Re: [homenet] homenet: what now? ... next?

[Mikael Abrahamsson <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, 1 Mar 2019, Michael Richardson wrote:

> For the last 10 to 15 years the ISP-provided home router has come to dominate
> the market, with the belief by the ISPs that this is a MUST that they control
> the device.  Many (but not all) at the IETF do not share this view, but most
> non-technical users see the ISP provided router is simply saving the trip to
> BestBuy, rather than an abdication of control over their home.   If this
> trend continues, then I believe that ISPs (residential IAPs) will come to
> want to control all IoT devices in the home -- because security -- telling
> residential customers what they can and not connect.

I have data from some ISPs here pointing to 1% of the customers setting 
the media converter/router into bridge mode and providing their own HGW. 
Most people just keep whatever the ISP provided them with. Looking at the 
SSIDs I see, typically people don't even change the SSIDs/passwords from 
what came out of the box.

A multi-router home isn't on the product managers radar. Their biggest 
issue right now, is customers complaining about bad service and most of 
the time this is related to bad wifi for the last 0-30 meters of access 
to the end-user device.

If HOMENET somehow could help solve that problem (diagnosing bad wifi and 
helping the ISP/customer figure out what's wrong and what needs to be 
done) then HOMENET might get onto the radar and be of interest.

The good thing is that the HGW is going from an unloved cost-cut necessity 
into a more important device that is a lot higher end device. It's gone 
from a 2-4MB flash / 16 MB RAM device, to nowadays often having 128-512MB 
RAM and 32-128MB flash (or even more). It now also is more likely to have 
aN ARM processor which is several times faster than the devices of 5-10 
years ago. A negative though, is that it's also very likely to contain a 
packet accelerator that is quite constrained in what it can and can't do 
acceleration of. This might make some use-cases harder to achieve. Speeds 
have gone up and nowadays having 4x4 wifi chips in there that'll in 
practice support actual transport payload speeds of upwards of 1 gigabit/s 
on wifi isn't uncommon. We're also now seeing devices with even higher 
port speeds than 1GE, but that might take a bit longer to reach wider 
adoption.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: [e-mail]