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The Return of the Internet Toaster

In the Interop conference's early days, John Romkey was provoked into demonstrating a connected toaster. The Sunbeam Deluxe Radiant Controlled toaster was modified for SNMP control over a TCP/IP network. Two pervasive technologies combined into one device. Despite the fanfare, neither Sunbeam nor its competitors ever brought an IP enabled toaster to market. Perhaps they felt IP was just a temporary fad, or maybe they were concerned about the lack of connectivity in most kitchens.

Or maybe it was because it offered no value. The SNMP control only enabled the toaster to be turned on. Insertion of the bread, and pushing-down the plunger required human intervention.

The toaster was really only meant to demonstrate the potential ubiquity of IP and the potential of SNMP. I remember the toaster well. It was impressive and fun, but also the source of ridicule. The connected toaster was for technology's sake, it didn't improve the quality of the toast or reduce the human effort. Unfairly it became the butt of every technology-gone-awry joke--not to mention the dot.com bust (2000) and the limitations of SNMP v1.

Well, it is back. Not because anyone wants it, but because we can, we have the bandwidth, the addresses (with IPv6), and the wherewithal to connect everything. We can rebuild the toaster, and make it faster, better, stronger than before (and for a lot less than $6 million).

Cisco believes the Internet is going to explode with new devices, and that seems like a reasonable bet. Cisco put together the Infographic below to illustrate the point. There is no question the Internet is growing and will continue to grow. Cisco (and Ericsson) predict that there will be 50 billion things on the Internet by 2020.

What types of things? First off, it's more of the same. Most of us expanded our arsenal of connected devices over the past few years. Perhaps from a single desktop/laptop computer to a smartphone, tablet, perhaps an e-book reader and game console. Some connected devices are transitioned from older technology, such as my television remote control that uses wi-fi instead of IR, and my DVR that I can access from my smartphone. But the biggest category represents things that we never considered connecting before such as cars, vending machines, and toasters.

I remember hearing Scott McNealy around 2000, then CEO of Sun (then tagline: the network is the computer) speak, and he pointed to the lights and said something like every light fixture should be addressable and should report when a bulb needs replacement. That idea had potential, particularly traffic lights, as their failures cause accidents. The problem was reality. The notion of running a network drop to every fixture was ridiculous as was the notion of replacing each dumb fixture with a smarter one.

Cisco's infographic illustrates the benefits of the connected cow. I used to work for a company that used electronic tags on cows to monitor their feed. The sensor technology made sure each cow got just enough feed--not too much. That company found it was more profitable to track cons, and became a leader in home arrest bracelets and monitoring. But cows or cons are more likely to be on private nets than be on the Internet.

Thanks to Network Address Translation (NAT), not everything needs a unique IP address. And thanks to various forms of gateways and private networks, not everything needs to be IP either. Toward the bottom of the infographic is the obligatory IPv6. Obligatory because 50 billion devices would not be possible without it. IPv4 worked wonderfully for decades, but the jig is up and new addresses are gone. No one wants to be accused of being short sighted, so the new model supports a much larger range.

The current IPv4 header is 4 bytes or 32 bits long. That creates a theoretical maximum of 4.294 billion possible addresses. How many more bits does it take to double that? One. In binary, each additional bit doubles the amount of possibilities. The IPv6 address is 128 bits long or 96 bits longer. That's a lot of addresses and/or cows, toasters, etc. (as shown).

Some have suggested that every human be assigned a unique IP address for life. IPv6 will support that and all the cows too, not to mention every light fixture as well.

There is some debate whether NAT will continue in an IPv6 world. NAT was invented because of a shortage of IPv4 addresses, but we've become accustomed to it and many IT departments intend to keep NAT. Theoretically, if we keep NAT, we could grow to 50 billion devices with IPv4. I would hate for a denial of service attack to prevent morning toast.

Abroad, countries are adopting IPv6, but there is little moo about it here. One of the reasons we (the world) ran out of IPv4 addresses is because we (Americans) took so many of them. As a result, the US is fat dumb and happy when it comes to IPv4 addresses. The result is a world imbalance regarding the urgency surrounding IPv6. Fortunately, IPv6 was designed to be compatible, though a transition which could be very long. My new home router from a major consumer brand surprisingly is not IPv6 ready.

IPv6 will enable Internet growth, but there is no bottleneck (in the US) that it uncorks. The IPv6 dudes are scratching their heads about how to get the US to prioritize migration.

Telecom as a whole isn't there yet. Several enterprise brands are still not IPv6 ready, though most call managers don’t sit directly on the public Internet anyway. Even peer to peer nets seem pretty savvy at firewall and NAT traversal. Is it still peer to peer if intermediaries are required to reformat the address? Is it still a connected device if it doesn’t have a public IP address?

The infographic shows more than just being connected to the Internet; it shows a potential high level of interaction between devices. It illustrates that the alarm clock allows an extra 5 minutes of sleep because the train is 20 minutes late. Anyone see any potential problems with this logic? Starting with why only 5 minutes and ending with thanks--but I am driving to work.

The IP network gets plenty of use, but doesn't get top attention like it will during the next few years. We are really going to have to think a lot about things we don't normally think about at all--like new addressing plans, the role of NAT, and what devices need public IP addresses.

Dave Michels is a frequent contributor and blogs at www.pindropsoup.com