Broadening the IPv6 discussion

Mon Sep 2 08:34:39 UTC 2002

Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> one" and then it levels off again. The question is: where on the S are we
> now? There is something to be said for high (close to leveling off)
> because pretty much anyone who wants/needs IP in North America and Europe
> has it, but maybe we're still quite low, since lots of stuff that could
> benefit from IP connectivity is still standalone. (And then there's the
> rest of the world, of course.)
> 
I think we'll have a "double S". Almost all residential broadband providers
here (.fi) have changed their policy from allocating 10/8 addresses and 
NATting the tens of thousands of subscribers to the outside to automatically
allocating public IP's with DHCP. Total consumption in order of a few 
hundred thousand addresses for our small country alone.

> The problem is not so much address space (you can run a fortune 500
> company behind a single address with NAT) but routing. This is still a big
> problem in IPv6 (as we're hoping to avoid the mess that is IPv4), but I
> think we're getting closer to a solution.
> 
Private address space is a pain if you have to redo company boundaries. 
Merging two or three businesses who all used the first subnets of 10/8 
takes a lot of unneccessary extra hardware.

Pete