The exhaustion of IPv4 address space

FireFury03 writes "Cisco has an interesting article talking about estimates for the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space, and the inevitable move to IPv6. It predicts that the IPv4 address space will be exhausted in 2 - 10 years and suggests that it isn't worth trying to reclaim old allocations. With the mainstream use of IPv6 now potentially within the ROI period of many products the manufacturers need to start including support, but will the ISPs roll out native IPv6 networks before they absolutely have to? IMHO, ISPs providing native IPv6 support would be a Good Thing since it opens up the door for peer-to-peer technologies such as SIP without needing nasty NAT traversal hacks, but a major stumbling block seems to be a complete lack of IPv6 support on current consumer-grade DSL routers (tunneling over IPv4 is an option but requires more technical know-how from the end user)." Of course, Cisco may have some vested interest in driving up the IPv6-compatible router sales *cough*, but the bottom line is that the transition will have to happen at some point in the near future.

Comments

Interesting

[Legendof_Pedro]

Interesting, but is 2 - 10 years as precise as they can be?
8 years seems to be a long time, to me...

Re:Interesting

[kihjin]

2 - 10 would be -8 years. So this already happened, 8 years ago.

Welcome to Slashdot.

Re:Interesting

[rubycodez]

yup, 8 years ago they were saying the ip4 space would be exhausted in next 5 years. Heck, I sat at a presentation on IPng in 1994 where that was said. At least such a statement is more true now than it was then, but I'll bet reclaiming old absurdly huge allocations of IP space could push this out beyond 10-12 years.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

The REAL question is whether IP drilling operations in ANWR, Alaska will buy us any time. What about our strategic reserves? I believe our goal should be to reduce dependence on foriegn address space.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

2-10 years?? Sounds like a Microsoft release timeline.

Re:Interesting

[Hizonner]

Yeah, they said the address space would be exhausted AND THEY WERE RIGHT. The only reason we're not out of addresses now is that people made a fundamental change in the network architecture by deploying NAT (primarily because IPv6/IPng wasn't ready), and using RFC1918 private addresses. NAT is a nasty kludge that breaks all kinds of things. Furthermore, NAT has been done, so it's not going to save us again.

Re:Interesting

[Cramer]

It's "not worth it" simply because of the greedy bastards hoarding those /8's. Let's see who is hoarding all that space...
003/8 - GE
004/8, 008/8, 046/8 - BBN
009/8 - IBM
015/8 - HP
016/8 - DEC
017/8 - Apple
018/8 - MIT
019/8 - Ford ...
045/8 - Interop Show Network !!

And then there's the US GOVERNMENT with 8+ /8's -- more if you count the number of big contractors holding /8's.

Re:Interesting

[AuMatar]

But no buisness will ever implement a v6 address when v4 users can then not access them. It would incredibly stupid. Thats why we can't just stop handing out v4 addresses.

Its not like there aren't plenty to go around still- HP owns 2 class As now, and a handul of universities own a full A as well. Reclaim a major portion of them for reuse.

Re:Interesting

[Cramer]

BBN... currently known as Level 3 Communications.

They were one of the first movers and shakers in the internet industry 20 odd years ago.

Already rolled...

[jamesgamble]

Most of the major ISPs have already rolled support for IPv6. They started the rollout about five years ago when the lack of IP address began to be a problem. I know for a fact that Sprint is ready to roll it, they are just waiting for other networks to support it. T-Mobile is also ready to roll it as is AOL. It's not really a big deal. It's already been done. Everyone is just waiting to push the big red button and turn on the support. Hell, even Windows supports it.

Re:Already rolled...

[FireFury03]

Everyone is just waiting to push the big red button and turn on the support

Why do you need to wait to turn it on? IPv4 and v6 can run side by side. I've been running v6 for a few years using 6to4 tunnelling to provide connectivity since my ISP doesn't do native IPv6... infact I haven't seen *any* ISP (in the UK) offering IPv6 connectivity over DSL. Just providing a 6to4 anycast gateway on their core network would be a start.

