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

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

On 5/13/2011 11:30 AM, William Herrin wrote:
> 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.
>

However we are quickly depleting our energy reserves and once they
are gone we WILL see some drastic harm to a lot of things particularly
food.

I suppose 100 years from now when your hamburger looks like a garden
burger and tastes like something almost but entirely unlike real beef,
and if you get a piece of steak it's comprised of compressed plankton
and food coloring and artificial flavoring, you will be happy enough
to have something to eat.  You might not even notice since only 
extremely wealthy will be able to afford the real thing, you probably
won't have ever tasted it.  But I for one think that's a sad way for
most of the people in the world to live.

> 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.
>

Getting from here to there is the issue.

> 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.

You have it backwards, Bill, the claim that it CAN allow the rest of the
world to get online is what is specious.  To do it requires the existing
Internet give up a huge amount of public numbers and your assuming those
numbers will be given up when the reality is that they won't be.

> 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.
>

All I'll say is that yes, your right in that IN THEORY if everyone used
CGN then we would get the rest of the world online with IPv4.  But 
everyone isn't going to want to use CGN and unless they do, it won't
work to get the rest of the world online.  So in the reality that most
people live in, the claim that NAT won't work is absolutely true.

In theory if everyone agreed that war was bad and to not do it, all wars
would go away.

Ted

> Regards,
> Bill Herrin
>
>
>