On Wed, Aug 03, 2011 at 04:09:37PM +0200, Philip Homburg wrote: > In your letter dated Wed, 3 Aug 2011 07:42:53 -0600 you wrote: > > The second case is a CPE ingress router with N routers behind > > it. In this case, I humbly submit that anything where N is > > greater than 2 says medium sized business maybe larger. > > From a layer 3 point of view, I think you are right (but these things are > hard to predict). What happens in practice though is that routers cost about > the same as switches. So people may stack routers in weird ways just because > they need more ports somewhere, or a wireless basestation, etc. > > It not always easy to figure out how to switch off the routing functionality > and get the device to become a switch. Moreover, most users are probably > not even aware that there is a difference. > > So in practice, I wouldn't be surprised if routers would get stacked quite > deep.
Exactly. My friend's parents have a DSL router followed by a wireless router. Weirdly, the DSL router only has one Ethernet port and no wireless (I find it hard to call it a router, but it does NAT rather than bridging). Looking around at local stores, this was the available equipment. If you think about it, it makes sense: given a choice between selling a WAP and getting it returned because "it doesn't work" (because ISPs will only assign 1 IPv4 address) and selling a wireless router that "just works" even if they're already using a router, the choice is obvious. And there really aren't any wireless switches that I've ever seen. Incidentally, if I did some kind of virtualization on my laptop on that network, that would require my laptop to act as a router (using libvirt). So now I'm 3 deep. I can also imagine another new technology pushing to 3 deep because the user bought something to add to their setup rather than to replace it (didn't feel like rewiring stuff, afraid to break it, not a superset of required functions, whatever). -- Scott Schmit _______________________________________________ homenet mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/homenet
