v6 subnet size for DSL & leased line customers

Simon Lyall simon at darkmere.gen.nz
Sat Dec 22 01:38:05 UTC 2007


On Fri, 21 Dec 2007, Scott Weeks wrote:
> If I wasn't worried about routing table size (you said "if you didn't
> have any history...imagine IPv4 didn't exist") I wouldn't give household
> and SOHO networks billions of addresses.

Well since it looks like it takes about 20-30 years to get a new version
of the IP protocol deployed we have to look way ahead.

Now I think there is a chance that full nanotech could deploy in the next
20 years so the protocol should probably be designed with that possibility
in mind.

Now according to an article on Utility Fog [1] one idea is that most of
the household objects around us could be replaced with small nanotech
robot. Each might weigh 20 micrograms which means 50,000 per gram or 50
million per kilogram. Non moving CPUs would probably be smaller.

So my house may have a couple of tonnes of them scattered around in
thousands of objects (chairs, screens, door handles, fly screens, sensors)
with between a few hundred to a few billion bots in each.

Yeah sure it's science fiction now but it's fairly possible that it could
be the situation in say 2030 and IPv6 is probably good enough to handle
it. If we'd let you design a protocol that didn't support billions of SOHO
addresses then around 2020 we'd be madly deploying IPv7.

However in the shorter term nobody has billions of IPs and most people
don't have thousands of networks.

My understanding is that the main idea with the /48 is that everybody
smaller than a provider, government or a Fortune 500 company will just get
one and no further paperwork will be required. Dropping it to a /56 means
that a certain percentage of your customers are going to have to
negotiate, fill out paperwork and pay extra for their /48
which is going to add costs all around.

[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0220.html


-- 
Simon J. Lyall  |  Very Busy  |  Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/
"To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.




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