Hallam-Baker, Phillip writes:
That is not a real problem.
I've lost count of the number of times I've heard _that_. Eight bits,
sixteen bits, thirty-two bits, sixty-four bits, and now 128 bits ...
they are all "good for eternity" for at least a few years, and then
suddenly they are out of space.
It is not practical to manage router tables with greater than 2^64
entries. In fact it is impractical to manage router tables with more
than 2^48 entries using technology forseable in the next ten or so
years.
It will never be possible to put an entire gigabyte of memory into a
computer. Processor speeds cannot exceed around 10 MIPS without
running into fundamental physical barriers. The maximum transmission
speed of a modem can never exceed 2400 bps.
The other side of the coin is the fact that many devices will effectively
require no more than a /128 because of the way they connect up to the
network. For example cell phones will be serviced on plans where the
subscription fee is per device. Verizon, T-mobile, cingular need no more
than one /64 each to service those networks.
No more than 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses each? Well, that's
comforting. But I suspect they will run out, anyway, for the same
reason that all address spaces run out.
Throwing away essentially the entire address space (/64) from the
beginning is not a good sign. It just demonstrates that the address
space will be exhausted in linear time, not exponential time.
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