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Comment by indolering | Hacker News Reader

Any particular advantage to Suzi over Thread? Why didn't they adopt an IP based standard that is interoperable with ... all major networks since ~1995 (if not before)?

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Multiple reasons like not enough v4 IPs, devices being able to sleep most of the time to conserve power, security cameras and IoT devices getting hacked and faling prey to by botnet operators etc.

> not enough v4 IPs

No one is giving their IoT devices public IPv4 addresses. They would be behind a NAT. RFC 1918 provides 17,891,322 usable IP addresses for each private network. If we want to be a little more adventurous, RFC 6598 provides an additional 4,194,302 usable addresses and 240.0.0.0/4 is another 268,435,454 usable addresses "reserved for future use" since 1989, but still sitting unused so we can use them as internal addresses inside a NAT anyway (for example, AWS uses this range internally).

Show me a network that is using all 290,521,078 addresses and I'll show you a network managed by a team of network engineers who can just set up IPv6.

You still have to manage those and assign them through DHCP every time the device wakes up and turns the radio on. Maybe WiFi 7 will address that with the low power mode? Also, I don't want a 100 sensor mesh network on my LAN. That's why Thread uses a IPv6 6LoWPAN. One should use that if they want to bridge to IP.

Thread uses IPv6.

Exactly, over over IEEE 802.15.4. Easy to bridge to IP using the appropriate border router or whatever they are called.

Don't use IPv4 and NAT < firewall.

Why would IP based routing be inherently more power hungry?

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