Waste will kill ipv6 too

Sat Dec 30 00:51:51 UTC 2017

Excuse the top post, but this seems to be an argument between people who understand big numbers and those who don't.  IPv4 has 2^32 addresses, IPv6 has 2^128, which means 79 octillion people can each have their own internet.  I think Owen is being modest when he says no one alive will be around for the exhaustion of IPv6, I think we're debating whether it will run out in a thousand years or a million. 

On 12/29/17, 10:44 AM, "NANOG on behalf of Owen DeLong" <nanog-bounces at nanog.org on behalf of owen at delong.com> wrote:

    > On Dec 28, 2017, at 18:54, Ricky Beam <jfbeam at gmail.com> wrote:
    > 
    >> On Thu, 28 Dec 2017 21:05:33 -0500, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
    >> If you want to make that argument, that we shouldn’t have SLAAC and we should use /96 prefixes, that wouldn’t double the space, it would multiply it by roughly 4 billion.
    > 
    > I'm saying I should be able to use whatever size LAN I want.

    Sounds like you already are and nobody is telling you that you can’t. It’s a rather silly way to over-complicate your life, but if you want to be on the wrong side of a direcTV commercial, nobody’s trying to stop you. 

    > 
    >> The routing problem might be real if everyone goes to PI, but I think that’s an unlikely scenario.
    > 
    > Every scenario everyone has come up with is "unlikely". Home networks with multiple LANs??? Never going to happen; people don't know how to set them up, and there's little technical need for it.

    Lots of home networks have multiple LANs today, so you’re patently wrong there already. 

    > 
    >> Your definition of “amazingly fast is pretty odd... we’ve allocated tiny fractions of 2 /3 prefixes to special uses (multicast, ULA, loopback, unknown, etc.). Beyond that, there’s a /3 delegated to IANA as unicast space for distribution to the RIRs. Of that /3, IANA has delegated a little more than 5 /12s to RIRs. That’s the total of 20 years worth of turkey carving and constitutes well under 1/8th of the address space. Issued. By that measure, we’ve got well over 160 years to worry about runout.
    > 
    > After 20 years of not using IPv6, that's actually A LOT of carving. And if you look at what's been assigned vs. what's being announced vs. what's actually being used, there's a fantastic amount of waste. But nobody cares because there's plenty of space, and "we'll never use it all." (history says otherwise.)

    Given that more than 50% of US mobile traffic is now IPv6, I find it hard to give credence to a claim of “not using”. It’s also north of 40% for US fixed wire line traffic. 

    As I said, I don’t doubt that we may eventually run out. However, I doubt anyone alive today will still be alive when we do. 

    Owen