Hacker News Reader

The problem is that the growth of the internet is up to now exponential. Even if we can get a few more years by spending inordinate amounts of money on reshuffling IPv4 addresses, it won't solve the underlying problem. It'll just delay the inevitable IPv6 deployment.

I've been reading about imminent address space exhaustion and the pending switch-over to IPv6 since I was proud of my five digit slashdot ID. It's easy to get cynical about it.

Oh, for sure, people have been warning about it for almost 15 years now (got my first tunnel in the early 2000's). But the difference now is that we've actually reached exhaustion, so I don't think it's fair to say nothing has changed.

That would unfortunately accelerate the cancer that is carrier grade NAT.

Growth in routing table sizes on core routers is a bigger problem.

IPV6 is massive in part so we can get back to sensibly slicing up subnets and keep routing tables small.

Except will that happen? ... :)

And then we might still be on IPv4 30 years from now.