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by PhantomGremlin 4713 days ago
Bah. All this IPV4 "exhaustion" stuff can be simply solved. Almost overnight. Right now, most of the space is underused and simply being hoarded.

Want to free up 90% of the IPs? Easily? Then charge for them!!!

If MIT had to pay $1/mo for each IP address ($16 million per month), it would immediately give most of them back.

If MIT had to pay $1/year for each IP address ($16 million per year), it would immediately give most of them back.

And yet for people like me, paying (in round numbers) $50 / month for Internet, $1/year or even $1/month would be "in the noise".

So how many hundreds of billions of dollars will instead be spent on the designed-by-nerds very-difficult-to-implement not-very-backward-compatible solution of IPV6?

3 comments

Such policy would lead to an explosion of fragmented patterns in routing, expanding the global routing table. That mean latency and costs would go up while throughput would go down.

If I remember right, there doesn't exist hardware for backbone networks that can handle a fully fragmented global routing table at the required speed of today. They are thus unlikely to also handle the increased speed of tomorrow without quantum computers.

Making ipv4 a second class citizen working like an low performance compatibility layer for legacy seems like a great migration plan to me. Especially if performance would go down progressively.
The backbone network is unlikely separated by hardware for IPv4 and IPv6. If one drains resources, the other gets effected.

They could start to charge differently for IPv4 traffic and IPv6. If peering Terms of IPv6 interconnection agreements was free/radically lower than ipv4 (by say, increasing ipv4 charge rate), ISPs would see a direct encouragement to move to ipv6. Its not a unique concept, as similar suggestion has been made in 2011 (http://www.canscouncil.net/presentations/CANS2011/china_ipv6...)

Awesome, that will push IPv6 adoption.

And big companies that need this sort of routing for millions of addresses can surely afford paying for these addresses anyway.

That would still only fix the problem for a relatively short time, and then you'd still need IPv6. It's a stopgap, not a long term solution.
> designed-by-nerds

I hate to break it to you, but everything you're using right now to send this information was arguably designed by nerds.