OMB: IPv6 by June 2008

Fri Jul 1 10:14:14 UTC 2005

Fred Baker wrote:
> 
> On Jun 30, 2005, at 5:37 PM, Todd Underwood wrote:
> 
>> where is the service that is available only on IPv6? i can't seem to 
>> find it.
> 
> In the Chinese *University*System*, there are ~320M people, and the 
> Chinese figured they could be really thrifty and serve them using only 
> 72 /8s. I know that this is absolutely surprising, but APNIC didn't give 
> CERNET 72 /8s several years ago when they asked. I really can't imagine 
> why. The fact that doing so would run the IPv4 address space instantly 
> into the ground wouldn't be a factor would it? So CNGI went where they 
> could predictably get the addresses they would need.

Excuse me, but I highly doubt that China has 320M people in the universities.
That would be about 25% of their entire population, or 35% of the population
15-64 years old.  It may be that there are 320M people in the whole education
system at the moment (including elementary school).  That said I can understand
why APNIC refused to give them 72 /8s.

The only reason north America has such an unproportional high IPv4 density
is because the Internet started there and for a long time large netblocks
were handed out like free candies to kids.  If NA had todays allocation
system and rules from the beginning there would not be such a difference
to the other regions.

> Oh, by the way. Not everyone in China is in the Universities. They also 
> have business there, or so they tell me...
> 
> The point made in the article that Fergie forwarded was that Asia and 
> Europe are moving to IPv6, whether you agree that they need to or not, 
> and sooner or later we will have to run it in order to talk with them. 

Huh, Europe is moving to IPv6?  I must have been asleep at all industry
meeting in the past few month and years...

The problem with IPv6 is that it is broken by design and doesn't solve a
thing that needs to be solved.  In addition various policies around IPv6
intermix layers that don't want to me mixed.

I'm going out on a limb here but IMO IPv6 would have been a big success
if it would just have extended the IP header to 64bit addresses and
rearranged the fields to be well aligned (modulo kicking header checksum
and some other clarifications).  Then directly integrate IPv4 into that
namespace for a relativly clear and transparent transition path and be
done with it.  All the other stuff and the different address scopes are
not only impractical but confuse the average consumer and MCSE admin to
no end (and those are the people that have to deal with it all the time).

return (ENOKITCHENSINK);

-- 
Andre