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IPv6 Still Hotly Debated
inkslinger77 writes "A significant stumbling block to IPv6 adoption may be IPv4 loyalists who are keen to keep the old protocol in preference to the 'new improved' version, according to a Computerworld Australia article. The article covers the views of Cisco's senior technical leader for IPv6 technologies, Tony Hain and Geoff Huston, a senior Internet research scientist from Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (Apnic)." From the article: "Go to your favourite venture capitalist and say 'I want to be an ISP'. By the time he stops laughing and [finds you want to run] IPv6 - the discussion gets terminated. No one wants to hear this. IPv6 is well ahead of adoption in this market so everyone is deferring. No one is running IPv6, because there is no business case for it ... if we really wanted to leave a legacy to our children we'd review the crap we have today which is pretty ghastly ..."
You forget the most important feature (and the reason for failure of IPv6):
- a smooth migration path from the older versions of the protocol
Without such a migration path, nobody will ever switch.
It is like the early versions of Windows, that had to be able to run DOS applications or nobody would have made the switch.
It was dumb, just plain DUMB, to not consider this when designing IPv6.
Let's do some math.
2^128 is approximately equal to 10^38 last time I checked. I may be off by an order of magnitude or two, but who cares.
There are at least 10^79 electrons in the universe. While this is not the number of atoms, let's just be generous and say that there are only 10^77 atoms in the universe—around 100 electrons per atom.
10^38 is much less than 10^77, by 39 decimal places.
— darco
You realize that you're wrong about that, right?
10^79 is MUCH larger than 3.402 * 10^38 (which is roughly 2^128).
Better to overengineer now, then go through the hassle of expanding later.