Thus spake <Michael.Dillon@radianz.com>
None of these applications have any requirement for peering every 100km2. I'd expect my refrigerator, oven, light switches, etc. to be behind my house's firewall and only talk using link-local addresses anyways.
Do you know how much traffic the high resolution MPEG4 video/audio stream from an oven uses!? Why on earth would a network operator want to haul that kind of traffic hundreds of kilometers when 99.5 % of it is going to a 3G mobile phone in the same city.
If there is an economic reason to peer locally, the carriers will do it; however, there is no technical reason to do so: bandwidth is cheap and 20ms RTT is irrelevant to any proposed application in this thread. As pointed out previously, it is currently cheaper to carry that MPEG-4 video to a remote exchange and back than it is to equip and support 96,400 exchange points in the US plus another 99,820 in Canada -- that's one for every 100km2.
Oh, BTW, ask someone at Cisco to explain to you how firewalls work. Their purpose is security, not reduction in PPS or bps.
Please tell me that was a troll...
People in general will communicate a lot more with other people who live nearby no matter what the communications medium. Therefore it is likely that as the Internet becomes a commonplace everyday tool for commonplace everyday communications, the vast majority of the traffic will be relatively local.
Agreed; I think that one exchange per LATA (roughly) is a reasonable goal. But that's a far cry from one exchange per 3000 people in the US, or one per 311 people in Canada. Think about those numbers for a minute.
And while there may be some technical gurus who believe in the purity of running a few mega peering points, over the long haul, the customers of networks will reject this kind of centralized system in the same way that they are rejecting every other form of centralized control.
Nobody is arguing purity; I think it's more "pure" to have a zillion exchanges, perhaps one in every person's house! However, there are issues, both technical and economic, which limit the number of exchanges that are feasible. Today, that number is a few dozen, not a few hundred thousand. S