Ars Technica on IPv4 exhaustion

Wed Jun 18 18:17:29 UTC 2014

A thought exercise for folks that think we need more network bits or fewer host bits or whatever...

If you went from 64/64 to 96/32, what would you do with all those additional network numbers?

Would you still assign /48s to end-sites or would you move that down to /80?

If you'd move that to /80, then do you really expect a need for more than 281,474,976,710,656 end sites?

Consider this... The world population is 7.1 billion, and expected 10.1 billion by 2100 (UN estimates).

Let's figure each person needs an end site for their place of business, their two cars, their home, their vacation home, and just for good measure, let's double that to be ultra-conservative. That's 10 end-sites per person or 101 billion end sites.

281,474 billion - 101 billion = 281,373 billion remaining /48s.

Of course, since we're giving ISPs /32s, let's assume that each ISP serves only 256 customers and that we therefore have a 256x inefficiency.

That means we would burn up 25,856 /48 equivalents, leaving only 255,618 extra /48s lying around.

Owen

On Jun 18, 2014, at 10:45 , Seth Mos <seth.mos at dds.nl> wrote:

> 
> Op 18 jun. 2014, om 11:41 heeft Martin Geddes <mail at martingeddes.com> het volgende geschreven:
> 
>> "IPv6 will never become the defacto standard until the vast majority of
>> users have access to IPv6 connectivity."
>> 
>> It may never become the defacto standard, period. Nearly 20 years to reach
>> 2% penetration is a strong hint that the costs outweigh the benefits.
> 
> To be fair, it is only now that there is considerable leverage to actually use IPv6 outside of a academic scope. Our company is ready now, and it’s just a commercial retailer. I know we are way ahead of the curve but I didn’t find it all that hard.
> 
> I see a lot of people crying foul, still, but IPv6 capable equipment is readily available now, and, it is up to you if you find it worthwhile to purchase. The worldwide IPv6 transit network is complete and most ISPs can actually deliver on IPv6 if you push them for it and don’t let them ship you off with „we can’t do it yet”.
> 
> As such we’ve had IPv6 at work since 2012, and we got to talk to engineers and it wasn’t really that much of a problem. Also, the free BGP tunnel from HE.net really is a lifesaver in getting at least backup peering in place, and that worked fine for over a year.
> 
>> IP's global addressing system is broken from the outset. See John Day's
>> presentation "Surviving Networking’s Dark Ages - or How in the Hell Do You
>> Lose a Layer!?"
>> <http://irati.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/1-LostLayer130123.pdf> (or,
>> indeed, lots of them at once.)
> 
> I don’t know, 64 bits for the networks, and 64 bits for the hosts seems fine, although to be fair, a 96/32 split could have worked too, more about networks and aggregated routes, less about hosts. It’s also really good that there is a „absolute split” at 64 bits to designate the network prefix part. That makes network identifying a lot easier. I suppose that is where the shorter network prefix is coming from, it’s easier to remember.
> 
>> It's really all about scopes, not layers - the TCP/IP architecture is
>> divided up the wrong way, and it will never be fixed. It's an escaped 1970s
>> lab experiment that was able to extract the statistical multiplexing gain
>> faster than rivals, but on a performance and security "buy now, pay later"
>> basis.
> 
> I like that IPv6 is close enough to IPv4 that I can just run with it. That’s not a drawback. If you understand classless subnetting you can work with Ipv6. 
> 
>> May all your intentional semantics become operational,
>> Martin
> 
> I didn’t find it all that hard to become operational. Not everything I have at work does IPv6, but that’s not really a requirement, is it?
> 
> I don’t care enough for backwards compatability with IPv4, actually, I’m really glad it isn’t so failure states are much easier to diagnose. I can see how IPv4.2 SP2 would have subtle issues with IPv4.3 SP1, but there is a hot fix for that, but not for your model. SOL.
> 
> Not very different if I must say.
> 
> Cheers,
> Seth
> 
> 
> 
>> 
>> On 17 June 2014 23:12, Andrew Fried <andrew.fried at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> IPv6 will never become the defacto standard until the vast majority of
>>> users have access to IPv6 connectivity.
>>> 
>>> Everything I have at the colo is dual stacked, but I can't reach my own
>>> systems via IPv6 because my business class Verizon Fios connection is
>>> IPv4 *only*.  Yes, Comcast is in the process of rolling out IPv6, but my
>>> Comcast circuit in Washington DC is IPv4 only.  And I'd suspect that
>>> everyone with Time Warner, AT&T, Cox, etc are all in the same boat.
>>> 
>>> Whether the reason for the lack of IPv6 deployment is laziness or an
>>> intentional omission on the part of large ISPs to protect their income
>>> from leasing IPv4 addresses doesn't matter to the vast majority of the
>>> end users;  they simply can't access IPv6 via IPv4 only networks,
>>> without using some kludgy, complicated tunneling protocols.
>>> 
>>> Andy
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Andrew Fried
>>> andrew.fried at gmail.com
>>> 
>>> On 6/17/14, 5:48 PM, Jared Mauch wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> On Jun 17, 2014, at 5:41 PM, Lee Howard <Lee at asgard.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On 6/17/14 4:20 PM, "Jay Ashworth" <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Here's what the general public is hearing:
>>>>> 
>>>>> But only while they still have IPv4 addresses:
>>>>> ~$ dig AAAA arstechnica.com +short
>>>>> ~$
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/with-the-americas-ru
>>>>>> nning-out-of-ipv4-its-official-the-internet-is-full/
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Can't tech news sites *please* run dual stack while they're spouting
>>>>> end-of-IPv4 stories?
>>>> 
>>>> <wishful thinking=on>
>>>> 
>>>> I would love to see a few more properties do IPv6 by default, such as
>>> ARS, Twitter and a few others.  After posting some links and being a log
>>> stalker last night the first 3 hits from non-bots were from users on IPv6
>>> enabled networks.
>>>> 
>>>> It does ring a bit hollow that these sites haven't gotten there when
>>> others (Google, Facebook) have already shown you can publish AAAA records
>>> with no adverse public impact.  Making IPv6 available by default for users
>>> would be an excellent step.  People like AT&T who control the 'attwifi'
>>> ssid could do NAT66 at their sites and provide similar service to the
>>> masses.  With chains like Hilton, McDonalds, etc.. all having this
>>> available, it would push IPv6 very far almost immediately with no adverse
>>> impact compared to users IPv4 experience.
>>>> 
>>>> - Jared
>>>> 
>>> 