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

[William Herrin]

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 11:48 AM, Joel Jaeggli <joelja at bogus.com> wrote:
> On 5/13/11 6:30 AM, William Herrin wrote:
>> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 7:44 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> 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.
>>
>> The half billion or so who've joined the Internet behind NATs this
>> past decade seem to think differently. Who am I to disagree with them?
>> Who are you.
>
> There are enough ip's for all the nats to site behind either, it's not
> rocket science... maintaining large numbers of parallel addressing
> planes the require state-management for egress has a real cost and those
> things have nothing like the scaling properties of the stateless v4
> internet you grew up with.

Joel,

In 1971, Ehrlich predicted a maximum sustainable world population of
1.2 billion people. By 1994 Ehrlich raised the estimate to 2 billion
saying, "the present population of 5.5 billion [..] has clearly
exceeded the capacity of Earth to sustain it." Two decades later we're
closing in on 7 billion actual souls the overwhelming majority of
which are not expected to starve to death or otherwise suffer drastic
harm due to insufficient planetary carrying capacity.

Don't be an Ehrlich, a population alarmist. NAT has scalability issues
but with more than a decade's experience, we know what they are. NAT
readily and cost-effectively scales the address-to-user ratio by at
least two orders of magnitude (100x), more than enough for the 4x
increase in Internet usage minimally needed to bring the rest of the
world online.

Not rocket science indeed.

Don't get me wrong: there are lots of good reasons why we -shouldn't-
build out the Internet to 7B people using IPv4. Excellent reasons to
push for IPv6 as our growth path instead. But the claim that IPv4 use
-can't- expand via NAT is purely specious. I'm tired of hearing that
outrageous claim from people who should know better. Makes you look
like idiots and (annoyingly) distracts from the topics then under
discussion.

Regards,
Bill Herrin



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