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Military Pressuring Vendors On IPv6
netbuzz writes "US military officials are threatening IT suppliers with the loss of military business if they don't use their own wares to start deploying IPv6 on their corporate networks and public-facing Web services immediately. 'We are pressing our vendors in any way we can,' says Ron Broersma, DREN Chief Engineer and a Network Security Manager for the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. 'We are competing one off against another. If they want to sell to us, we're asking them: Are you using IPv6 features in your own products on your corporate networks? Is your public Web site IPv6 enabled? We've been doing this to all of the vendors.'"
2^128 unique address. I don't think we'll be exhausting them any time soon. That's like each person on earth have access to roughly 10^38 unique address.
I'll try...
I have no idea of any meaningful measurement of Library of Congress for comparison, sorry.
It takes 39 digits to define the number of addresses in IPv6. Only 10 digits to define the number of addresses in IPv4.
If you treat each address as a unit of mass and consider IPv4 to have mass equivalent of 7 liters of water, then, IPv6 would have mass equivalent roughly to Earth. (The whole earth, including all the oceans, lakes, land masses, people, buildings, etc.)
In IPv4, there are more than 1.5 people alive today for every address.
In IPv6, there are 50,041,524,547,196,832,862,260,971,681 addresses for each person alive today.
Or, perhaps consider the following:
The US public debt is 13,848,000.000,000. If IP addresses were pennies, we would need 3,462 IPv4 internets to pay it off. The IPv6 address space, converted to pennies, OTOH, would pay the public debt more than 24,572,672,365,752,344,270,896,491 times. /64 network worth of pennies, please ;-)
(If anyone wants to send me even a single IPv6
email me for contact information.)
Hope that helps.