Re:Already rolled...

[Spetiam]

All I know is that if, once my broadband ISP serves up IPv6, they want to charge me extra for a static IP, I'll be pissed.

Re:Already rolled...

[comcn]

Try Andrews and Arnold. I've had IPv6 (via a tunnel from their network) for the last two years with them. Native IPv6 (without a tunnel) is integrated into the new router they are developing, and should be live by the end of the year (only problem is finding an ADSL router that will support it, but you can use an ADSL modem and Linux, for example).

I can't understand why...

[saskboy]

Why don't more routers that are sold today tout their IPv6 compatibility? Are they not compatible with the new protocol? If not why not?

NATs at home can only hold IPv4 together for so much longer. Soon a killer ap will come out that just doesn't want to be NATted, and the whole Internet using public will demand direct addressing [at least they'll demand a solution that requires direct IP addressing].

Re:I can't understand why...

[xappax]

I know that Azeurus happily opens up a few ports on my router every time that I start it up. Whether this is a good idea security wise is another story...

NAT is not a security tool.
NAT is not a security tool.
NAT is not a security tool.
Network Address Translation was never intended to function as a firewall or a packet filter, it was designed exclusively to allow multiple computers to share the same IP at once. That's it.
The fact that NAT has some side effects which are similar to a firewall has been a big problem for network security, because it leads users and even administrators to believe that their network does not need a firewall because they use a NAT system.

We are finally, after many years, starting to see real firewall use become commonplace, and a XP even has an automatic software firewall now, but if it hadn't been for NAT, I bet people would've been implementing real, security-focused firewalls a lot earlier.

Is NAT Better?

[HugePedlar]

I remember reading a while ago that NAT actually turned out to be better than IPv6 by virtue of it "solving" the limited number of addresses problem and simultaneously providing a defence against simple hacking attempts by hiding your real IP address.

Can anyone explain whether this is true or not and why?

Re:Is NAT Better?

[amalcon]

The one "benefit" of NAT over IPv6 is that you can't access ports which aren't forwarded to that computer. i.e. it basically acts like a firewall, but potentially a little weaker because it isn't designed to be a firewall. As IPv6 doesn't keep you from having a firewall, this is almost moot. It's not entirely moot because home users who have NAT would not always consider having firewalls. The benefits of IPv6 are numerous, however.

Re:Is NAT Better?

[phoenix.bam!]

NAT is not defense. The stateful firewall is defense. You can use stateful firewalls on IPV6 also and there is no reason that consumer grade routers would not include the firewall.

Re:Is NAT Better?

[fyonn]

I remember reading a while ago that NAT actually turned out to be better than IPv6 by virtue of it "solving" the limited number of addresses problem and simultaneously providing a defence against simple hacking attempts by hiding your real IP address.

well, it's not "better" as such, just a different solution. NAT is not a golden bullet though. Yes, it does, by and large prevent random machines on the internet directly contacting your unpatched windows desktop at home, but a firewall will do that too, and virtually every dsl router has a firewall these days too. I would like to see home dsl routers supporting native ipv6 but I don't know of any.

I think that ipv6 is a good thing to go for, but it's not finished (but then, is ipv4? :). there's lots of advertised features for ipv6 (mandatory encryption, mobile ip etc) that are good on paper, but aren't all that in the real world.

Mandatory support for ipsec is great.. except how many of us would use it? as there is currently no support for mndatory ipsec encryption to unknown strangers. you've got to be pre-configured for crypto. I'd like to see something like ssh. if you know the key then great, if you don't then you can accept and save one and then while you may not have verified the destination, you're at least protected on the wire. yes, they also need to sort out authentication and perhaps some form of certificate distribution, but lets make a start on something useable.

mobile IP. sounds great! I can be using my ipv6 pda via my mobile phone and as I walk into my house, it picks up my wireless net and my downloads speed up instantly, all the while not dropping the voip call I'm making. or I'm using a laptop on the train and as it flits from hotspot to hotspot I don't lose any of my connections. sounds great! how does it work? you tell me, details are not easy to find. ots of talk, few working implementations (if I'm wrong, please tell me, I'm genuinely very interested).

working with networks as part of my job, I know how useful and really annoying NAT can be, and I really think it should be an option, not a requirement. I'd love to see ipv6 rolled out and see what changes it brings, but I also think it needs a fair amount of work still.

dave

Re:Is NAT Better?

