Subject: [homenet] homenet hardware requirements

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2015 08:14:38 -0500

Mikael wrote privately (and I asked to quote):
    > Since I'm designing for a network with gig speed access to the home, when
    > someone comes and says they want to take into account a 5 year old device
    > with 4 MB flash and a 5 year old slow CPU accessing the network over bad
    > wifi, then it's quite unstandable that the solutions proposed are going to be
    > very different. A lot of these different expectations came up during the
    > discussion, and also some issues that hadn't been adressed so far (for
    > instance if a multi-AP home would have a shared L2 or not), multicast
    > routing, and others.

I think this is an interesting point.
Someone building a FTTH homenet will not have such slow devices at the edge.

But, here is my response: the old devices don't get thrown out if they are
owned by the end user.  Ideally, they get reflashed (usually not), and get
pushed into less busy parts of the (home) network.  This is the same thing
that happens with the core routers of 2001; they were often the edge routers of
2008.  When I sold routing ASICs, the flexibility was one of the features we talked about.

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-