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by madsushi 2599 days ago
IPv6 routes also take more TCAM space than IPv4, so IPv6 growth (unless strongly aggregated) is actually more expensive than IPv4.
1 comments

The parenthetical in your sentence is the key of course. In theory IPv6 allows for much greater aggregation than IPv4, especially as the latter becomes increasingly fragmented due to address exhaustion.

Of course in practice things are not that simple. Network operators have a habit of de-aggregating their BGP advertisements for various reasons, including traffic engineering.

It's an interesting problem from a economic perspective. Using BGP for traffic engineering consumes resources from every network participant, but there is no formal mechanism for ensuring efficient allocation of those resources. So far this hasn't been big deal because routing table capacity has been able to stay ahead of demand without too much trouble. It will be interesting to see what happens when/if the supply of routing table entries falls short of demand. Will there be a fee per advertisement? How would that even work? Will operators seen as over-consumers start seeing their de-aggregated advertisements dropped?

As with IPv4 runout, people will refuse to even start thinking about economic incentives until the problem happens then lawyers will spend five years coming up with some kind of "technically it's not the FIB entry that you're paying for" solution.