[FireFury03]

I remember reading a while ago that NAT actually turned out to be better than IPv6 by virtue of it "solving" the limited number of addresses problem and simultaneously providing a defence against simple hacking attempts by hiding your real IP address.

NAT in itself doesn't provide any extra security - the connection tracking needed by NAT is what provides the security (and you can do this equally well without using NAT). I wrote an article on this subject a while back.

Whiles NAT does to some extent "solve" the limited number of addresses problem, it also creates many more problems. The Internet was designed to be peer to peer but NAT turns it into a client/server model. Whilest client/server works fine for "traditional" applications such as web surfing, it's a major stumbling block for peer to peer services such as VoIP, which have to employ various hacks to trick NATs into letting the peer-to-peer traffic through (with varying degrees of success). The likes of Skype are designed to hijack the connections of random Skype users who don't have NAT and use them to route traffic between peers who do have NAT when the NAT traversal hacks fail.

Re:Is NAT Better?

[MSZ]

The benefits of IPv6 are numerous, however.
Cisco marketing rep:
NOBODY expects the IPv6!
Our chief benefit is length... greater length of the packet header and and unrememberable addresses...
Our two benefits are greater length of packet header and unrememberable addresses... and rewrite of all network apps....
Our three benefits are length of packet header and unrememberable addresses... and rewrite of all network apps.... and an almost fanatical devotion to some broken standard....
Our four... no...
Amongst our benefits... Amongst our array of benefits... are such elements as greater length of packet header and unrememberable addresses...
I'll come in again.

But seriously, if IPv6 was so good, it would not require so much pushing. If the IPv4 exhaustion was real and imminent, it would not rquire so much pushing.

Re:Is NAT Better?

[saikatguha266]

Actually, NAT is better because it provides address space isolation. If your organisation has 500 computers that all have a public IP address, it is harder for you to switch providers (500 IPs is too small to get your own address space for). When you switch your provider, you have to renumber all hosts, fix config files, fix DNS servers etc -- a royal pain in the ass. A NAT allows your to keep your internal structure exactly the same while you switch providers. That address isolation is very important for small-mid sized companies.

Second, NAT helps multihomed corporations. For large companies, your 10k hosts are going to be distributed over many states/countries/ISPs ... and each site advertising its own address space is expensive for the ISP's because they cannot perform route aggregation (since your address space may not line up with the address space of each ISP). NAT solves this by having each site be NAT'ed behind that ISP's IP address (convinient for the ISP, cheaper for the company). The internal company network runs in the private space and when traffic crosses to the public internet, it gets an IP from the ISP it came out of ... consequently replies come back in through the ISP. Read: If you send a packet out of India, the response won't come back inthrough America ... which would otherwise require you to then forward it to India through your company's routers.

It is this address isolation and multihoming support that drives NAT use in small and large companies. Address space depletion has nothing to do with it. IPv6 does not fix these problems; companies will continue using NATs because NATs do.

Re:Is NAT Better?

[Gr8Apes]

NAT and firewalls (FW) are 2 separate things, as you can have NAT without a FW, and you can have a FW without NAT. Now, NAT, by its nature, inherently has some features in common with FWs, such as that it effectively hides ports unless they're mapped.

A second item is that moving to IPv6 will not necessarily remove NAT or the current 1 router many PCs setup so many of us have. ISPs in general have charged per IP connection/computer, considering each IP a separate computer. Do you honestly think that will change with IPv6? That ISPs are going to be nice and just let you wire up however many systems you want to their network?

