[arin-ppml] Just a reminder of some quick mathematics for IPv4 that shows the long term impossibility of it

[Owen DeLong]

On May 12, 2011, at 9:27 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

> On 5/12/2011 4:44 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
>> 
>> On May 12, 2011, at 3:46 PM, William Herrin wrote:
>> 
>>> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 4:23 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt<tedm at ipinc.net>  wrote:
>>>> So how exactly do we get the other 4.5 billion people on the Internet
>>>> using IPv4?
>>> 
>>> Survey says: NAT.
>>> 
>> That does not put the other 4.5 billion people on the internet.
> 
> I think he was making a joke, Owen.  Meaning that the "average person"
> if they are told a little bit about IPv4 runout they think "NAT can handle it"
> 
I doubt he was joking. Bill is a rather strong proponent of the idea that
NAT works just fine. He even seems to believe it is a security feature.

>> That might put
>> the other 4.5 billion people onto a carefully controlled subset of the internet.
>> I do not advocate inflicting this damage on what would become the vast
>> majority of internet users. Rather, I think it is vastly better to deploy them
>> with IPv6 and let the rest of the internet catch up.
>> 
> 
> You cannot grow the Internet to be 3 times larger than it is now
> on RFC1918 numbers.  The problem is the average person thinks of an
> IP address like a telephone number.  They see the phone companies
> throw phone numbers around willy nilly.  They don't understand that
> the two systems are completely different.
> 
I think we're saying the same thing, though I'm not entirely convinced
about your reasoning above.

>>> 
>>>> But, don't let something like mathematics bog your day down!
>>> 
>>> Or technology either it would seem.
>>> 
>> One man's "technology" is another man's nightmare.
>> 
> 
> I think he meant that from a technological standpoint the proposition
> is impossible.
> 
No, he was claiming that the technology (NAT) would make it possible.
Bill and I have a long history of debating the lack of merit of NAT.

Owen