IPv6 end user addressing

Mon Aug 8 20:25:41 UTC 2011

On Aug 7, 2011, at 3:09 PM, Jonathon Exley wrote:

> This has probably been said before, but it makes me uncomfortable to think of everybody in the world being given /48 subnets by default.
> All of a sudden that wide expanse of 2^128 IP addresses shrinks to 2^48 sites. Sure that's still 65535 times more than 2^32 IPv4 addresses, but wouldn't it be wise to apply some conservatism now to allow the IPv6 address space to last for many more years? 
> After all, there are only 4 bits of IP version field so the basic packet format won't last forever.
> 

Let's look at this realistically.

In 30+ years of internet development, giving IP addresses to lots of things besides just single sites, we still haven't
completely used up the 32 bit space. This includes reserving 1/16th of it for unknown purposes that are never to be.

65,536 times enough space for all the sites we deployed in 30+ years will more than likely outlast the lifetime of the
protocol, so, yeah, I'm OK with giving every end-site in the world (note an end-site is not a  person, it's a building,
structure, or tenant in a multi-tenant building or structure).

Owen

P.S. Jonathon: If anything in your email was confidential, too bad. You posted it to a public list. Silly notice at the
bottom to that effect removed.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 2105 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/attachments/20110808/6d6bc21a/attachment.bin>