Enhanced IP: IPv4 with 64 Bit Addresses (2012) [pdf]

Its been decades, but still IPv6 is deployed (at best) as a parallel network that effectively doubles management/maintenance overhead. And at worst sites just add an IPv6 reverse proxy.

There's a whole generation of people and experience that wasn't able to enter the discussions in 1993 and is available now. Maybe new eyes or experienced eyes would have a better solution.

The problem is clearer now than then. IPv6 makes many changes to address many problems, but maybe only address space is a real problem, because only address space seems to be motivating people to join IPv6.

Of course, the downside is not a lot of people want to be on three parallel networks, it's a lot of work. But perhaps, if that third network were more desirable and easier to implement, it could get larger coverage in a shorter amount of time than IPv6. Sort of like how TLS 1.1 never had more users than TLS 1.0, but TLS 1.2 overtook them both.

You would need real consensus and commitment from lastmile ISPs, backbone ISPs, networking vendors, OS vendors, CPE vendors, mobile networks, content providers, etc, though and that's tough. The consensus on IPv6 seems to be clearly, we'll do it eventually, when we really have to (which for some networks was 2012, and some networks is now, and some networks seems to be never)

As a user you lose some visibility in terms of what routers your packet traverses, but the same can be said about MPLS tunnels/IPSec tunnels where your packet magically seems to have gone just 1 hop instead of the 10 it actually took.

As a result many home and mobile users only get personal IPv6 addresses with IPv4 connections being tunneled over shared addresses.

You're saying CGNAT is fine?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT

That having to NAT on your home Linksys/Asus and then getting NATed again by your ISP is fine? If you want to allow a connection to your PC or gaming system, how do you hole punch a double-NAT exactly?

Which means that, as you have to start over in a non-compatible manner, you might as well use the opportunity to make other improvements.

Edit: I didn’t read much into detail, assuming that the hosts that do not understand this extension could just ignore the option. If the scheme doesn’t work in this case as sibling comment suggests, then yeah that’s a problem indeed :)

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7126

This one has a bunch of grave problems.

1. Notice that the address space shortage is not in fact alleviated although it is shy about admitting that. Nobody who doesn't have addresses gets addresses from this scheme. Instead, everybody who already has addresses gets even more of the new addresses and the author simply hopes they'll choose to give them away to those who don't have any. You know, like that time Bobby Kotick got a huge bonus and so he gave the money to er... oh right, he just kept the money.

2. But wait, how would they give away these addresses? The author proposes they can just give away a /29 at a time. In fact, a IPv4 /29 is not routable as a global route, so this will not work. The smallest size you can carve out from the global routes is a /24 and every time you do this you're making things worse for everybody in the backbone game by increasing fragmentation, gosh they're going to be pleased about so much of this "charity".

3. OK, well maybe instead of giving away addresses, our Good Samaritans will give back their existing allocation and take only one /24 for their own network now that is plenty big enough with the new addresses. But that means they must renumber absolutely everything which is one of the things this proposal was supposed to avoid and all their services lose the ability to interoperate properly with everybody who didn't upgrade yet, getting a degraded "sort of like NAT" mode until everybody in the world upgrades. Suckers.

4. It doesn't bother fixing all the other related infrastructure. That work was done for IPv6. PKIX works for IPv6 (certificates for e.g. the DNS service 1.1.1.1 contain IPv6 addresses, no you can't just write any arbitrary text, that's not how it works at all), DNS works for IPv6, all the fancy modern stuff works for IPv6, but you need to begin over for this "Enhanced IP" and the paper neither proposes any way to avoid that, nor does it include all that work, so you're beginning very late in 2012.

Still, there have been much worse attempted solutions written up. My favourites are the ones which don't realise addresses are just bits and propose we can fix everything by writing bigger numbers like 300.400.500.600 ...

You need new code to "understand the extension". Any old network stack will not, and will thus not be able to send packets to it… just like old code does not understand IPv6 addresses.

> What am I misunderstanding / oversimplifying?

IPv4 is 32 bits, and all the data structures are 32 bits. We are running out of 32 bit addresses. If you want more address space you have to have more than 32 bits, and it is impossible to squeeze >32 bits in a 32 bit data structures, last time I checked.

So you need to ship code on every single Internet device to update it to handle >32 bits.

We've just spent the last few years shipping new code for larger address data structures, i.e., the 128 bits of IPv6. Look how long that's taken.

And you you want to do that again?

However, Mobile networks are actually biggest users of IPv6, especially if the rumour I heard about licensing being cheaper on IPv6 is true (IPv6 is also in many ways cheaper on backbone implementation).

This is why Apple recommends IPv6 accessible sites, because for many mobile networks IPv6 is faster - it avoids multiple levels of network address translation through possibly limited number of gateways.

The mobile stack itself doesn't really care for IPv4 vs IPv6 except for v6 making it much easier to build the network and having easier IP Mobility (keeping connections across moving addresses). Protocols run perfectly well on both v4 and v6 (SIP, IPsec, various other L4 and higher protocols involved)

Oh my.

3G predate iPhone by a lot. There were 3G Smartphones ( Symbian ) or 3G Mobile phones years before iPhone. The first 3G network if I remember correctly "launched" before year 2000 in Japan. ( That is why some analyst suggest that iPhone was bringing the Japanese Internet to the world with touch screen. )

The 3G Spec ( Now known as 3GPP ) predate 2000. 4G was the first system moving from circuit switch to packet-based switching. As that was a lot on their plate already. Remember 4G was designed in an era where 3G was considered a flop. Billions were paid to buy spectrum and equipment but MNO for years were losing money. iPhone was the saviour to MNO as Apple managed to push ARPU instead of their death spiral.

There were talks of a completely new network stack for 5G and later 6G. I think that is still an ongoing research. But without Smartphone I am willing to bet ipv6 would have been no where nearly one tenth of today's usage.