Domain Registration Related News
Internator 3: Rise of the Devices
March 2004
When archrivals Microsoft and Sun make a joint
announcement, something important is clearly
afoot. The news that the two companies are part of
a consortium that is applying to ICANN to create a
new top level domain for mobile devices is a case
in point.
At first sight, the story is about convergence:
the fact that more computers are portable these
days, and that mobile phones now pack a
considerable computing punch: contemporary mobile
phones such as the Sony P800 are more powerful
than the machine that ran Netcraft's first Web
Server Survey. But at another level, it is
symptomatic of an even more profound change: a
move from wired Internet connectivity centred on
the users of a Net connection - companies or
individuals - to a wireless Internet connectivity
of objects, essentially independent of users.
The idea is not new: it is implicit in IPv6, the
next generation of the Internet Protocol, which
goes back to 1994. One of IPv6's key changes is to
increase the address space from 32 bits to 128
bits; this raises the total number of Internet
addresses from 4,294,967,296 to a theoretical
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456.
As a useful background paper points out, this
represents 665,570,793,348,866,943,898,599
addresses per square metre of the Earth's surface.
Allowing for inefficiencies in the address
architecture, the actual number is likely to be
between 1,564 and 3,911,873,538,269,506,102
addresses - more than enough to give an IP address
to every kind of physical object at any point in
the world.
The implementation of IPv6 has been proceeding
rather slowly - largely thanks to the widespread
adoption of Network Address Translation (NAT) as a
stopgap measure to make up for the impending IPv4
address shortage. NAT has proved so good at
solving the short-term problem that the
longer-term benefits of IPv6 have been postponed.
An alternative approach to creating an "Internet
of things" has been developed under the auspices
of a group known collectively as the Auto-ID Labs,
whose goal is summarised by its slogan: "identify
any object anywhere automatically." That
identification will be achieved by drawing on
three technologies: the Internet, Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) tags, and Electronic Product
Codes (EPC).
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