[fournm]

This is the recovered pool that's finally running out, so short of reclaiming something drastic like the class A block 10 (you know, a really really bad idea), dang.

Anyone know what IPv6 adoption is looking like these days? Google is showing like 3% of their connections are native to it [1], which does not look promising.

1: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6...

[duskwuff]

> …short of reclaiming something drastic like the class A block 10 (you know, a really really bad idea), dang.

10/8 is off limits, but there are a bunch of /8 blocks which could likely be reclaimed if we really needed to, including:

- About half a dozen which were allocated to the US military in the early 1990s, most of which aren't even publicly advertised at all

- 44/8, reserved for amateur radio

- A number of other /8 blocks owned by corporations, which could potentially sell or return chunks of them if properly convinced

[X-Istence]

Even if a block is not publicly advertised, it is still entirely possible that it is used internally. Using the 10/8 range was not common place, and certain organisations have IP's that are technically publicly routable in their internal infrastructure.

As for 44/8, there are still those that use it, taking it away would mean having to renumber all of the equipment on that network...

No, trying to reclaim IPv4 addresses by making people go through herculean efforts to renumber their networks is not the way forward and simply delays the inevitable. IPv6 is the way forward, start pushing that, and get more people using it.

[slyall]

Claiming back /8s from companies won't work. 16 million addresses is just a drop in the bucket compared to growth in China, India and other countries.

It would take years to arrange the return of 100 million addresses compared to the demand for a few billion addresses with even conservative growth.

[xhrpost]

Yup, IANA was allocating two /8's per month before they ran out. At best, you'd get a few months of extra time. http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-addr...

[IgorPartola]

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/195/

Edit: I wish there was an updated version.

[danielweber]

What is that way of ordering numbers called? If I knew the name I could google it but that's what I'm missing.

[Coincoin]

It's called a Hilbert Curve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve

[tbrownaw]

It's a variety of space-filling curve.

That's enough to find out that this particular one is called a Hilbert curve.

[Cameron_D]

http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/images.html

This page has similar images from 2012

[carsonreinke]

Yeah, Ford definitely does not need its own block

[icedchai]

Who doesn't? I have my own /24 - registered back in the early 90's.

[rjsw]

Ford has as much reason as anyone else to need a block.

Consider subcontractors needing to connect to servers in a particular department.

[mikeash]

Ford has an entire /8, a significant chunk of the entire address space. Ford does not have as much reason to need that much address space compared to, say, major ISPs.

[rjsw]

I would argue that Ford (and the other multinationals) have more need of an /8 than any university that is just in a single city.

[hrrsn]

A /8 is 16,777,216 addresses.

Ford has 181,000 employees as of 2013 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Motor_Company).

That's very roughly 92 publicly routable IP addresses per employee.

I highly doubt they need that many.

[mikeash]

I would agree, and say that universities with an entire /8 probably shouldn't have them anymore either. That's a case where it definitely made sense early on, but stopped making sense quite a while ago.

[danyork]

The World IPv6 Launch site has monthly measurements available that show the amount of IPv6 being seen from network operators participating in the measurement effort:

http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/

[api]

Great strides could be made if Google, Wikipedia, and other major destinations had a day where they displayed a box to non-IPv6-enabled visitors telling them to contact their ISPs and ask for IPv6 and explaining why.

[IgorPartola]

Great strides will be made when the cost of each IPv4 address rises significantly. That's when you'll see real progress, though not necessarily in the right direction.

[derekp7]

If only there were sites / protocols that everyone wanted, which could only be reachable by IPv6. Maybe a new file sharing protocol, which uses the vast IPv6 address space to hide better, or something like that.

[freehunter]

Isn't it standard for 4G to give out IPv6? If everyone switched, we'd all have IPv6.

[gsnedders]

LTE is in large part about IPv6 (with the aim of using the PS IPv6 net to move all audio/video longer-term), often with carrier-level NAT for IPv4, simply because unlike the incumbent telecos, many mobile operators simply don't have many IPv4 addresses and there isn't the pushback against carrier-level NAT on mobile.

[drewcrawford]

No. "LTE does not require or even help IPv6 deployment." http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/v6ops/current/msg15116....

[btgeekboy]

It's probably better to fight one battle at a time. Network neutrality is a more immediate concern than IPv6 support.

[blueskin_]

If they really wanted to bring the world onto ipv6, they just need to drop the IPv4 version of their service.

[lambda]

You could never recover 10/8. Simply impossible. Due to the fact that IP address space is running out, 10/8 what everyone uses for NAT; how are you going to solve the address exhaustion problem by removing the main tool people are using to fight it?

Well before that, you could recover 18/8, MIT's prefix; how many addresses does a single university actually need, even MIT? Stanford already returned their /8 prefix. Or you could potentially recover a variety of DoD /8s, or start assigning some of the ones that are "reserved for future use" like 240/4.

Of course, an even better use of 240/4 would have been to use it as a backwards-compatible way to move to a larger address space. IPv6 should have been specified with IPv4 compatibility via NAT from the beginning, so that it could be a gradual migration. I mean, we're moving that way anyhow, but with a much more painful period in the middle in which NAT is necessary but IPv6 isn't ready yet for people who want to end the pain of NAT.

[AnthonyMouse]

> start assigning some of the ones that are "reserved for future use" like 240/4.

The 240 block is problematic because a huge amount of legacy routing equipment is hard-coded to blackhole it. The best thing for it is probably to reserve it for unspecified local use, which would allow you to use it to NAT IPv6 addresses into locally, or use as additional RFC1918-style address space, or as ORCHID-style address space for IPv4-only applications using the likes of cjdns, etc.

[danyork]

There are a number of other IPv6 statistics sites out there. We've tried to list a good number at:

http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/ipv6/statistics/

Eric Vyncke and Lars Eggert have two good sites at:

https://www.vyncke.org/ipv6status/

https://eggert.org/meter/ipv6.html

Cisco 6Lab has a nice map at: http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/