[dsl]

> A /48 is considered one "site" in current thinking.

This is the really important part. As they continue to hand out IPv6 like candy, the minimum prefix length will get shorter.

No ISP wants a hundred million+ routes in their routing table, so people will start to drop anything shorter than a /42, /40, /38, etc. until the table gets small enough and shunt everyone elses traffic off to Hurricane Electric or the like as a default route.

People have this mindset of "we added a bunch of zeros, its an infinite resource now!" which is how we ended up in this mess to start with.

[throw0101a]

> This is the really important part. As they continue to hand out IPv6 like candy, the minimum prefix length will get shorter.

Unlikely.

> No ISP wants a hundred million+ routes in their routing table […]

Too late. IPv4 are set to hit 1024K (2^20) in January 2024 at current trends:

* https://blog.apnic.net/2021/03/03/what-will-happen-when-the-...

Already close to 10^6:

> I see 904560 IPv4 prefixes. This is 30 fewer prefixes than 6 hours ago and 416 more than a week ago. 59.10% of prefixes are /24.

* https://twitter.com/bgp4_table

* https://bgp.potaroo.net

* https://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/

Also: https://twitter.com/bgp6_table

[dsl]

> Unlikely

What is your basis for this opinion? Network operators are already talking about it.

> Too late. IPv4 are set to hit 1024K (2^20) in January 2024 at current trends

Allow me to expand that number for you: 1,048,576

One million. A reasonable upper bound for max announced v4 prefixes is somewhere around two million. You can handle that in a few GB of RAM. IPv6 could see 100x or 1000x that number based on how we are handling allocations, at which point prefix trimming will happen.