Ars Technica on IPv4 exhaustion

Thu Jun 19 22:58:44 UTC 2014

On Jun 19, 2014, at 11:27 , Ricky Beam <jfbeam at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 18 Jun 2014 14:17:29 -0400, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Can we stop with the lame "every person, and their dog!" numbering plans. The same MISTAKE has been repeated so many times in recent history you'd think people would know better. It's the exact same wrong-think that was applied to the 32bit IPv4 addressing in an era where there were a few dozen computers worldwide. (also that IPv4 was an "experiment" that was never imagined to be this big.)
> 
> We're smart enough to mis-manage *any* resource.  It's just a matter of "when" that it'll be back to haunt us. ("not within my lifetime" seems to be a very popular compromise.)

I'm more going for not within the useful lifetime of the protocol.

I figure we'll be lucky if IPv6 doesn't hit some non-address-size related scaling limit in less than 50 years. As such, I figure a conservative protocol lifetime of 100 years is not unreasonable.

If you read the rest of my post, you would realize that I wasn't arguing to give out addresses to every person and their dog, but instead arguing that trying to shift bits to the right would be costly and pointless because there are more than enough bits on the left site already.

If you can provide any sort of math to back up a claim to the contrary, then let's see it.

If all you've got is we have grossly underestimated demand in the past, then I say sure, but we've so grossly overprovided for our estimate of demand in this case that it's unlikely to be an issue in any probable lifetime of the protocol.

Owen