On Sep 16, 2011, at 4:02 AM, Usman Latif wrote: > I just hope that we don't look back at this time in future and regret taking this decision because it seems that we are starting out very very liberally in our address assignment approach (potentially wasting a lot of space) and could potentially come to a similar exhaustion problem far earlier than if we had started out more conservatively with /96s or something similar. Do the math. Last I looked, we were consuming around 300 million IPv4 addresses per year. Assume we allocate 300 million IPv6 /64s per year. It would take 7,686,143,364 years to consume the 1/8th of the IPv6 address space used for global unicast. If we assume we allocate 300 million IPv6 /48s per year (as recommended by the IETF), we run out of the current global unicast block in 117,281 years. Let's assume the IPv6 Internet grows 1000 times faster than the IPv4 Internet. If we count /48s as the minimum allocation unit, we'll run out of the current global unicast block in 117 years (7,686,143 years if we count /64s). And once we consume the current global unicast block, we still have 7/8th of the address space left. If we consume the first 1/8th in my lifetime, I will think it appropriate that everyone involved in devising allocation policy be taken out back and be beaten with a stick. Under current policies, there are far more useful things to worry about than running out of IPv6 space. The real risk is that policies will change since there is no finite resource that policy wonks can't devise insane policies to consume. Regards, -drc
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