[10487] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Utility industry IP addresses.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Scott Bradner)
Fri Feb 25 10:01:17 1994
Date: Sat, 12 Feb 94 21:13:49 -0500
From: sob@hsdndev.harvard.edu (Scott Bradner)
To: stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Dick,
> For example, in one of the Next Generation Internet Protocol
> proceedings, the power generation utility industry submitted
> comments indicating that it would like IP addresses for every
> controllable electrical device in the world.
I'm afraid that there has been a bit of a transmission error in this
message. In response to RFC 1550 the Electric Power Research Institute
(EPRI) has submitted a white paper to help define the set and scale of
requirements that the Internet Protocol: next generation (IPng) protocol
should meet.
This white paper, along with all of the other white papers received by the
IETF IPng effort, will be made available in the next few weeks after the
IPng directorate has a chance to review them and make suggestions, if
warranted, to the authors about any ambiguous or incomplete wording.
This white paper does make suggestions about the scale of deployment that
an IPng should be able to meet but does not go into specifics about how the
power industry plans to deploy addressable devices.
The day after RFC 1550 was issued I received a call from a technical
marketing person at a major computer manufacturer. He had noticed a
specific reference to utilities in RFC 1550 and wanted to know if we (the
IPng area co-directors) had been in touch with EPRI since some people there
were talking about ideas that might include the ability to assign an
address to each electrical outlet and device.
During the Internet Society board of trustees meeting this week I gave an
informal report on the state of the IPng selection process. During this
report I mentioned both the white papers that we have received and the
conversation. I must not have been as clear as I thought I was and this
resulted in the above mixed report.
Scott
