[ppml] IPv6>>32

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

> People
> need a way to switch providers without concern that they will have to 
change
> their subnet plan. 

Some people will switch providers on a daily basis. Maybe even more than
once per day. Consider a Vehicle Area Network installed in a refrigerated
van filled with crates of vegetables. Each vegetable crate has it's own 
subnet. The refrigeration systems have several subnets for motors, motor
control, coolant monitoring, circulation control. Then there are the 
various
normal systems found in any vehicle, the driver's own Personal Area 
Network
and his links into the corporate VPN. This will be a complex subnet plan
more complex than found in most small businesses today. This VAN needs to
be able to roam from one provider to another without resubnetting and in
the evening when it is parked in the company facility, again, it needs to
fit in as a node in the vast corporate network.

> In any case it is wrong for an ISP to assume that the device at the end 
of a
> particular link is an endpoint handset. 

I think this is the fundamental challenge of networking in this century.
The current IPv4 network is rather small and can often be visualized as
a hierarchy from Tier1 to provider core to pop to end site. Today this
is a workable simplification in many instances. But the small IPv4 
networks
common today will be dwarfed by the scale and complexity of networks 50
years from now. In 50 years, it will be difficult to identify end-sites
because many traditional end-sites will become gateways to other networks 
at least part of the time.

> FUD simply states that we are wasting space because we are allocating 
more
> than we have in the past.

I think we are allocating less than in the past. In IPv4 we give 
a new ISP 20 bits of address space. In IPv6 we give him 32 bits
in his prefix. Therefore the IPv6 ISP is getting a much smaller
fraction of the total address space than the IPv4 ISP. These people
who talk about waste simply do not understand IPv6 fundamentals.
Either that, or their definition of "waste" doesn't match what
I read in the dictionary.

--Michael Dillon