Feasibility of using Class E space for public unicast (was re: 44/8)

Sat Jul 27 18:46:41 UTC 2019

On July 26, 2019 at 21:19 dougb at dougbarton.us (Doug Barton) wrote:
 > All of this, plus what Fred Baker said upthread.
 > 
 > When I was running the IANA in the early 2000's we discussed this issue with
 > many different experts, hardware company reps, etc. Not only was there a
 > software issue that was insurmountable for all practical purposes (pretty much
 > every TCP/IP stack has "Class E space is not unicast" built in), in the case of
 > basically all network hardware, this limitation is also in the silicon. So even
 > if it were possible to fix the software issue, it would not be possible to fix
 > the hardware issue without replacing pretty much all the hardware.
 > 

Not particularly interested in arguing for using Class E space but
this "not compatible" reasoning would seem to have applied to IPv6 in
the early 2000s (whatever, pick an earlier date when little supported
IPv6) just as well, pretty much.

So in and of itself it's not a show-stopper. Just a matter of whether
there's an overall positive ROI.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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