[ppml] Policy Proposal: Decreasing Exponential Rationing ofIPv4 IP Addresses

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> Funny how people managed to live in homes for thousands of 
> years without oil heat...

Yes they did, but have you ever been in one of those homes? I have been
in two of them, in the Ural mountains of Russia in winter when the
outside temperature rose up to minus 30 degrees in the daytime. These
are small square boxes made of thick logs covered with a thick layer of
plaster inside and out. The walls are roughly one and a half feet thick
(50 cm). The kitchen is dominated by a huge clay platform that is a
combination woodstove, bread oven and hypocaust. The master bed is on
top of the platform behind the chimney, roughly in the center of the
house. There are probably millions of Russians and Tatars and other
Siberians living like this today. Most of them do have electricity and
in larger towns they also have gas. But if the gas and electric are cut
off, life goes on not much different from a thousand years ago.

When resources are scarce, people can make do and go to great efforts to
live off of what is available. And that is what we have done with IPv4
and NAT and DHCP etc. But we could live in an IPv6 world instead where
everyone has enough subnet room in their personal home allocation to
carve off 4 or 5 subnets for an in-law apartment.

--Michael Dillon