Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mailrus!uwmcsd1!marque!uunet!lts!amanda From: amanda@lts.UUCP (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: ToasterNet (was Re: Running out of Internet addresses?) Message-ID: <729@lts.UUCP> Date: 1 Dec 88 16:32:51 GMT References: <8811281821.AA00300@bel.isi.edu> <207@logicon.arpa> <1010@asylum.sf.ca.us> Organization: InterCon Corporation, Reston, VA Lines: 32 In article <1010@asylum.sf.ca.us>, romkey@asylum.sf.ca.us (John Romkey) writes: > I want to see a protocol address space large enough to handle a node > in each household appliance, each piece of electronic equipment, and > several extras per household, office and vehicle. Traffic lights on > the Internet. Stray toasters. And enough addresses left over to > scatter hosts across the inner solar system. This reminds me of a remark Gurshuran Sidhu made at an Apple networking conference a couple years ago. He described Ethernet addresses as having been "designed to be intergalactically unique." The biggest problem, I think, is that 32 bits (or 48, or whatever) is certainly big enough to serve as a *physical* addressing scheme, but we keep chopping up addresses so that we can have a *logical* addressing scheme. I mean, we have a Class C address, and we've got a whopping four hosts. That's 1.5% utilization. Of course, it's nice to be able to add hosts as we get them, and subnetting makes contiguous blocks A Good Thing, but it still means that the address space is sparsely populated if you think of it as a physical address space. One advantage that I see IP having over OSI (from what I understand about OSI addressing, anyway), is that the encoding scheme is very simple, thus giving some of the advantages of both physical and logical addressing. I remember the NCP/TCP switchover. It will be a lot harder the next time... -- Amanda Walker ...!uunet!lts!amanda / lts!amanda@uunet.uu.net InterCon, 11732 Bowman Green Drive, Reston, VA 22090 -- "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." -- N. Negroponte