Nat

Sun Dec 20 19:53:40 UTC 2015

On 20 December 2015 at 17:57, Mike Hammett <nanog at ics-il.net> wrote:

> The idea that there's a possible need for more than 4 bits worth of
> subnets in a home is simply ludicrous and we have people advocating 16 bits
> worth of subnets. How does that compare to the entire IPv4 Internet?
>

Does those extra bits somehow physical hurt you?

Really the choice of address space was 64 or 128 bits. Anything else would
just make it cumbersome to implement in hardware.

We are assigning /48 to end users. If IPv6 addresses had been 64 bits, that
would leave just 16 bits to the users. We would have gone from you get more
than you could possible imagine to "plenty for most, but not that much
really".

I am happy that we have 128 bits. It has already proven useful for many
purposes, including the ability to encode pairs of 32 bit IPv4 addresses as
part of the IPv6 address.

Regards,

Baldur