Why no IPv6-only day (Was: Protocol-41 is not the only tunneling protocol)

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Tue Jun 7 05:46:08 UTC 2011


On Jun 6, 2011, at 4:41 PM, Matthew Petach wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 2:36 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>> On Jun 6, 2011, at 2:23 PM, Mark Andrews wrote:
> ...
>>> IPv4 will never reach those figures.  IPv6 isn't preferenced enough for
>>> that to happen and IPv6-only sites have methods of reaching IPv4 only
>>> sites (DS-Lite, NAT64/DNS64).
>> 
>> I think you'll be surprised over time. Given the tendency of the internet
>> to nearly double in size every 2 years or so, it only takes 7 cycles (about
>> 15 years) for the existing network to become a single-digit percentage
>> of the future network.
>> 
>> Owen
> 
> Hm.  With roughly 1B people on the internet today[0], 7 cycles of
> doubling would mean that in 15 years, we'd have 128B people
> on the internet?
> 
Ah, but, today, we don't really have 1B people on the internet, we
have about 10,000,000 people on the internet and about
990,000,000 people behind NAT boxes, so, in 7 cycles of doubling
we'll be at 1,280,000,000 people on the internet. ;-)

> I strongly suspect the historical growth curve will *not* continue
> at that pace.
> 

Likely, but, I couldn't resist pointing out the reality above anyway.

Even without the growth curves continuing, the IPv4 internet will
become a relatively small fraction of the total internet in about 15
years.

Owen






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