I don't think they'd give up that type of revenue stream. (Besides, think of the security nightmare of locking down and managing security for all those items, like your refrigerator! You'd want some sort of appliance FW/NAT box, both to secure you and keep you from paying extra each month. The latter would be the selling point for most normal users.)

Re:Is NAT Better?

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

IP address exhaustion is like Peak Oil.

There is a time where the problem is looming, but taking action then will mitigate a lot of the damage.

Or one can wait until it is having severe impacts, and then we will all be hosed very very badly.

Re:Is NAT Better?

[FireFury03]

Weaker how? If you can't address a node, how can you attack it?

Well, ignoring the fact that there _are_ ways to defeat NAT (although they usually require cooperation from hosts behind the NAT anyway), one notable weakness is that you're relying on your ISP to get things right, and relying on someone else's cluefulness is always bad.

What I mean by that is, given a network like:

      PC (192.168.0.1) ------ (192.168.0.254) Router (1.2.3.4) ------- ISP

Assuming 1.2.3.4 is a global scope address and 192.168.0.0/24 is site-local. The router is doing NAT, all well and good. However, if the ISP somehow ends up routing traffic destined to 192.168.0.1 to your router (for exacmple, a routing cockup on their end) then most consumer grade routers will just let it right through because they don't explicitly block incoming traffic.

Admittedly it's unlikely this would happen, and only nodes reasonably close to you would be able to take advantage of the routing. However, I still maintain that trusting a third party as part of your network security is a Bad Thing.

but I don't see how it's less secure than the complicated (and thus fallible) filtering rules in a "real" firewall.

Firewall rules don't have to be especially complex - a firewall that does the same job as a NAT (security wise) but provides protection from the above problem is simply a connection tracker configured to drop incoming connections. Infact, since a NAT is basically a connection tracker with some more stuff shoved ontop it could be argued that the NAT is more complex and thus more fallible.

Love that quote

[Matey-O]

"and suggests that it isn't worth trying to reclaim old allocations."

Isn't worth it to whom?

Re:Love that quote

[Kadin2048]

Well if you look at the List of Class A address allocations you'll see some possibilities of people who might not be interested.

In particular, Level 3 Communications has not one but two Class A blocks, the 4.0.0.0 and 8.0.0.0 blocks; "Comcast IP Services" has another one.

There are some oddball Class A assignments on there too. Who would have guessed that Ford has one? The US Postal Service? The Defense Department has something like seven, not a huge surprise given when the assignments were made. Halliburton even has one.

Anyway, reading down the list you can see that the people who already have their own Class A blocks are unlikely to care too much about how quickly v6 gets rolled out, at least for their own use. But some of the newer big-time tech companies who aren't on that list might have more of an interest ... Cisco, for instance, is not on there.

Dupe.

[haeger]

I know I've read this statement atleast yearly for the last 2-10 years.

.haeger

It's a race!

[Anonymous Coward]

Will *BSD die before the switchover to IPv6? Maybe a good Slashdot poll:

[ ] Yes
[ ] No
[ ] Microsoft
[ ] I don't know what IPv6 is, but I'll post anyway
[ ] Cowboy Neal encodes my packets

for anyone who can't tell wtf is going on

[s388]

TFA didn't help me get much of a clue. I tried reading it, and I said to myself: "aren't there one trillion possible IP addresses, available in principle? (minus 1)" just because of the 12-digit IP addresses i'm used to.

"The IPv4 address space has 32 bits, limiting it to an absolute maximum of 232 (roughly 4.3 billion) possible addresses. For both administrative and technical reasons (the latter in large part being related to routing), IPv4 addresses are allocated in blocks which are restricted to sizes which are powers of 2; this leads to many addresses being unused at any given time. In addition to this, substantial parts of the IP address space are not easily usable because of early technical decisions reserving them for private network use, loopback addresses, multicast, and unspecified future uses, which has resulted in some of these limitations being programmed into devices; working around these limitations will require substantial amounts of re-engineering to increase the amount of available address space. Finally, some of the IPv4 address allocations made early in the development of the Internet (in the 1970s), when only blocks of 224 possible addresses (called a /8 in IPv4 address terminology) were supported, led to some institutions that were involved in the development of the Internet having disproportionally large allocations. MIT, for example, has an entire /8 block allocated to it (224 addresses, about 0.39% of the whole internet address space) and various US Department of Defense agencies have several such blocks."

