[ppml] IPv4 "Up For Grabs" proposal

[John Paul Morrison]

There's a lot of reasons for IPv6 (about 2^128 reasons), but I don't 
think it has anything to do with keeping global routing running.
Not when the two biggest vendors have routers that will scale to 
millions of routes, the biggest carriers have or will have these routers 
in their networks, and likely don't even have BGP running within their 
cores (since you don't have to with MPLS).

Routing tables are of course growing (though nowhere near at the rate of 
the early 1990's) and mid-sized carriers may be feeling the pinch. But 
hey, if you haven't upgraded your hardware or network architecture since 
Y2K, you can't complain - and I don't think they are, I think they're 
just happy that they can actually get another few years out of their kit 
by re-using as MPLS switches or aggregation routers. The fact they've 
survived in business this long means they can afford to upgrade their 
edge/peering boxes where the big routing tables are needed.

Call me a cynic, but I think it's either very optimistic or very naive 
to think that just because IPv6 has a nice hierarchical address 
allocation/aggregation plan on paper, that the IPv6 routing tables are 
going to look much different from today. You have the pressures of the 
market/business and the random entropy of global network with no central 
management that's going to churn the routing tables, punch holes in it 
and leak prefixes everywhere.

Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>   
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:ppml-bounces at arin.net]On Behalf Of
>> Kevin Kargel
>> Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2007 12:07 PM
>> To: PPML at arin.net
>> Subject: Re: [ppml] IPv4 "Up For Grabs" proposal
>>
>>
>> Why is there such a big push to drop IPv4? 
>>     
>
> Didn't you read John's posting yesterday?
>
> "If you've got a way to keep IPv4 running, and still maintain
>    the enough hierarchy to keep global routing running, then
>    it's time to enter the spotlight and share the secret.  There
>    is no doubt that its so much easier for us all to stay on IPv4
>    then to move to IPv6, we just don't know how to do it, and
>    still keep the Internet running"
>   

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