[156393] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: IPv6 Ignorance
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matthew Kaufman)
Mon Sep 17 11:19:49 2012
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2012 08:18:52 -0700
From: Matthew Kaufman <matthew@matthew.at>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <50571759.5050704@illuminati.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 9/17/2012 5:28 AM, John Mitchell wrote:
> I think people forget how humongous the v6 space is...
>
> Remember that the address space is 2^128 (or
> 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses) to put
> the in perspective (and a great sample that explained to me how large
> it was, you will still get 667 quadrillion address per square
> millimetre of the Earth’s Surface.
Yes. But figure an average subnet has, what, maybe 5 hosts on it? (Sure,
there's some bigger ones, but a whole lot of "my router, my PC, and
maybe my printer" networks too.
So even if you could use all the top bits (which you can't, as many
combinations are reserved), that's more like 92,233,720,368,547,758,080.
And if you lop off the top three bits and just count the space currently
assigned to Global Unicast, that's 11,529,215,046,068,469,760. Which is
0.02 per square mm of the earth's surface. Or just over 2 per square
centimeter.
Powers of two get big fast... but they get small fast too.
Matthew Kaufman
