IPng was discussed to death and found not workable. The history is there for you to read. In the meantime, it's not helpful claiming IPng until you understand that background. -mel
On Dec 28, 2017, at 11:15 AM, "bzs@theworld.com" <bzs@theworld.com> wrote:
Just an interjection but the problem with this "waste" issue often comes down to those who see 128 bits of address vs those who see 2^128 addresses. It's not like there were ever anything close to 4 billion (2^32) usable addresses with IPv4.
We have entire /8s which are sparsely populated so even if they're 24M addrs that's of no use to everyone else. Plus other dedicated uses like multicast.
So the problem is segmentation of that 128 bits which makes it look a lot scarier because 128 is easy to think about, policy-wise, while 2^128 isn't.
My wild guess is if we'd just waited a little bit longer to formalize IPng we'd've more seriously considered variable length addressing with a byte indicating how many octets in the address even if only 2 lengths were immediately implemented (4 and 16.) And some scheme to store those addresses in the packet header, possibly IPv4 backwards compatible (I know, I know, but here we are!)
And we'd've been all set, up to 256 bytes (2K bits) of address.
If wishes were horses...but I think what I'm saying here will be said again and again.
Too many people answering every concern with "do you have any idea how many addresses 2^N is?!?!" while drowning out "do you have any idea how small that N is?
-- -Barry Shein
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