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Enhanced IP: IPv4 with 64 Bit Addresses (2012) [pdf]

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Re: Enhanced IP: IPv4 with 64 Bit Addresses (2012) [pdf]

#21
post #6

What is the rational reason, if any, for bringing up things like these? The time to have this discussion would have been in like 1993 or so. Now, IPv6 is what we have, and the standards are what they are, flaws and all. The only reason I can think of is psychological: People don’t want to learn new things, so they find reasons to dislike the new thing to be able to pretend they don’t need to learn it.

I think it could be argued that the flaws in IPv6 are significant enough to result in an scenario where IPv4 is never actually retired and therefore IPv6 is never fully adopted. Its been decades, but still IPv6 is deployed (at best) as a parallel network that effectively doubles management/maintenance overhead. And at worst sites just add an IPv6 reverse proxy.

We are way past the critical mass for IPv6, it has enough momentum to become predominant "internet" in the next decade or so. Thinking that it won't happen is pretty ludicrous at this point

Re: Enhanced IP: IPv4 with 64 Bit Addresses (2012) [pdf]

#22
post #2

1992: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1347

Can't forget the SIP (Simple Internet Protocol) proposal https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8507

Of course that SIP (not my one) and Paul Francis's PIP were what got merged to become IPv6. The rationale was that 128 bit addresses allowed all the flexibility of address hierarchies from PIP within a fixed length address. With hindsight, we've never really tried to use that flexibility in the real world, but the capability is there if we need it.

Re: Enhanced IP: IPv4 with 64 Bit Addresses (2012) [pdf]

#23

i have a question, when iphone was introduced in 2007, 3G came AFTER that, then 4g and now 5g. why didn't the mobile revolution help move ipv6 adoption? i mean at the time, why wasn't 3G built on ipv6 instead of basing on ipv4? couldn't apple have forced websites to play nice with ipv6 to get more users from iphone crowd? android would have followed suit? i get the whole legacy thing but since transitioning to lets s…

iPhone 2G was released when 3G networks were becoming common among better telcos. For critical period in the early 3GPP network stack, it was niche player.

However, Mobile networks are actually biggest users of IPv6, especially if the rumour I heard about licensing being cheaper on IPv6 is true (IPv6 is also in many ways cheaper on backbone implementation).

This is why Apple recommends IPv6 accessible sites, because for many mobile networks IPv6 is faster - it avoids multiple levels of network address translation through possibly limited number of gateways.

The mobile stack itself doesn't really care for IPv4 vs IPv6 except for v6 making it much easier to build the network and having easier IP Mobility (keeping connections across moving addresses). Protocols run perfectly well on both v4 and v6 (SIP, IPsec, various other L4 and higher protocols involved)

Re: Enhanced IP: IPv4 with 64 Bit Addresses (2012) [pdf]

#24

Can someone explain to me how about a decade ago we were going to run out of IPv4 addresses in a matter of months and we needed to switch to IPv6 or else , but now we’re still using it fine?

lots of multiple-layer NATs, plus some legacy blocks got sold to cloud providers

Re: Enhanced IP: IPv4 with 64 Bit Addresses (2012) [pdf]

#25

i have a question, when iphone was introduced in 2007, 3G came AFTER that, then 4g and now 5g. why didn't the mobile revolution help move ipv6 adoption? i mean at the time, why wasn't 3G built on ipv6 instead of basing on ipv4? couldn't apple have forced websites to play nice with ipv6 to get more users from iphone crowd? android would have followed suit? i get the whole legacy thing but since transitioning to lets s…

>3G came AFTER that,

Oh my.

3G predate iPhone by a lot. There were 3G Smartphones ( Symbian ) or 3G Mobile phones years before iPhone. The first 3G network if I remember correctly "launched" before year 2000 in Japan. ( That is why some analyst suggest that iPhone was bringing the Japanese Internet to the world with touch screen. )

The 3G Spec ( Now known as 3GPP ) predate 2000. 4G was the first system moving from circuit switch to packet-based switching. As that was a lot on their plate already. Remember 4G was designed in an era where 3G was considered a flop. Billions were paid to buy spectrum and equipment but MNO for years were losing money. iPhone was the saviour to MNO as Apple managed to push ARPU instead of their death spiral.

There were talks of a completely new network stack for 5G and later 6G. I think that is still an ongoing research. But without Smartphone I am willing to bet ipv6 would have been no where nearly one tenth of today's usage.

Re: Enhanced IP: IPv4 with 64 Bit Addresses (2012) [pdf]

#26

i have a question, when iphone was introduced in 2007, 3G came AFTER that, then 4g and now 5g. why didn't the mobile revolution help move ipv6 adoption? i mean at the time, why wasn't 3G built on ipv6 instead of basing on ipv4? couldn't apple have forced websites to play nice with ipv6 to get more users from iphone crowd? android would have followed suit? i get the whole legacy thing but since transitioning to lets s…

Mobile is driving IPv6 adoption. Look at Google's IPv6 usage rate over time (https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html), and you'll notice there's a clear cyclical nature in IPv6 usage, with IPv6 peaking in weekends and troughing in weekdays (except in late December). And the COVID lockdown suddenly causes the weekday troughs to jump up 1.5 percentage points.

