deeps@chocha:~$ ping weblog.chrisgrundemann.com
PING weblog.chrisgrundemann.com (173.14.10.9) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 173-14-10-9-Colorado.hfc.comcastbusiness.net (173.14.10.9): icmp_seq=1 ttl=53 time=149 ms
64 bytes from 173-14-10-9-Colorado.hfc.comcastbusiness.net (173.14.10.9): icmp_seq=2 ttl=53 time=149 ms
64 bytes from 173-14-10-9-Colorado.hfc.comcastbusiness.net (173.14.10.9): icmp_seq=3 ttl=53 time=148 ms

deeps@chocha:~$ ping6 weblog.chrisgrundemann.com
PING weblog.chrisgrundemann.com(ChrisGrundemann-1-pt.tunnel.tserv8.dal1.ipv6.he.net) 56 data bytes
From gige-gbge0.tserv8.dal1.ipv6.he.net icmp_seq=1 Destination unreachable: Address unreachable
From gige-gbge0.tserv8.dal1.ipv6.he.net icmp_seq=2 Destination unreachable: Address unreachable
From gige-gbge0.tserv8.dal1.ipv6.he.net icmp_seq=3 Destination unreachable: Address unreachable

took me an age and a half to reach your site as a result, almost gave it up for dead til it retried over v4 instead

I’ve going through this right now with SIP. Few if any SIP speaking nodes support IPv6, and the combination of SIP and IPv4 and NAT is an utter disaster. I’ve pretty much given up for the time being. I just can’t understand why the VoIP world hasn’t embraced IPv6 and made it their standard and made NAT just a distant, painful memory.

All my regular hosts support IPv6, so I use it regularly with 6to4 as a NAT penetration scheme. No port forwarding crap. And It All Just Works. These days it’s hard to find better praise for a network protocol than that.

IPv6 and 6to4 are among the Internet’s best kept secrets. A lot of people seem to believe that they can’t do anything with IPv6 because their ISP doesn’t support it. 6to4 tunneling almost completely moots ISP IPv6 support. In fact, I almost hope my ISP never implements IPv6. Right now my 6to4 tunnels operate in blissful transparency, with no ISP filtering of any kind to get in my way.

So forget about those huge numbers. They’re meaningless. What matters is that with IPv6 we can get rid of NATs RIGHT NOW and make the Internet work again the way it was originally supposed to work, with bidirectional, transparent, end-to-end and peer-to-peer connectivity. And that’s the reason to use it.

Remember that only a /3 or about 15% of the IPv6 addresses are allocated this way. If we in the future realize that the current allocation scheme wastes too many addresses we can invent a new for the other 85% of the IPv6 addresses space. Perhaps steal a few bits from the host ID part of the address so that every subnet is a /80 or /96 instead of today’s /64?

IPv6 Question: “Do we run out of network numbers?”
Answer: Yes

Better IPv6 Question: “When do we run out of network numbers?”
Answer: It depends on how we use/waste them.

I plan to explore the details of this argument in more detail as soon as I can squeeze in some time to write it. In a nutshell: Our (network operators) attitude towards IPv6 will be a major factor in it’s longevity. The other factors are RIR policy and the IETF standards. All three of these are out of whack currently, imho. If we (NetOps, RIRs, Working Groups) fix them, I believe that you are correct and we can be OK well into the unforeseeable future. If we do not, the foreseeable future may contain the need for yet another IP protocol.

In IPv6, the question really is “Do we run out of network numbers?”. With 64 bits for host addressing on every subnet in IPv6, I really don’t think any particular network will be short of ability to support hosts. 50 million cellphones if they all need a /64 each is a lot. Most of them, even in the foreseeable future, will not. In fact, I can see a /64 per cell tower being a much more realistic number. Now, there will be mobile users that require Prefix delegation and likely they will eventually result in a need for larger aggregates per tower or a different way of doing routing. However, even with a /56 per cell tower (providing for 16 customers with 16 /64 subnets each, for example) in addition to the shared /64, I still think we’re OK for far longer than the validity of any crystal ball when it comes to networking.

I agree that the v6/32 to v4/20 comparison is not really useful and tried to point that out, perhaps too briefly. I included it for the sake of being thorough. Your explanation is spot on.

My opinion is that the 16.7 million times greater figure is the most accurate. And while I agree that there are other planetary scaling barriers with lower thresholds I still don’t think that this is an extremely large number considering the number of devices which could benefit from having an IP address. Especially when you consider how early we are in the areas of Internet penetration, intraplanetary exploration (the Oceans) and interplanetary exploration. We have a lot of growing to do and the fairly common belief/statement that IPv6 won’t run out is simply wrong, quite possibly even in our lifetime.

Perhaps you can consider this my early vote for the /96…

In addition, the ARIN MAU for IPv6 to end users is currently /48, not /32, and, there are 65,536 times 4,096 times (268,435,436 times) as many of those as there are IPv4 /20s and 16,384 times 4,096 (67,108,864 times) as many as there are /22s (the current ARIN MAU for end users).

Your point that 41 IPv4 /8s were given out to individual organizations while accurate really doesn’t have a parallel in IPv6 policies. Today, those same organizations would probably receive a /32 under current IPv4 policies. As you have already pointed out, there are 16.7 million times as many IPv6 /32s as there are IPv4 /8s.

The reality is that there really isn’t an apples to apples comparison, but, when you consider that IPv6 supports roughly 16.7 million times as many organizations (/48s) or 4,294,967,296(/56s) as many households or some combination thereof, I think there are many other planetary scaling problems that will become a much larger issue before we run out of IPv6 numbers with current allocation policies.

Additionally, there is a somewhat built-in safety valve for this in IPv6. Only one /3 has been assigned for allocation at the current time by IANA. The remaining 7 /3s are held in reserve and if we hit the wall on the first /3 sooner than expected, I am confident that addressing policy for IPv6 will be reviewed and modified before we run out of the second /3. Once that is done, we should still have time to transition the first /3s over to new policy and continue with little or no disruption. One example of modified addressing policy would be to abandon EUI-64 and go to end user subnets of /96 instead of /64. This would result in the next /3 containing essentially 4+billion times as many usable subnets as the first /3s.