Christian Huitema writes:
The definition of a small network is pretty much "single subnet". Yes, I understand very well that the average home of the future will have a mixed wiring. Of course, my own home does have Ethernet and Wi-Fi. In the not so distant future, it will have several Wi-Fi networks operating on different frequencies, some form of power-line networking, and some rooms may have their own high speed wireless wiring using UWB or some similar technology. But I am pretty much convinced that all of these will be organized as a single subnet.
You mean that the faster actual subnets will not be subnets in the IETF sense, right?
If a number of devices have some extremely fast special network, and a bridge or router to connect them to the rest of the world, presumably they need the extra bandwidth: If their traffic were to leak onto the slower net, it would be more or less unusable.
But there are several ways in which the fast devices can leak traffic, often involving broastcast or multicast. (I have some neat audio boxes that multicast to group "all-devices-from-manufacturer-x", very nice, but I'm glad my backbone isn't 802.11.)
Either the IETF subnet has to be usable to describe these actual subnets (ie. people get more than a /64 automatically so it's the common case and random consumerboxes are built for it) or there'll eventually be some new subber-than-subnet concept so devices can broadcast or multicast traffic onto their fast subber-than-subnet without overwhelming the slow parts of the subnet.
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