The network in my home office is pretty basic: a DSL modem, an Apple (News - Alert) Time Machine, which does incremental backups and also functions as a router. It has connections to the modem, my iMac, a printer, and a desktop VoIP.   I use a competing carrier for analog calls, most are made by my wife, but I have to pay a monthly rental to the incumbent operator for the ISDN connection.

The competing carrier told me that the rental contract would run out in a couple of weeks and offered a VoIP gateway. That way I wouldn’t have to renew and the calls would be cheaper. They would also inform the incumbent, i.e. take care of the change.

A technician came round to install the gateway. The VoIP side would have to wait until the ISDN line went dead but the Internet connection was working fine so he left. After a new software version I had to restart and then I lost the Internet. I could get it back by switching a couple of cables, but then the gateway wouldn’t kick in and my wife would lose the ability to make regular TDM calls.

Fortunately I realized that my home network now had two routers and I had hit a problem about which I had written over three years ago. It was a white paper that I did for a forward-thinking Norwegian company. The issue is quite complex, but if we keep it simple then having one router behind another — the VoIP gateway and Apple’s router — creates a chasm in the home network. Services can’t jump over to configure and monitor applications and services on the endpoints.

With help from Norway I found out how to fix it and I am rather technical, but what would the average consumer do? This issue is set to grow and grow because vendors are shipping all kinds of products that incorporate routers. And while technicians can be trained on the installation of their employee’s devices, they are not going to be able to configure a network that may have several products from competing vendors.

The key message is that we need solutions that incorporate a high-level provisioning technology and since we are talking about multi-vendor networks, they would have to be based on a standard. It would not be very difficult to fix this issue if all routers and all broadband access networks employed the same standard. But they don’t. Some are slow, some are fast, some are stateful some are not, some can handle many connections, others just a few, etc., etc. What could have been fixed early on has now become very complex.

More on this topic in next week’s blog. Of course, the chasm would disappear if we had IPv6, but don’t hold your breath under water while you wait.