It's Ars Tech's turn to bang the IPv4 exhaustion drum

Mon Aug 18 21:01:22 UTC 2008

On 18 aug 2008, at 21:18, Justin M. Streiner wrote:

> Just because IPv6 provides boatloads more space doesn't mean that I  
> like wasting addresses :)

That kind of thinking can easily lead you in the wrong direction.

For instance, hosting businesses that cater to small customers  
generally have a lot of problems with their IPv4 address provisioning:  
for a customer that only needs one or a few IPv4 addresses, it's not  
feasible to create a separate subnet, because that wastes a lot of  
addresses. But invariably, these customers on shared subnets grow, so  
over time the logical subnet gathers more and more IPv4 address blocks  
that are shared by a relatively large number of customers, and because  
of resistance to renumbering, it's impossible to fix this later on.

With IPv6 on the other hand, you can easily give each customer their  
own prefix which they'll pretty much never grow out of, and not be  
forced to artificially keep lots of customers in the same VLAN.

The extra 96 bits do make a difference.