Re: IPv6 adoption

[Drake Diedrich <Drake.Diedrich@anu.edu.au>]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2000 at 11:44:53PM -0600, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
> 
> Remember, IPV6 addresses are 128 bits because a number of members of
> the IPv6 working group didn't understand that 64 bits was significantly
> more than twice the number of addresses than 32 bits.
> 

   I believe the reason for 128 bits vs. 64 had more to do with routing. 
With very large address spaces it's easier to dynamically assign parts of
the network address to group similarly connected networks into one larger
network, and to maintain redirections for networks that have had their
connectivity change recently.
   For comparison, ATM uses even longer 192 bit addresses, but being
connection oriented and fully switched throughout allows them to avoid
adding 192 bits to every 53 byte cell (source and destination adresses would
be almost the whole thing).   Phone connections usually survive fairly
dramatic outages with the end users totally oblivious.   IPv4's address
space has been too small to route robustly from almost day one.
   IPv6 will probably sneak into the infrastructure as it's needed.  Most of
us use ATM every day, in the IP backbone and in our telephones.  We just
don't see it at the endpoints unless there's a really good reason.  Having
IPv6 support in Debian means we're more likely to end up running at the
v4/v6 boundary (eg. a squid forwarding requests from v4 clients over a
hierarchy on the 6bone, to both v4 and v6 servers).
   Maybe Internet phone or mobile IP will be the killer app that moves IPv6
onto the end user, like Netscape was for IPv4.