[arin-discuss] [arin-announce] Community Consultation: Future Direction for the ARIN Fee Schedule

[Morizot Timothy S]

Peter//MetanetHosting.com wrote:
> True,
>
> I think it unwise to assume there will be no shortage or hoarding.
> However difficult it is to foresee, the next 25 years may experience
> radical technological breakthroughs which may once again limit
> IPv6 availability and put us squarely back where we are with IPv4.

That actually represents a failure to grasp the scope of the mathematics involved. My non-IT physics/math son grasped it immediately when I described the problem with IPv4 and the solution.  In fact, his first question when I described the solution was why they didn't go with 2^64 instead of 2^128 since the latter represents more than the number of particles in some very large set I have to confess I don't specifically recall. When I explained it's actually 2^64 networks each capable of having up to 2^64 hosts so you never have to worry about running out of networks or space on an individual network, that made perfect sense to him.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if some radical (or perhaps even incremental) technological breakthroughs made IPv6 obsolete for some reason sometime in the next 25-50 years, but it won't be because we're running out of address space.

Scott