Subject: [v6ops] A good "state of the art" overview of IPv6 Transition from FCC

From: Ed Jankiewicz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2011 11:50:27 -0500

Excellent survey article with a realistic view of the motivations for 
IPv6 and the downside of the delay in implementation.

http://www.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2010/db1230/DOC-303870A1.pdf

-- 
Ed Jankiewicz - SRI International
Fort Monmouth Branch Office - IPv6 Research
Supporting DISA Standards Engineering Branch
732-389-1003 or  [email-masked]

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From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:35:21 +0900

> http://www.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2010/db1230/DOC-303870A1.pdf

"The Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) developed in the late 1970s has
the capacity for about 4 billion unique addresses. It would have been
hard to imagine in the 1970s that 4 billion addresses were not going to
be enough. But by the early 1990s, Internet engineers recognized that
the supply of addresses was relatively limited compared to likely
demand, and they set to work designing a successor to IPv4. They
developed a new Internet Protocol, IPv6, with a vastly increased address
space: 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses."

it should have added " It would have been hard to imagine in the 1990s
that 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses were not going to be
enough."

i wish i could remember the quote and attribution that no fixed address
size has ever been enough.

randy

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From: Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2011 01:04:35 +0100

> size has ever been enough.

So Internet addressing is a gas: it will diffuse readily, spreading
apart in order to uniformly fill the space of any container. :-)

-- 
Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond, PhD
http://www.gih.com/ocl.html

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From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2011 09:06:25 +0900

> apart in order to uniformly fill the space of any container. :-)

and the /32s the rirs are allocating to anything that walks are pretty
big molecules

randy

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From: Joel Jaeggli <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2011 17:08:48 -0800

> size has ever been enough.

There's ~10^80 atoms in the observable universe...

some constraints are harder than others to work around.

I'm pretty confident that by the time I'm the age you are now that we
will have had to do something else, 1982 was a while ago.

> randy
> _______________________________________________
> v6ops mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/v6ops
>

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From: Ed Jankiewicz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2011 22:31:40 -0500

right up there with:

"I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers"  Thomas Watson, 
Chair IBM, 1943
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home"  Ken 
Olsen, Chairman and founder Digital, 1977
"We don't like their sound, and guitar groups are going out" Decca 
Records, rejecting the Beatles in 1962
"640K should be more than enough for anybody" Bill Gates, 1981

what is the old quote about "never been a weapon built that hasn't been 
used"?  or the generalization of Parkinson's law:

"The demand upon a resource tends to expand as much as the supply of the 
resource"

We can only hope that 340 trillion trillion trillion is enough for a 
while...

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From: "Lee, Yiu" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2011 03:35:40 +0000

>Amen!

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From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:24:47 -0500

> We can only hope that 340 trillion trillion trillion is enough for a 

It's frustrating that people describe the situation this way.   The problem with IPv4 and IPv6 is not that there aren't enough addresses to address all the devices that need to be addressed (although in the case of IPv4, that is a true statement).   It's that a one-to-one mapping of devices to addresses is not, and never can be, possible, and so the address needs to be large enough to account for the necessarily less efficient mapping that is required in the real world.

The "number of atoms in the universe" comparison is hopelessly misleading, and should not be repeated by people who understand the problem.   It leads to things like people advocating the use of broadcast networks with host address numbering narrower than 64 bits.