On June 6th, World IPv6 Launch Will Change The World Forever

Second, The network portion for most enterprises is going to be a 48 bit super net (which network admins will memorize within a few days of working within a particularly company) followed by a 16 bit network portion. So, in the above example, the 48 bit super net is 2001:1868:209 and the network portion is FFFD.

So - now, when I see an IPv6 address, my eye automatically scans the network portion, much, much more quickly than I did in the IPv4 world, where we had 30 or 40 IPv4 networks, many of them with their own strange /30, /28/ /26 /25, etc.. net masks. I've been doing this for 16 years, and I still can't transparently do the math in my head for all variants of IPv4 - and even 2-3 seconds of translating /27 into 5 bits into 32 addresses into boundaries of 0,32,64,96,128,etc... can break your concentration. That problem no longer exists with IPv6. It's a 48 bit super net + 16 bit network for most enterprises.

Now, for those who aren't using the privacy elements, you also have advantage of embedding the MAC address in the address, so, for those of us who are OUI geeks, we can also identify the equipment in the address so (it's the first 24 bits of the host portion, with a bit of bit twiddling the in 7bit Local/Global spot) - and, we can also see whether proper EUI-64 expansion has taken place (in the above example, it hasn't - the proper EUI-64 expansion would be 0213:50FF:FE12:3456)

So - at a glance, I see the network, sub network, and hardware, skim over the FF:FE filler, and, the actual address - 12:3456 is simple to remember.

Finally - if you have a lot of hosts you are trying to put on a single network, you don't have to play games. We routinely put 25,000 devices on a single routed link, and we aren't concerned about rolling out 2,000 of those 25K device routed links for a particular instance. And we can (and have) rolled out a hundred instances of such configurations, with no overlap in addressing between any of them. Try that without gymnastics in the IPv4 world. In IPv6 it just follows the simple rules of 48 bit supernet + 16 bit network + 64 bit host field.

It takes a couple years (or at least it took me a couple years) - but once the brain's rewired - the additional structure is in _some way_, easier to understand and remember -but obviously this is all within a particular hardware and enterprise context. Clearly a Random 32 Bit IPv4 address is easier to memorize than a random 128 Bit IPv6 address.

Realistically the first 64 bits are going to be very ugly, so I disagree that a v6 will ever be much easier to remember than a v4 address. Especially with the 0 compression being back-ported to v4 stacks, running on the 10. network - You can ping 10.1 as 10.0.0.1 on many stacks now.

We're solving a chicken and egg problem by providing more and more chicken so eggs ought to follow.