ISP customer assignments

Mon Oct 5 23:50:15 UTC 2009

On 10/05/2009 04:41 PM, Robert.E.VanOrmer at frb.gov wrote:
> The address space is daunting in scale as you have noted, but I don't see
> any lessons learned in address allocation between IPv6 and IPv4.  Consider
> as a residential customer, I will be provided a /64, which means each
> individual on Earth will have roughly 1 billion addresses each.
> Organizations will be provided /48s or smaller, but given the current
> issues with routing /48's globally, I think you will find more
> organizations fighting for /32s or smaller...  so what once was a
> astonomical number of addresses that one cannot concieve numerically, soon
> becomes much smaller.  I can see an IPv7 in the future, and doing it all
> over again... I just hope I retire before it comes... The only difference
> I can see between IPv4 and IPv6 is how much of a pain it is to type a 128
> bit address...  Just like back in the day when Class B networks were
> handed out like candy, one day we will be figuring out how to put in
> emergency allocations on the ARIN listserv for IPv6 because of address
> exhaustion and waste.

I'm perplexed. At what size address would people stop worrying about
the "finite" address space? 256 bits? 1024 bits?

I just don't get it. It's not like people get stressed out about running
out of name space in English which is probably more "finite" than ipv6.

Mike