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Consumer Trends - Applications
Most promising applications today are peer-to-peer
- Peer-to-peer needs end-to-end connectivity
- NATs block p2p growth
Networked consumer electronics and gaming devices are emerging
Applications that need always-on, anywhere connectivity
- Voice
- Video
- Collaboration (IM, file sharing, etc.)
Consequences
- We need to be able to address every point on the network
Notes:
I’ve already told you, that P2P will be an important part of the Internet of the future, applications for voice, video and collaboration (Instant Messaging, file sharing, etc.) are already amongst the most popular. Less obvious things like connectivity to your home appliances are bound to emerge. When the usage of RFIDs by retailers will become widespread, a intelligent refrigerator will be able to tell you exactly what products it has stored, how fresh they are, etc. While shopping at the supermarket, you’ll be able to easily connect from your cellphone to your home appliances, and check if you have enough milk for the next week, or if you have all the ingredients needed for the dish you wish to make this evening. This may all sound like Sci-Fi, but these things are coming, and once the network becomes omnipresent, we will find that all these things are possible and the technology to deliver all these solutions is already here.
NATs block the growth of P2P as they make connectivity to between peers harder, and sometimes completely impossible (2 layered NAT for example, quite common today in China).
Most importantly, if the network is to become accessible from anywhere, we need to be able to address and reach every point on the network, and this a task that cannot be handled by today’s predominant protocol IPv4. We need more addresses. We need IPv6.