ISP customer assignments

Mon Oct 5 23:41:08 UTC 2009

The address space is daunting in scale as you have noted, but I don't see 
any lessons learned in address allocation between IPv6 and IPv4.  Consider 
as a residential customer, I will be provided a /64, which means each 
individual on Earth will have roughly 1 billion addresses each. 
Organizations will be provided /48s or smaller, but given the current 
issues with routing /48's globally, I think you will find more 
organizations fighting for /32s or smaller...  so what once was a 
astonomical number of addresses that one cannot concieve numerically, soon 
becomes much smaller.  I can see an IPv7 in the future, and doing it all 
over again... I just hope I retire before it comes... The only difference 
I can see between IPv4 and IPv6 is how much of a pain it is to type a 128 
bit address...  Just like back in the day when Class B networks were 
handed out like candy, one day we will be figuring out how to put in 
emergency allocations on the ARIN listserv for IPv6 because of address 
exhaustion and waste.

Food for thought...

>Message: 3
>Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2009 17:47:12 -0400
>From: Dorn Hetzel <dhetzel at gmail.com>
>Subject: Re: ISP customer assignments
>To: bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com
>Cc: NANOG list <nanog at nanog.org>
>Message-ID:
> <7db2dcf90910051447r5bd7e42fja0b750dceb8d764 at mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
>The estimated mass of our galaxy is around 6x10^42Kg. The mass of earth 
is a
>little less than 6x10^24Kg.
>
> 2^128 is around 3.4x10^38.
>So in a flat address space we have about one IPV6 address for every 
20,000Kg
>in the galaxy or for every 20 picograms in the earth...
>
>One would hope it would last for a while :)
>
>On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 5:32 PM, <bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> considered top posting to irritate a few folks, decided not to.
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 04:20:44PM -0500, Chris Owen wrote:
>> > On Oct 5, 2009, at 1:43 PM, Wayne E. Bouchard wrote:
>> >
>> > >Whenever you declare something to be "inexhasutable" all you do is
>> > >increase demand. Eventually you reach a point where you realize that
>> > >there is, in fact, a limit to the inexhaustable resource.
>> >
>> > This is where I think there is a major disconnect on IPv6.   The size
>> > of the pool is just so large that people just can't wrap their heads
>> > around it.
>> >
>> > 2^128 is enough space for every man, woman and child on the planet to
>> > have around 4 billion /64s to themselves.   Even if we assume 
everyone
>> > might possibly need say 10 /64s per person that still means we are
>> > covered until the population hits around 2,600,000,000,000,000,000.
>> >
>> > Chris
>> >
>>
>>         here, you expose a hidebound bias to 20th century networking.
>>        please remember that - with few exceptions - people network
>>        at a very different level than machines.  people don't need
>>        IP addresses - computing nodes that want to communicate do.
>>
>>        Just for grins, put a unique IPv6 address in every active RFID
>>        tag.  ...  and remember that there are RFID printers that can
>>        put 18 tags on a single A4 sheet.  Numbers will become 
disposible,
>>        like starbucks coffee cups and MCD's bigmac containers.
>>
>> --bill
>>
>>