On Jan 25, 2011, at 2:21 PM, Leo Bicknell wrote: > In a message written on Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 05:07:16PM -0500, > valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: >> To burn through all the /48s in 100 years, we'll have to use them up >> at the rate of 89,255 *per second*. >> >> That implies either *really* good aggregation, or your routers having enough >> CPU to handle the BGP churn caused by 90K new prefixes arriving on the >> Internet >> per second. Oh, and hot-pluggable memory, you'll need another terabyte of >> RAM >> every few hours. At that point, running out of prefixes is the *least* of >> your >> worries. > > If you were allocating individual /48's, perhaps. But see, I'm a > cable company, and I want a /48 per customer, and I have a couple > of hundred thousand per pop, so I need a /30 per pop. Oh, and I > have a few hundred pops, and I need to be able to aggreate regionally, > so I need a /24. > > By my calculations I just used 16M /48's and I did it in about 60 > seconds to write a paragraph. That's about 279,620 per second, so > I'm well above your rate. > How soon do you expect your $CABLECO to need to come back to the RIR for their next /24?
That is the meaningful number. The fact that it took you 60 seconds to use a /24 to retrofit a network that was built over decades really isn't a useful measure of utilization rate. > To be serious for a moment, the problem isn't that we don't have > enough /48's, but that humans are really bad at thinking about these > big numbers. We're going from a very constrained world with limited > aggregation (IPv4) to a world that seems very unconstrained, and > building in a lot of aggregation. Remember the very first IPv6 > addressing proposals had a fully structured address space and only > 4096 ISP's at the top of the chain! > Yep... Proposal 121 is intended to help address this problem (the humans are bad at math and big numbers problem). > If we aggregate poorly, we can absolutely blow through all the space, > stranding it in all sorts of new and interesting ways. > We may or may not blow through the space, but, we certainly can easily render the space we do blow through useless. Owen
