On Aug 10, 2011, at 6:52 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > On 2011-08-11 12:45, james machado wrote: > >> what is the life expectancy of IPv6? It won't live forever and we >> can't reasonably expect it too. I understand we don't want run out of >> addresses in the next 10-40 years but what about 100? 200? 300? >> >> We will run out and our decedents will go through re-numbering again. >> The question becomes what is the life expectancy of IPv6 and does the >> allocation plan make a reasonable attempt to run out of addresses >> around the end of the expected life of IPv6. > > Well, we know that the human population will stabilise somewhere below > ten billion by around 2050. The current unicast space provides for about > 15 trillion /48s. Let's assume that the RIRs and ISPs retain their current > level of engineering common sense - i.e. the address space will begin to be > really full when there are about 25% of those /48s being routed... that makes > 3.75 trillion /48s routed for ten billion people, or 375 /48s per man, woman > and child. (Or about 25 million /64s if you prefer.)
It's not the humans that are going to soak up the address space, so it seems a little misguided to count up the humans a reference for the bounding properties on growth. That said I think 2000::/3 will last long enough, that we shouldn't be out rewriting policy anytime soon. > At that point, IANA would have to release unicast space other than 2000::/3 > and we could start again with a new allocation policy. > > I am *really* not worried about this. Other stuff, such as BGP4, will break > irrevocably long before this. We have a few problems to solve along the way. Running the current network is hard enough as it is. > Brian >
