[arin-ppml] Straw Poll

[Fred Baker]

On Oct 6, 2009, at 10:56 AM, Kevin Kargel wrote:

> My question here is whether even a /0 of 32 bit space is enough to  
> service a global scope of the plan with unique addresses.

I would tend to think not: if you assume that every person on the  
planet will have a smart grid device (if not the meter, then the  
refrigerator), there are more people on the planet than there are IPv4  
addresses. There are also - of more practical importance from my  
perspective - requirements for O(5000) homes in a single AMI subnet.  
To my way of thinking, IPv6 is better suited from a variety of  
viewpoints.

An important one is that of one of the electric utilities primary  
think tanks: EPRI.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1673.txt
1673 Electric Power Research Institute Comments on IPng. R. Skelton.
      August 1994. (Format: TXT=7476 bytes) (Status: INFORMATIONAL)

The author of that really preferred OSI addressing.
> 2. Basic Requirements.
>  - Scaleability
> The addressing scheme must have essentially an unlimited address  
> space to encompass an arbitrarily large number of information  
> objects. Specifically it must solve the fundamental limitations of  
> 32 bit formats, a format for 20 octets and above is considered  
> suitable.

His argument doesn't get me to 20 octets, but it certainly gets me  
above four.