back to article Remember information-centric networking? It's on the way back

Ten years ago, the world of tech was waking up to three hot new technologies – Software-Defined Networking, Network Function Virtualisation, and Information-Centric Networking. The first two are now sweeping the world, but what happened to the third? You'd be forgiven for thinking the technology had passed to a quiet grave, …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Frankly I don't understand why we are bothering with IP at all. Given the address space in IPv6, you could easily assign a unique number to the content itself. Yeah, yeah it's standing the idea on it's side....

  2. Field Commander A9

    Distributed Hash Table

    Does basically the same thing?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And when you need to address something that is not a "content"?

    I would be very careful to tie networking to single semantic model. Sure, *today* it's all about "contents", but *tomorrow*?

    I don't think bringing the application layer into the whole networking implementation is a sound design - it strongly couples it to a single model, hindering further developments.

    The very fact they talk about Netflix only should be a red flag - that's a single, "simple" (simple as people select a content and view it, not simple to deliver) business model.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: And when you need to address something that is not a "content"?

      And his last point seems wrong to me. Statistically I don't think people watch stuff at the same time... well not on things like Netflix anyway. The whole point of Netflix is that you watch what you want and when you want.

      In the case of Netflix it seems to identify your local "cache" when you login and then pull whatever you ask for from there. I don't think I've seen it jump to other servers but perhaps I don't pay enough attention....

      The only application I can think of is when you're watching a football match, for example. Then most people would want to watch live but that's only one specific scenario (well if you count live events as a scenario) and it seems we can already manage that.

  4. Dan 55 Silver badge

    The Netflix example is just a CDN

    It's not the holy grail of a URI identifying the piece of data, the browser connecting to the fastest server to get it, and changes to it being replicated across all copies.

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