identity of things: IP, therefore I am

 Roger Frost’s column in ‘TV Technology and Production’ from when the Internet just started to get easy

IP, therefore I am (TV Technology – September 2000)
Roger Frost gazes at when machines will have their own personality and IP address.

Somehow, the Disneyland Paris hotel mini-bar knew exactly how much drink I had consumed. Within moments of removing another beer from the fridge, a sensor invisibly relayed this fact to my account. For the first time in history, technology had accurately measured my drinking habit (it had not cared to measure my honesty mind you) and by morning had delivered a suitable bill under the door. Fridges aside, I came away from the land of Mickey Mouse wondering how many other things could be more connected and become more useful.

Enter then global telephony and data company Nortel Networks, responsible for countless Internet technology behind-the-scenes. The Canadian based company has developed ‘Open IP’, that will lead to more connected, more intelligent appliances not unlike my holiday fridge. Open IP is software on a chip that will Internet-enable servers, personal computers, mass-market devices, mobile phones, set-top boxes and offer them a kind of personality.

The Nortel chip can put an IP (Internet Protocol) address into everything irrespective of what it is. Connected to a network cable around the house or office, each device will have an identity and be programmed to know what their purpose in life is. One day soon newspapers will discuss the rights and wrongs of giving domestic appliances this much of a personality. Maybe one day after the fridge engage us in a chat on the topic of ‘IP, therefore I am’.

The Open IP initiative does away with large and complex ‘Old World’ routers – the devices that steer the IP traffic around networks and the Internet explains Nortel’s Steve Jenkins, “Historically the only way to connect things up was through routers. You would have had to have an expensive and cumbersome router somewhere around the home; that router can now actually be built into the device.”

Routers tell things how to get from a to b and convert the LAN to the WAN. They are also a bottleneck in the system. They currently handle the ‘IP stack’ – a package that moves from one place to another. Routers take in raw data from the device (a PC say), label where it has come from, reformat it, address it and send it on to its destination. With the IP stack now inside the new chip and some of the functionality taken out of the router, the devices themselves share the decision-making and make the system more efficient.

“What we have done is taken the ‘IP stack’ and made it very manufacturer friendly. We’ve also created tools to allow manufacturers to define what the chip should do”, adds Jenkins, “For example the chip can be built into a car and mobile phone so that the car and mobile phone have IP addresses. If you break down the garage could call the mobile and interrogate the car to see if it can be fixed without sending an engineer. Equally the car or some unattended device could make a call when it recognised that something was wrong. Similarly, if the electricity company build Open IP into the domestic meter; they could dial into your house to read it.”

Applying this scenario to a Sky Digital set-top box, the future ‘box’ would not need to be connected to a phone line or use a modem for ordering films and billing for them. Instead it would be connected into the house network and have its own its IP address that would handle the authorisation and say, downloading of films from a server. Monitoring usage and paying for viewing time seems entirely possible.

Already Nortel Networks have licensed the Open IP technology to some 75 Internet savvy companies who will embed Open IP into products. Intel and IBM are among them with IBM building it into their Power Network Processor, a communications chip they can put into any device. The chip has the ability to ‘talk’ IP, the established language of the Internet. It has a LAN port on one side, and a WAN port on the other side. What then remains is that equipment manufacturers build it into new technology in anticipation of increasing bandwidth everywhere.

As many know, the local loop is the key bottleneck: although you can buy a high-powered PC and fabulous 100MB LAN at an easy price; the link to the telephone exchange and the fibre optic heaven beyond it is pure blockage. Lots of hope is pinned on new connection technologies, such as DSL, to offer a high-speed link to the outside world.

Whether the wait to overcome the local loop is over rests on BT’s launch of ADSL. Taking shape as Openworld, it’s been a launch sluggish enough to drive the technology industry, and me, to drink. We’ll discuss DSL and maybe also ‘I drink therefore I am’ some issue soon.