[1st-mile-nm] IP addressing upgrade

[John Brown]

having a hard time doing the math that says 85% of the IPv4 space is 
already used up.  I'd say that 88% of the space is currently available 
for traditional internet usage, but that its not 3% away from exhaustion.

One of the first things that needs to be done is to remove the WASTE 
that is in the current allocations.  Example:

Why does the "Interop Show Network, a trade show" need 16 million IP 
addresses ???

Any reason why the Department of Social Security of UK needs 16 Million 
IP addresses ??

or the USPS ?? or duPont ?? or Eli Lily and Company ??
or Halliburton, or Ford Motor Company ?? or HP, or IBM ?? or Xerox

Thats 160 Million IP addresses alone.....

Why Comcast would need 100 million IP's is interesting.  I guess they 
haven't heard of RFC 1918.

Most of these organizations use private RFC 1918 address for their 
internal networks.

Or why does the State of New Mexico need 65,000 IP addresses ??  Most of 
which are not in use.

IPv6 requires upgrades to edge (read customer equipment), much of which 
is unable to handle the upgrade.  Think all those Qwest DSL modems made 
by actiontec and others.  They don't support IPv6 and potentially don't 
have the memory space to support the firmware updates.

Translate that into, SILLICON JUNK for the land fill.



Carroll Cagle wrote:
>  
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>  
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>  
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> 
>   *  Your number’s up*
> 
> Jun 5th 2008
>>From //The Economist// print edition
> 
> 
>     *Networking: The internet will run out of addresses unless a new
>     numbering system is adopted. After years of inaction, there are now
>     signs of progress*
> 
> NOBODY would expect a city water system designed for 1m residents to be 
> able to handle a 1,000-fold increase in population in just a few years. 
> Yet that is what the internet’s fundamental addressing scheme has had to 
> accommodate. When the network was first established there were only a 
> handful of computer centres in America. Instead of choosing a numbering 
> system that could support a few thousand or million addresses, the 
> internet’s designers foresightedly opted for one that could handle 4 
> billion. But now even that is not enough.
> 
> The addressing system, called internet protocol version 4 (IPv4), cannot 
> keep up with the flood of computers, mobile phones, hand-held gadgets, 
> games consoles and even cars and refrigerators flooding onto the 
> network. Nearly 85% of available addresses are already in use; if this 
> trend continues they will run out by 2011, the Organisation for Economic 
> Co-operation and Development, a think-tank for rich countries, warned in 
> May.
> 
>  
> 
> The shortage is not the only problem; so too is growing complexity. IPv4 
> addresses are allocated in blocks to network operators. The path to 
> reach each network is published on a global list that is constantly 
> updated. Big computers, called routers, use these entries to guide the 
> flow of traffic across the internet. But as more devices and networks 
> link to the internet, it becomes necessary to subdivide the address 
> blocks into ever-smaller units. This risks overtaxing the millions of 
> routers that handle the internet’s traffic, which must be regularly 
> upgraded to keep up. Were there no alternative to IPv4, parts of the 
> internet would eventually suffer from sporadic outages, warns Paul 
> Vixie, a network engineer who wrote the software the internet uses to 
> translate domain names (such as economist.com 
> <http://www.economist.com/>) into their underlying IPv4 addresses.
> 
> Fortunately a new system does exist, called internet protocol version 6, 
> or IPv6. (Version 5 was a short-lived experimental system.) IPv6 
> provides 3.4x10^38 (4 billion to the fourth power) addresses. This means 
> IPv6 addresses can be allocated to network operators and companies in 
> much larger quantities. It also provides a clean slate for establishing 
> new paths over the internet, reducing complexity. But switching means 
> upgrading millions of devices.
> 
> In fact, support for IPv6 is already widely available in software and 
> hardware, but it has not been used much. Only a few research 
> institutions and the American government took the IPv6 plunge early on. 
> (In America all federal agencies must be capable of using IPv6 by June 
> 30th 2008, by executive order.)
> 
> But in recent months the pace of change has picked up. In February Mr 
> Vixie and others who operate the “root nameservers”—the central 
> computers that translate domain names into internet addresses—flipped a 
> switch that means domain names can now map onto IPv6 addresses. This may 
> herald more widespread adoption of the new protocol, since it means that 
> any organisation can use IPv6 addresses with its domain names, and users 
> can access them without special rigging. Google was one of the first 
> widely used sites to take public advantage of this, setting up 
> ipv6.google.com, which maps to an IPv6 address for its home page.
> 
> Support for IPv6 is already baked into most popular operating-system 
> software. It is incorporated into Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X 10.3 
> “Panther” and later, and many flavours of Unix and Linux. But operating 
> systems are only the taps of the plumbing system: a house’s other 
> fixtures (like set-top boxes), inside pipes (broadband modems and 
> routers), and feeder pipes (backbone routers) must also be upgraded for 
> the full benefits of IPv6 to become available. In the meantime, IPv4 and 
> IPv6 can co-exist by smuggling data addressed in one form inside 
> packages addressed with the other.
> 
> The cost of the upgrade will be distributed across the internet’s many 
> users, from consumers to companies to network operators, and will mostly 
> be a gradual process. “The internet itself has grown organically—it’s 
> not possible to implement or mandate a change across the network,” says 
> Leslie Daigle, chief internet-technology officer at the Internet Society 
> <http://www.isoc.org/>, a non-profit body that supports the development 
> of internet standards. But some big network operators may have to 
> upgrade in order to accommodate more devices. Comcast, an American cable 
> operator, realised in 2005 that it might need 100m IP addresses by 2008, 
> but would be able to get perhaps one-tenth of that number of IPv4 
> addresses. It has since converted the core of its network to IPv6.
> 
> Pressure to convert entire broadband networks to IPv6, right down to 
> individual PCs, may come from an unexpected source, says Mr Vixie. 
> “First-person, shoot-’em-up gaming and peer-to-peer file sharing works 
> better if IPv6 is used,” he notes. And once consumers get a taste of the 
> benefits, he says, the adoption of IPv6 should take off dramatically.
> 
>  
> 
> 
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