ISP customer assignments

Joe Greco jgreco at ns.sol.net
Mon Oct 5 18:35:08 UTC 2009


> So a customer with a single PC hooked up to their broad-band connection would be given 2^64 addresses?
> 
> I realize that this is future proofing, but OMG! That’s the IPv4 Internet^2 for a single device!
> 
> Am I still seeing/reading/understanding this correctly?

The fact that you could use it for a single device is irrelevant.  We
have learned the problems imposed by the shortsightedness of IPv4.

You're already given 65536 ports for your IPv4 device.  OMG, you do
not /really/ need that many for a single device!

This issue has been hashed over many times.  Stop thinking IPv4, where
bits are in sufficiently short supply that we "feel" assignment of any
extra space is "waste."  Start thinking IPv6, where bits are in such
great supply that it makes sense to think about stuff like making sure
delegations are sufficiently large that your typical ASN isn't having
to advertise a hundred prefixes of cobbled-together-over-the-years
space, that NAT can be purged from the face of the earth, etc.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.




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