I feel like this blog does not accurately describe how large the ipv6 address space even after accounting for it being reduced by 2^64 for the host portion of the address. If it did it would make the concerned comments about /28 ipv6 network sizes seem very misplaced.
A single static ipv4 address is a /32 slice into the ipv4 space and is considered a reasonable to size give out to a single person or even a small business that asks for it. Of course larger companies and telecom operators need larger network allocations and they have gotten them for many years in the past.
Now realize that if a /64 ipv6 network is the minimum size like a single ipv4 address then you see that the ipv6 address space has 2^32 /32 ipv6 networks. Now with ipv6 any technical person and acquire a entire ipv4 internet sized network in a continuous (globally routeable if you want) range.
And if any sized business today can expect buy a single "class c" /24 range of ipv4 it makes sense that large global compaines get a ipv6 /20 network to run their entire network on it.For example cloudflare[1] uses 6 regional /32 networks and a /29 network for all their routing needs. Imaging trying to build cloudflare with less than 32 addresses in a single /24 ipv4 allocation.
ipv6 is so large that you can just design your network without worrying about subnet size and route based on real policy or security boundaries alone. We will run out of MAC addresses before we run out of ipv6
People get caught up in how many IPv6 addresses exist, as if we will always have enough to go around. Recently Capital One was assigned a /16, enough for every ATM in the US to be its own ISP and make its own customer allocations. We continue to repeat the same mistakes that made people believe we needed v6 in the first place.
We will never run out of IPv6, but I believe in my lifetime you won't be able to get new v6 allocations anymore because they will have all been handed out to the large corporations with deep pockets. Oops, no addresses left - but you can rent one from a cloud provider for a few dollars a month.
A /16 is the first quarter of the network prefix. That is indeed like assigning an IPv4 /8 to General Electric in 1985 and then wondering why, 40 years later, we’re out of address space.
Then, we’ll make IPv8, with 2^1024 address, which will be incompatible with IPv6 and IPv4 and all software on release, and will take decades before any appreciable uptake. Addresses will use hexadecimal, as well as the entire 4-byte Unicode table of emoji and Egyptian hieroglyphics, with octet separated by $ and { symbols for heightened readability.
I believe IPv8 does something else:
No, we won't do that.
> Recently Capital One was assigned a /16
So besides the bad design ipv6 is also badly managed?
It’s really hard to even comprehend how large IPv6 is. I have found that extreme examples tend to help people get there. Here are some I’ve used in the past.
There are enough IPv6 Addresses for 4.77 x 10^28 for every living person.
If each IPv6 address was a grain of sand…
That’s 2.39 × 10^18 of addresses per person, or roughly enough sand sized addresses to equal about 1.8 times the volume of earths ocean per person.
At sand scale all IPv6 addresses would take the volume of 12 sols.
Conversely, all the IPv4 addresses in this sand scale would slightly over fill an oil drum.
From “IPv6 Addresses: Big Numbers, Big Solutions”: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1365362
> It’s really hard to even comprehend how large IPv6 is.
But the allocations for a single device are so large that it's not actually as large as it seems to be. Kinda like usb N only working at N-2 speeds...
I think it's more useful to comprehend it as 64+64 though.
We can give every person a million local networks, with unlimited devices on each local network. That's more accurate and also easy to think about.
Chess has 1e100 possible games but the more practical metric is that the average game involves 40 black moves and 40 white moves.
Similarly, it’s better to think of the depth of a network’s topology. The size of the tree when full is immaterial, especially when the last 64 bits is intended to be so sparse that random address assignment is viable.
Hah - all of those examples use a planet as comparison. The first 16 bits of the address should be reserved to be used by the Planetary Internet Addressing Council (PIAC)
Allocating all addresses to Earth seems very shortsighted.
(Some sarcasm should be assumed.)
It doesn't really matter how you explain large-number math to people who are bad at large-number math (aka all of us) - there's always some bright-spark who misses the point.
The moon can share with the earth, and anything further away needs special encapsulation to deal with hours or more of latency.
It's only minutes for the inner planets. But of course that's already enough to require special treatment.
Except that IPv6 is actually not that large. You effectively can't use networks that are smaller than /64, because stateless autoconfiguration can't use any other prefix size (there's an effort to fix it, but it'll take a decade at best)
You can absolutely use them, you just need static or DHCP addressing just like the old days. But thanks SLAAC for forcing my ISP to give me /64 or bigger so I can always subnet into /96 for example.
Seeing the domain which screams Australian (potaroo, quoll, quokka, et al) I looked at the author's name which brought back a few memories :-)
For general interest, this is (among other accolades) 2012 Internet Hall of Fame Inductee Geoff Huston https://www.internethalloffame.org/official-biography-geoff-...
Interesting how the IPv4 price has pulled back 30% since early 2022.
That is when Amazon stopped pouring money into buying up as much IPv4 as possible and the market returned to demand based pricing.
Is Amazon not demand? Do they exist outside economics?
(Legally they're supposed to use those addresses within a year(?) of buying them, but I won't pretend that anyone would really notice whether that's the case or not.)
It's easy for Amazon to artificially use their address space because they can rotate them around customers using dynamic allocations.
You know what I mean.
That's probably more to do with interest rates than anything else. Cheap money => speculative assets are worth more.
Probably also CGNAT, and tunnelling instead of directly exposing your servers.
The investment in infrastructure is cyclical. A lot of ISPs started large expansion projects, fueled by the lockdowns in 2020-s that highlighted the inadequate infrastructure. A lot of content companies also acquired additional IPv4 space for servers.
Interesting to see how apparently low deployment of IP v6 we have achieved in Sweden. I wonder why.