End-to-end — to the home
Our group at EarthLink recently released a firmware upgrade to the popular Linksys WRT54G home router. The firmware allows a home LAN to now support IPv4 and IPv6 side by side, one not impeding the other. We also offer IPv6 routing services on an experimental best-effort basis, so the IPv6 packets in the home can go someplace useful.
If one is in the Internet business, end-to-end puts food on your table. It puts food in the mouths of your children. If you are in the information business, and aren’t we all, it puts your thoughts, your music, your audio, your image, your expression, in front of someone else’s eyes and ears. End-to-end is the people’s influence. NAT giveth address-accounting-free home networking, but NAT taketh away end-to-end. Without end-to-end, the Internet slowly begins (frog in heating water) to resemble — the phone company. That’s where you get the applications you want when someone else decides you should have them.
I have seen intelligent discussion on p2p overlay networks obviating the need for something like IPv6. And I have seen not so intelligent discussion where “We have NAT to enable home networking. Why do we need IPv6?”. p2p obviating IPv6 is interesting, and requires deeper consideration.
NAT is a tax on all the applications that won’t get written because traversing it is just too hard. What are these applications? UDP-based voice, for one. The rest of them, I don’t know. But the world is a better place for compilers, even though we don’t know what code gets written today and compiled tomorrow. I can believe the same thing about NAT. Remove it and let’s see what code gets written.
Will deploying IPv6 be hard? Back-breaking hard, and that includes home security. But it’s deserving of consideration — for all those apps that might get written and for all the food they put on the table.