Re: Enhanced IP: IPv4 with 64 Bit Addresses (2012) [pdf]

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it could be argued that the flaws in IPv6 are significant enough to result in an scenario where IPv4 is never actually retired and therefore IPv6 is never fully adopted. Its been decades, but still IPv6 is deployed (at best) as a parallel network that effectively doubles management/maintenance overhead. And at worst sites just add an IPv6 reverse proxy.

What do you think are the biggest flaws in IPv6?

I believe that the comment is not a personal opinion but a reflection of the acceptance rate of IPv6. If most of the web still uses IPv4 and not using IPv6 is still defended with the "people against new things" arguments, it shows that there is at least one thing that prevents people from using it. Considering that the new kid on the block is 26 years old, I think, there is more than one.

Re: Enhanced IP: IPv4 with 64 Bit Addresses (2012) [pdf]

#28
post #4

Curious why this hasn't taken off, it seems to make so much more sense to me. Let IPv4 addresses run out. Allow parties to trade them. Slowly migrate from "one IP per box" to "one IP per net" with what looks like NAT, but can easily be traversed if you understand the extension. And once we start running out of IPs again, rinse and repeat. What am I misunderstanding / oversimplifying?

It's fun with all these proposals that so many people think they make sense, presumably including their authors.

This one has a bunch of grave problems.

1. Notice that the address space shortage is not in fact alleviated although it is shy about admitting that. Nobody who doesn't have addresses gets addresses from this scheme. Instead, everybody who already has addresses gets even more of the new addresses and the author simply hopes they'll choose to give them away to those who don't have any. You know, like that time Bobby Kotick got a huge bonus and so he gave the money to er... oh right, he just kept the money.

2. But wait, how would they give away these addresses? The author proposes they can just give away a /29 at a time. In fact, a IPv4 /29 is not routable as a global route, so this will not work. The smallest size you can carve out from the global routes is a /24 and every time you do this you're making things worse for everybody in the backbone game by increasing fragmentation, gosh they're going to be pleased about so much of this "charity".

3. OK, well maybe instead of giving away addresses, our Good Samaritans will give back their existing allocation and take only one /24 for their own network now that is plenty big enough with the new addresses. But that means they must renumber absolutely everything which is one of the things this proposal was supposed to avoid and all their services lose the ability to interoperate properly with everybody who didn't upgrade yet, getting a degraded "sort of like NAT" mode until everybody in the world upgrades. Suckers.

4. It doesn't bother fixing all the other related infrastructure. That work was done for IPv6. PKIX works for IPv6 (certificates for e.g. the DNS service 1.1.1.1 contain IPv6 addresses, no you can't just write any arbitrary text, that's not how it works at all), DNS works for IPv6, all the fancy modern stuff works for IPv6, but you need to begin over for this "Enhanced IP" and the paper neither proposes any way to avoid that, nor does it include all that work, so you're beginning very late in 2012.

Still, there have been much worse attempted solutions written up. My favourites are the ones which don't realise addresses are just bits and propose we can fix everything by writing bigger numbers like 300.400.500.600 ...

Re: Enhanced IP: IPv4 with 64 Bit Addresses (2012) [pdf]

#29

i have a question, when iphone was introduced in 2007, 3G came AFTER that, then 4g and now 5g. why didn't the mobile revolution help move ipv6 adoption? i mean at the time, why wasn't 3G built on ipv6 instead of basing on ipv4? couldn't apple have forced websites to play nice with ipv6 to get more users from iphone crowd? android would have followed suit? i get the whole legacy thing but since transitioning to lets s…

It did. Many mobile carriers use IPv6.

Re: Enhanced IP: IPv4 with 64 Bit Addresses (2012) [pdf]

#30
post #4

Curious why this hasn't taken off, it seems to make so much more sense to me. Let IPv4 addresses run out. Allow parties to trade them. Slowly migrate from "one IP per box" to "one IP per net" with what looks like NAT, but can easily be traversed if you understand the extension. And once we start running out of IPs again, rinse and repeat. What am I misunderstanding / oversimplifying?

> […] but can easily be traversed if you understand the extension.

You need new code to "understand the extension". Any old network stack will not, and will thus not be able to send packets to it… just like old code does not understand IPv6 addresses.

> What am I misunderstanding / oversimplifying?

IPv4 is 32 bits, and all the data structures are 32 bits. We are running out of 32 bit addresses. If you want more address space you have to have more than 32 bits, and it is impossible to squeeze >32 bits in a 32 bit data structures, last time I checked.

So you need to ship code on every single Internet device to update it to handle >32 bits.

We've just spent the last few years shipping new code for larger address data structures, i.e., the 128 bits of IPv6. Look how long that's taken.

And you you want to do that again?

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