On Mon, 08 Aug 2011 10:15:17 +0200, Mohacsi Janos said:
- Home users - they usually don't know what is subnet. Setting up different subnets in their SOHO router can be difficult. Usually the simple 1 subnet for every device is enough for them. Separating some devices into a separate subnets is usually enough for the most sophisticated home users. If not then he can opt for business service....
You don't want to make the assumption that just because Joe Sixpack doesn't know what a subnet is, that Joe Sixpack's CPE doesn't know either. And remember that if it's 3 hops from one end of Joe Sixpack's internal net to the other, you're gonna burn a few bits to support heirarchical routing so you don't need a routing protocol. So if Joe's exterior-facing CPU gets handed a /56 by the provider, and it hands each device it sees a /60 in case it's a device that routes too, it can only support 14 devices. And if one of the things that got handed a /60 is a wireless access point or something, it's only going to be able to support 15 or so subnets. So a simple topology of only a half dozen devices can burn up 8 bits of subnet addressing real fast. Yes, you can conserve bits by being more clever, but then you probably need an IGP of some sort....