The Choice: IPv4 Exhaustion or Transition to IPv6

Alexander Harrowell a.harrowell at gmail.com
Thu Jun 28 15:00:36 UTC 2007


On 6/28/07, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu <Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Jun 2007 10:33:25 EDT, JORDI PALET MARTINEZ said:
> > I'm working on it ... But I think it will be really difficult to capture in
> > a couple of pages what the document try to explain !
>
> The story goes:
>   Richard Feynman, the late Nobel Laureate in physics, was once asked by a
>   Caltech faculty member to explain why spin one-half particles obey Fermi Dirac
>   statistics. Rising to the challenge, he said, "I'll prepare a freshman lecture
>   on it." But a few days later he told the faculty member, "You know, I couldn't
>   do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't
>   understand it."
>
> And he was talking about quantum mechanics. Surely we understand IPv4
> exhaustion and IPv6 transitioning well enough to get it down to a few pages?
>

1. IPv4 address space is a scarce resource and it will soon be exhausted.

2. It hasn't run out already due to various efficiency improvements.

3. These are themselves limited.

4. IPv6, though, will provide abundant address space.

5. But there's no incentive to change until enough others do so to
make it worthwhile.

6. Economists call this a collective action problem. Traditional
solutions include legislation, market leadership, and agreements among
small actors to achieve such leadership.

OK?



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