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SubjectRe: IPv6 and the "average user"
Date

Followup to: <3h7mnhjs36.fsf@Q.Net>
By author: Bradley Ward Allen <ulmo@q.net>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> For instance, IPv4 has an address space of 2^32, or 4,294,967,296,
> addresses. That's a few billion less than there are people on the
> earth, or thereabouts, and we double every 60 years anyway (remember,
> half the people ever alive still are, or are dead, or however you
> prefer to look at two halves). At first glance 4,294,967,296 looks
> like a big number, but if your base is today's population, then it
> looks rather smallish (less than 1).
>

It is also important to point out that for various technical reasons,
the actual number of possible hosts turn out to be much lower than
that. Someone proposed a law saying that "the utilization of address
space is inversely proportional to the address length"; although I
personally think this law is overly optimistic, there is definitely a
strong effect: as the address space goes larger, the more hierarchial
it needs to become, and the less efficient the address utilization.

Either way, the results are the same -- 32 bits is just hideously
insufficient. Personally I think it was a bad move of the IETF to
pick a fixed-length standard for IPng (IP - The Next Generation), but
my understanding is that router manufacturers (read: C*sc*)
insisted...

-hpa
--
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have been left blank, and would otherwise have been left blank.


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