yeah, I remember that. We were going to run out of IPV4 addresses 4 or 5 years ago, and we were all going to be switched over to IPV6 now.
IPV6 = Fail.
"...and is therefore future proof..." = fail. Nothing is future proof.
Perhaps the rest of us would prefer to put the entire US behind a large Linksys router at 198.133.219.1
"Who would ever need more then 640k of ram?"
May have lots of IP address with IPV6, but with excess comes over use. Got lots, so lets give everything it's own.... Oops, need more
The DHS looking into grid threats comes from an academic paper prepared by a Chinese researcher (see current New Scientist). As for the Smart Grid -- billions of meters all capable of real time charging for power, that's a Marketing executive's wet dream but a nightmare in waiting for the consumer ("night and weekend electrons"). The address space thing - IPv4 is a bit constrained but IPv6 is a good example of how not to design a protocol. Its got too much of what we don't need (address space -- downloaders beware) and it breaks the cardinal rule of networking with its (source) routing methodology. Its also very inefficient when running TCP. It sells -- the Chinese like it -- but I prefer the old school myself.
IPv6 uses 128 bit addresses which allows for a little over 85000000000000000000000000000000000000 unique addresses. That's comparable to the number of atoms in the solar system. So IPv6 really is future proof forever.
ROFLMAO! "So IPv6 really is future proof forever." Srsly? If they were not so wasteful with how they're allocating addresses then it *might* of been future proof. However, as they decided the MINIMUM network size is 64 bits, this limits us to a max of 2^64 networks. If you have more then 1 network, then minimum address size is 80 bits (a 48 bit netmask). Have a point-to-point tunnel? There goes ~18,446,744,073,700,000,000 address, all for 2 machines! Have 2 networks (say 1 public and 1 private)? There go 1.21e+24 addresses, no matter how many machines or addresses are actually used. Also, don't forget to subtract the 4.4e+36 addresses that cannot be used because they are reserved for special purposes!
(BTW, a 128-bit address means there are 2^128 or 3.4e+38 unique addresses, not 8.5e+37)
"The address space thing - IPv4 is a bit constrained but IPv6 is a good example of how not to design a protocol. Its got too much of what we don't need (address space -- downloaders beware) and it breaks the cardinal rule of networking with its (source) routing methodology. Its also very inefficient when running TCP."
What are you talking about? Give examples. IPv6 routing is much more efficient as there's no checksums to compute. No FUD please. Give examples.