THANK YOU wikipedia.

I predict that...

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

in 2 to 10 years lots of things will happen. some people will die, some will be born...

aw, c'mon...

in a month europe, brasil and a few other nations will force a global netsplit, so we'll have 2 "internets". double the address space for the same price, so this prediction is not only imprecise, it's useless!

my R$0,02.

All I know is

[Hershmire]

I have my IPv4 address. Why should I worry? Perhaps I can even sell mine to the highest bidder when the shite hits the fan.

Hell, maybe the address shortage will create this crazy new "Road Warrior" world where IP addresses are a rare commodity and people have to fight each other with mad overclocked computers just to get some packets routed. And then Mel Gibson can play an ex-help-desk-guy-turned-hero whose Mac was killed by software pirates in the movie version.

All I know is, I'm training my kids how to catch sharp boomerangs.

Home routers

[bozojoe]

Perhaps this is an AskSlashdot, but who is making a decent(affordable) IPv6 router for the home? And where can one locate documents on SIP/RTP in IPv6 land?

My cold, dead hands

[BJZQ8]

Until I absolutely HAVE to switch to IPV6, I will keep my much easier-to-remember addresses. Try to remember something like these:

fe80::02d0:c1ff:fe5c:0010/10

2002:c0a8:1122::5efe:0a01:0101/48

2001:7f8:2:c01f::2

I mean, DNS goes a long way towards turning that hex into something memorable, but as a sysadmin it does NOT make my life easier. Let's reclaim some of those /8 blocks allocated to people that barely use them, first. Does E.I duPont REALLY need 0.39% of the internet address space? Does Eli Lily? That is 16777216 addresses, for what? Does Eli Lily even have 16 million adressable devices? It seems to me that we have plenty of IPV4's, it's just the allocation stinks.

Re:My cold, dead hands

[Mondoz]

I'm with you. This scares the hell out of me.
Unless my host file grows to be the size of Montana...

Do host files and IPITAV6 work together anyway?

Besides, this is going to make my "There's no place like 127.0.0.1" shirt obsolete in 10 years!
I'll have to get one with colons in it!
Jeeze...

Re:My cold, dead hands

[Just Some Guy]

Besides, this is going to make my "There's no place like 127.0.0.1" shirt obsolete in 10 years! I'll have to get one with colons in it!

Good point. Imagine the joy:

Cute girl: There's no place like... colon?
You: *sob*

Think maybe I'll pass on that one.

transport ready, management a hassle

[puzzled]

  I've been playing with IPv6 off and on since 2000. My current IPv6 plant incarnation is a Cisco 2610XM tunneling traffic from btexact (best tunnel broker if you want to play), a Cisco 1605 that is sometimes online, and a FreeBSD box. I don't have a site up this time, just taking it slow and playing, doing this mostly because the CCIE lab has started requiring IPv6.

  The transport works just fine, the application support is still a hassle. If its a barrier for me after five years of dinking and nothing left to do Cisco wise except complete my CCIE ... well ... Joe MCSE is probably going to get chewed up by it.

  Moving to IPv6 from IPv4 is as much a change in mindset as moving from IPX to IPv4 was ...

Re:Explanation requested

[gr8_phk]

I've been looking forward to a time when everyone gets at least one fixed IP address. Want to run a server of any sort? No? How about a mail server built in to your cable modem? Or do you like your email getting stored at your ISP? Then there are any number of handy p2p type apps that will benefit. VOIP comes to mind - without needing to subscribe to a directory service. Fire up gnome-meeting or whatever and enter your friends IP (well the software could remember it for you) - the same IP they have every time. Actually, fixed IPs for everyone reduces the role of the ISP to simply being a network connection like they should be. Also, it takes effort from developers to get software working through NAT, so the burden on them should be reduced.

