{"id":114,"date":"2008-07-24T12:09:11","date_gmt":"2008-07-24T10:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ofcourseimright.com\/?p=114"},"modified":"2008-07-23T08:15:59","modified_gmt":"2008-07-23T06:15:59","slug":"perhaps-i-was-right-long-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/?p=114","title":{"rendered":"Perhaps I Was Right, Long Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Source: Computer History Museum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We are running out of addresses for the current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4<\/a>.\u00a0 That protocol allows us to have 2^32 devices (about 4 billion systems minus the overhead used to aggregate devices into networks) connected to the network simultaneously, plus whatever other systems are connected via network address translators (NATs).\u00a0 In practical terms it means that the United States, Europe, and certain other countries have been able to all but saturate their markets with the Internet while developing countries have been left out in the cold.<\/p>\n

Long ago we recognized that we would eventually run out of IP addresses.\u00a0 The Internet Engineering Task Force<\/a> (IETF) began discussing this problem as far back as 1990.\u00a0 The results of those discussions was a standardization that brought us IP version 6.\u00a0 IPv6 quadrupled the address size so that there is for all practical purposes an infinite amount of space.\u00a0 The problem is IPv6’s acceptance remains very low.<\/p>\n

While IPv6 is deployed in Japan, Korea, and China, its acceptance in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere has been very poor.\u00a0 It is not the perfect standard.\u00a0 ALL it does is create a larger address space.\u00a0 It does not fix routing scalability problems and it does not make our networks more secure.\u00a0 No packet format would fix either of those problems.<\/p>\n

One of the reasons that IPv6 is not well accepted is that it requires an upgrade to the infrastructure.\u00a0 Anything that uses an IPv4 address must be taught to use an IPv6 address.\u00a0 That is an expensive proposition.\u00a0 IP addresses exist not only in the computer you’re using right now, but in the router that connects your computer, perhaps in your iPhone (if you are a Believer), in power distribution systems, medical systems, your DMV, and in military systems, just to name a few.\u00a0 Changing all of that is a pain.<\/p>\n

Back around 1990, I had posited a different approach.\u00a0 Within IPv4 there is an address block 240.0.0.0\/4 (16 \/8 blocks).\u00a0 What if one could continue to use normal IPv4 address space, but when needed, if the first four bytes of the IPv4 address space contained addresses from that reserved block, one would read the next four bytes as address as well?\u00a0 View that block, if you will, as an area code, and everyone would have one.\u00a0 That would mean that you would only need it if you were contacting someone not in your area code.\u00a0 It would also mean that eventually we would have increased the address space by the size of a factor of 2^28.\u00a0 That’s a big number, and it probably would have sufficed.<\/p>\n

Even after these addresses became prevelant, since devices would only need to use them if they were communicating outside their area code, it would mean they could be upgraded at a much slower pace.<\/p>\n

The problem that people had with the idea the time was that the cost to implement this version of variable length addressing would have been high from a performance factor.\u00a0 Today, routers used fixed length addresses and can parse them very quickly because of that.\u00a0 But today that is only because they have been optomized for today’s world.\u00a0 It might have been possible to optomized for this alternate reality, had it come to pass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are running out of addresses for the current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4.\u00a0 That protocol allows us to have 2^32 devices (about 4 billion systems minus the overhead used to aggregate devices into networks) connected to the network simultaneously, plus whatever other systems are connected via network address translators (NATs).\u00a0 In practical terms … Continue reading “Perhaps I Was Right, Long Ago”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,17,87],"tags":[88,502,55],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-complexity","category-economics","category-internet","tag-growth","tag-internet","tag-ipv6"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":123,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions\/123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}