That sure sounds like a lot. But "billions" is less than a /64. Try "sextillions" (/56) or "septillions" (/48). Of course, when the denominator is "undecillions", it becomes clear that this is actually a non-issue.
A reasonable sized /32 allocation would have allowed for giving every ATM they operate worldwide its own globally routable /48.
Those fanboys going "we'll never run out of 2^128 IPs" are being disingenuous when about 2^59 of them have been burnt straight away (I'd guess most subnets have less than 30 devices)
2^64 subnets is a reasonable number, but when they are handed out like candy that number dwindles quickly. ARIN is allocating the equivalent of a /15 every year. That's fine if it's a constant allocation, there's 100,000 years worth, but if that rate grows, the space will be eaten in a matter of a few decades.
* Sparse networks. 64 bits is too big to feasibly do a brute force scan on, which reduces how often servers get exploited by random network attacks. * SEND secures NDP by using those 64 bits for a public key
Reducing network sizes to 12 bits would destroy both advantages.
Snark aside, very much agreed, and I don't like that they got away with it. It's precisely with the mindset of "we'll have enough" that companies like ford have a /8 or the DoD has more /8s that we can count. And with this mindset we'll run out of IPv6 the same we ran out of IPv4.
You're not ment to utilize every address assigned to you. Trying to do so will always lead you to situations where you messed up and need to renumerate.
The more one digs, the more egregious it seems. If the NETIFY webpage is accurate, it shows that Capital One already had "/32" and "/36" blocks, and yet they also got "/16" : https://www.netify.ai/resources/networks/capital-one
And if I'm reading the ARIN fees correctly, it only costs $4000 annually for a "/16" allocation: https://www.arin.net/resources/fees/fee_schedule/
There doesn't seem to be any public transparency of the approval process to explain how a non-ISP company could justify a "/16" block so it just leaves everybody guessing.
John Sweeting from ARIN only confirmed that the "/16" was allocated to Capital One according to policy but he didn't elaborate on the rationale: https://www.mail-archive.com/arin-tech-discuss@arin.net/msg0...
Example reddit discussion : https://old.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/17yuqvp/til_capital_o...
For better or worse, you're not; that's for IPv4 /16. For IPv6 /16, it'd be the X-Large service category, so $16,000/year.
Yeah, that's not okay. Either the price needs to go up a lot or they need to include factors other than money in the allocation criteria.
They already do, and simply being able to pay the fee does nothing to qualify you for an allocation: https://www.arin.net/participate/policy/nrpm/#6-ipv6
At least, in theory. I'm not going to attempt to defend the Capital One allocation.
That's an interesting idea for how they justified it. There might be something like 4 billion active credit/debit cards in the US (but they probably weren't all issued by Capital One).
The up to 42 deep hierarchy of routing levels built into IPv9 must
have been one of the key features for its wide deployment. [...]
As yet, no requirement has been found for levels 40-42, with level 39
still being used for experimental interrogation of atomic structure
of components where required.
That subnet is large enough to then assign an IP address to every individual atom in that grain of sand.
For comparison, if we wanted to assign every living person on Earth a grain of sand, we would only need a few cubic feet of it (less than 1 cubic meter).
Of course we'd all be paperclips long before they need to worry about networking
As parent said, I'm sure people made the exact same argument about IPv4 back in the day, but comparing it to something else.
And when IPv16 finally appears in the future, people will yet again make exactly the same argument.
You're ignoring the sheer scale of this question. We don't have enough raw materials on this planet, or likely in the observable universe, to produce enough devices that would consume that many IPs.
We could colonize 1 billion planets.
Each of those planets could have 100 billion people.
Each of those 100 billion people could own 1 billion "things" that could be considered "networked devices".
Each of those "things" could consume 1 billion IPs.
We could have all that, and we would still have 70% of the IPv6 space left.
> The decision to put a 32-bit address space on there was the result of a year’s battle among a bunch of engineers who couldn’t make up their minds about 32, 128 or variable length. And after a year of fighting I said — I’m now at ARPA, I’m running the program, I’m paying for this stuff and using American tax dollars — and I wanted some progress because we didn’t know if this is going to work. So I said 32 bits, it is enough for an experiment, it is 4.3 billion terminations — even the defense department doesn’t need 4.3 billion of anything and it couldn’t afford to buy 4.3 billion edge devices to do a test anyway. So at the time I thought we were doing a experiment to prove the technology and that if it worked we’d have an opportunity to do a production version of it. Well — [laughter] — it just escaped! — it got out and people started to use it and then it became a commercial thing.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZo69JQoLb8&t=816s
They were contemplating 128 bits addresses all the way back then, but settled on 32 bits as a mere proof of concept that got out of hand.
The original numbering plan for IP was that each network number became a /8. Which is how we miraculously ended up with 10/8, because network 10 was ARPANET itself, so 'flag day' left 10/8 vacant.
But back to the point at hand. IP itself is RFC 791, September 1981, nice and famous. The addition of classful networking because 255 network numbers wasn't going to last long, was RFC 790.
The first workaround for IP exhaustion was published before IP. It's been a Known Issue since day negative-one.