One Giant Honking DHCP Server

[Nom du Keyboard]

To make most efficient use of the 4.3 trillion possible IPv4 addresses, all we need is one giant honking DHCP server for the world to use. Of course, the USA should run it forever.

Not any time soon.

[dills]

I have worked in the internet service business for over a decade now. I have seen a lot of things come and go, and a lot of predictions about when we would run out of IP space.

The bottom line is that the only people who realy WANT a rollout of IPv6 is Cisco. Why? Because the vast majority of their existing installed routers will not support IPv6 with anywhere near the same feature set and packet rate as those routers can handle with IPv4. Thus, IPv6 means people upgrading equipment that isn't really deficient.

Most people have no concept of:

a) How much IP space we have left.
b) How extremely inefficent we have been with a large percentage of the address space.
c) How much assigned, announced, and routed space is completely unused.
d) How much the rate of growth has flattened.
e) How wrong every prediction about when we run out of IP space has been thus far.

If you search the nanog archives, you'll see posts by myself going back many years stating essentially "Somebody tell me why we need IPv6 again?"

Do not hold your breath. We're 10-15 years away from IPv6, because it will take an even larger gross expenditure for the service providers to upgrade to support IPv6 than it did for the broadcast industry to upgrade to HDTV.

This is what industries that rely on revenue growth do when their customer growth flattens. They invent a new widget, come up with reasons why everybody needs it, market it, and hopefully everybody buys the product all over again. IPv6 is admittedly a good bit different; it was created by geeks in attempt to solve a perceived problem. However, it was siezed upon by the router vendors as a future "upgrade when growth flattens" path.

Don't buy into the hype. IPv4 is here to stay for a long time. Even when IPv6 starts to have some decent degree of market penetration, you will always find most of the devices on the net are IPv4 behind IPv6 to IPv4 NATs.

Network Operators thoughts on IPv6

[br00tus]

I went to a NANOG meeting in 1997, at which were many of the bigshots of network operation - Van Jacobsen (author of traceroute and Van Jacobsen compression, which you may recall as a checkable option on Windows 3.x's Trumpet Winsock), Paul Vixie (of BIND and MAPS fame), Kim Hubbard (of ARIN), Mark Kosters (of Network Solutions) and that type.

Anyhow, I myself was curious about if/when IPv6 would be rolled out. One of the talks was about how to deal with IPv4 space running out, and a lot of the talk revolved around such things as multiple web sites running on the same IP (which was very uncommon then) and other ways to use less address space. Some audience members gave other suggestions for conserving IP space such as ways to use Network Address Translation to limit public IP use. I would say the feeling in the hall was that this was not a problem, and that people had to go the route of IP sharing, and aside from the need for more IP sharing, everyone pretty much liked the situation as it was, which was in contrast to the prevailing attitude in the world outside the hall. One audience member rose his hand and said, "What about IPv6?" The response to this was the entire audience broke into laughter - it was the funniest thing they had heard that week. After that I began thinking about IPv6 more along the lines of projects such as MBONE (anyone remember the hooplah over that years ago?). Not that IPv6 will never be implemented, but this story that IPv6 was needed straightaway could have been written 8 years ago. I haven't seen much headway in it in the past 8 years, except for products promising they were IPv6 compatible, just in case. Not that IPv6 will never be rolled out on a large scale, but I'm not holding my breath.

NAT is about a lot more than low address reserves

[jjeffrey]

I don't think that IPv6 will see the end of NAT at all. NAT is a very quick and covenient technique for consumer DSL routers to use.

For a start, a lot of ISPs only offer one address, partly to encourage people to buy more expensive packages with multiple addresses, and NAT transparently solves that issue.

There is no reason to assume that increased avilability of addresses will cause ISPs to offer more addresses to consumers - after all if they anticipate 100,000 single PC broadband connections, they are going to find it hard to get approval for 800,000 addresses (to allow a /28), even with the increased address space. And even when you do have multiple addresses allocated, what about the users that have one more machine than usable addresses? Small company networks etc? Now matter how many addressed IPv6 supplies, we will run out eventually, and much sooner than we expect.

