Jim, as I read through your post I'm reminded of another concept that is designed to alleviate the scaling problems (which I've not delved into here) which, while not being called such, defines what might be considered a personal walled garden. Your own RAN, or residential-area network.
Of course, the prospect of achieving a personal walled garden that interfaces with the greater Internet directly could be severely complicated, or rendered impossible for all practical purposes, if one already resides within someone else's walled garden. Doesn't it. But I suppose that with enough network address translation kludges, anything is possible.
But to carry the idea forward, I've made reference to this concept because the zone of primacy, conceivably, can shift from one where accessing the 'Net is paramount, to one where there is an equal or greater amount of in-home networking taking place than there is traffic to and from the 'Net. The alternative is to maintain two entirely isoloated networks, where traffic from one never sees traffic from the other. But such would present problems of its own, if the idea is to be allow appliances to be monitored remotely, and the ability to reach other appliances <and your own visibility when you are elsewhere> outside of the residence.
Ideally, there would be a single networking scheme, and it would satisfy not only the devices in the home - including the main servers and routers - but those that reach outside the home, as well. Of course, we're talking about IP here, and setting up access controls and filtering that would effectively limit or permit access of devices to communicate with one another on the basis of what you deem to be correct.
In such a scenario, the user's personal network elements and terminal devices (in your case the A/V, surveillance possibly, and your two computer networks inclusive of peripherals, to name only those that are obvious at this stage) could be considered the primary zone, or "domain," with the Internet regarded as a secondary domain that requires, from time to time, gatewaying to. The latter gateway could be a combination router and firewall set up. You're not thinking of your own Internet cache, are you? ;) Or, are you?
The folks up in Canarie land are talking about a scenario whereby end users become the 'owners' of discreet lambdas that are provisioned over dark fibers, which would take them directly to peering points where they could hand off to others with similarly defined needs.
Similar ends can be achieved over wireless, I suppose, but I've not seen this proposed over wireless media. In any case, the peering points would house third-tier and lower ISPs, too, which would have the effect of reducing dependency and resulting transit to the primary backbone providers, with the secondary effect in some cases being a flattening of the transport heirarchy. And this, it's been posited, might also serve to reduce hop counts, depending on where the end points are situated.
At first, as the model would have it, this arrangement would be deployed by the less dominant ISPs. Then by enterprises, and later on by end users, as well.
Such might require a new way of looking at how the residence interfaces to the outside world. It might require a "border gateway" router in the home, hence the call for an optical border gateway protocol, or OBGP.
I think it's time for others - anyone with an interest in this topic - to weigh in at this point. Comments, corrections welcome.
FAC |
