Of light bulbs and business models: IPv6 as a self-experiment

The IPv6 protocol has meandered through so many promotional IPv6 is cool-stories that you might take it for a fact that you can also have your own IPv6 enabled fridge. Not true, says Nathalie Trenaman. Trenaman, who is an IPv6 trainer for the RIPE NCC – the IP address registry for Europe and the Middle East – in her spare time tried to implement IPv6 onto everything in her house – a non-trivial, but funny task that also sheds some light on policy problems with the new protocol.

“IPv6 in your house is not cheap. You have to replace a lot of devices and you can make it as crazy as you want,” Trenaman concludes, after spending six months experiencing with IPv6 light bulbs and thermostats. There is a lot of manual labour involved and “you cannot do everything over IPv6,” she admits.

IPv6 growing slowly on the net

The new, longer IP addresses are necessary because the older, shorter IPv4 addresses that were designed in 1981 - during internet stone age - are nearly depleted. With two international IPv6 Days orchestrated by the technical community in 2012 and 2013 and the Asian and RIPE region running out of the regular free IP addresses, usage of IPv6 numbers have gone up.

Geoff Huston, the chief meteorologist behind the IPv6 weather forecasts, presented latest figures at the 67th RIPE meeting in mid-October. Close to five percent of the users in Asia and Europe use the new protocol preferentially. The developments at the same time are very uneven, with some countries like Switzerland and Romania already having over 10 percent usage rate. Certainly savvy users with prepared network operators will not even realise much change when they connect to large sites via the new protocol. The IPv6-only network during the RIPE meeting, from which this story was filed, illustrates this point.

Basic problems

For Trenaman, the first basic problem to address is to get that savvy provider of IPv6 internet access at home. Her Dutch broadband provider did not offer it. Living too far from the next Digital subscriber line access multiplexer (DSLAM) to get a really fat broadband connection from an alternative provider, she and her partner opted to have Access4All as a second provider. Resulting challenge: instruct your home router to manage two providers, an IPv4-only and an IPv4-IPv6 dual-stack.

The router first considered, a high-end DSL-Router came with a high price tag of over 200 Euro. Setting up your IPv6 network at an affordable price requires some investigation. Once the network is up and running, a number of existing machines like a brand new computer, but also several Android and Mac devices, as well as the Media (all managed via Raspberry Pi Minicomputer) work well. But not every machine is IPv6 enabled. Some printers, for example, are not, as IPv6 expert Benedikt Stokebrand anecdotally reports. In a dual-stack IPv4-IPv6 network, his printer crashed.

Internet of Things – scary business model?

Trenaman next explored the more geeky things you could connect into your home network: a thermostat able to be addressed over the Wi-Fi and two light bulbs manageable from a smart phone. With a Wi-Fi IPv6 enabled thermostat that Trenaman considered a substitute for her only IPv4-speaking existing one (a Heatmister), she first came across what she called a “scary business model” for the Internet of Things. German company Tado does offer the thermostat on a subscription basis. For 99 Euro per year, it offers monthly reporting, so it is always connected to the company’s network. The thermostat turns down the heating when it senses that everybody in the household (who has the app on his smartphone) has left.

The same is true for the GreenWaveLight light bulbs which had not only their own IP address, but also an “e-manager“-subscription. The bundling of hardware and services seemed like the re-introduction of an old business model – the one state telecom operators used for ages, Roland Dobbins, from Arbor Networks, said in Athens.

Privacy and the Internet of Things

Why, asked Trenaman, are the Internet of Things products only available on a subscriber basis, and much more importantly, what would happen with the data collected by these companies? The privacy problem of such things “calling home” were concerning, agreed Randy Bush, networking engineer at the Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ).

On the European Union level, the Internet of Things consultation initiated by the EU Commission has addressed the privacy problem. Binding law was the most promising option to ensure that a privacy-friendly development, the final report about the consultation reads. If the EU wants to beat the bad models by legislation, regulators have to get started.