Also low end ADSL connections often force NAT upon a user, allowing the vendor to create a differentiator between it's commercial and domestic offerings.

In the end NAT offers security, independence of allocated IP space to available addresses, simplified network management with an excellent delineation point between vendor and consumer (the ISP dosen't have to worry about what is inside the end user network), and a reasonable form of security. It's great for a small internet connected network.

the 10.x.x.x net is mine! Get off my lawn you kids

[infonography]

I have had 10.x.x.x addresses for a long time and I am gonna keep them. You varmits need to find your own, your not taking away my net addresses. Same goes for the 192.168.X net. That's mine too, it's just my summer home.

Re:Nasty NAT hacks

[nutshell42]

I'd love to know the zombienet operators' take on the conversion to IPV6.

United Zombienet Operators issued a press release today adressing fears about increased zombie activities following a theoretical switch to "Eye P-V6". Only one line long, it reads "Please remember the codewords are 'Klaatu Verada Snugglesworth'." Asked for an official statement a spokesdead of the Army of the p0WneD just said "Urgh...MUST...EAT...BRAIN". We will continue to report this story as it develops.

Tunneling is not good enough, no multicast!

[shapr]

I'm using 6to4 right now, but it's not good enough! One of the greatest benefits of IPv6, true multicast support, does not work, since the underlying IPv4 layer does not support multicast.

Many applications could take advantage of multicast if it were available.

Some examples:
Bittorrent is a cheesy IPv4 emulation of multicast.
Game servers could multicast 'common' data and save roughly 50% of the total bandwidth used.
Mirror sites could multicast their updates. Debian, Redhat, and other mirrors would use a fraction of their current bandwidth.

If you went the bittorrent way, files could be sent via looping multicast, no more slashdotting the Id games servers.

Basically, any duplicate TCP/IP streams could be a single stream that gets replicated at the router. I want it now!

Think of it, even spam could be more efficient with multicast emails!

ipv4 is underutilized

[austad]

We had an IT person in our london office at a previous job. When I was out there, I had mentioned that they were running out of IP's for the office and we'd have to assign a new block. She pulls out her spreadsheet which is fully poplated up to something like .253, and proceeds to show me all the empty space up to .999.

Obviously we are underutilizing the ipv4 space, no one seems to use anything above .255. We should just all follow her lead and go to .999. It's like a network that goes to 11 man.

For *business* customers maybe, for a price.

[Bob_Robertson]

I recently asked my cable ISP what their IPv6 gateway was. They said, "We don't provide that service. Maybe you should upgrade to a business account."

They only offer multiple client services on business accounts, so technically I'm already in violation of their rules because of using a router and NAT even though I run no "server", just a couple of PCs.

Yes, Cisco has a vested interest in replacing all those legacy IPv4-only cigar-box routers like mine. Yes, my IP provider would love a reason to raise rates or otherwise push me into a "business" account (and thereby charge me more).

Fact is, I won't be buying a new router, I'll just recycle one PC into place as a gateway and continue to hide behind NAT because I don't care to pay business rates for home PC use.

No matter how much I dislike IPv6 because of its "second system" bloat, I have yet to find a free IPv6 tunnel provider. Yes, it's my fault, people tell me they're out there I just cannot find them.

Bob-

Re:Fossil fuels

[dustmite]

Except, they didn't say that. "They" predicted that oil production would PEAK by (twenty years from thirty years ago) - "peaking" is completely different from "running out" - "peaking" means, basically, that you're at the top point of the production curve --- it means you've used up roughly half of the oil (i.e. you are only halfway), and that you will start running out ("start" meaning to be on the downward slope of the production curve - but you still have a LOT of oil at the point when you "start running out"). You're thinking of Hubbert's estimation (which was already in 1956, actually) that global oil production would peak in 2000. It was predicted that US oil production would peak by around 1970.

See this link for more information on peak oil theory.