[e2e] Free Internet & IPv6

[Fred Baker (fred)]

On Sep 18, 2012, at 3:26 PM, Arjuna Sathiaseelan wrote:

> Lets put the economics aside for a moment. I am more thinking like if
> we can assign a class of IP addresses, where essential government
> services  run, and lets say if the intermediate network devices are
> configured (within the network operators) to recognise that these IP
> addresses can be allowed to access without the client/user to pay,
> then the network operators can always allow access to these services.
> So are there any technological challenges here to realize this? I dont
> think so.

There's no technical challenge there. It's a business problem. Allocate some addresses from the existing pool and use them for a defined service such as you're describing.

What happens next, of course, is that since bandwidth costs money and no money is being exchanged, one gets no bandwidth. You've had the experience in hotels, no doubt; they offer free wifi in every room, by which they mean they have installed wifi APs on a LAN and connected that to some service provider. It works just fine as long as you send no packets on it. If you decide to send packets, oh, well gee. 20% loss is not a problem, is it? It's better than losing ALL of the packets, and after all it's free...

TANSTAAFL...