nanog mailing list archives
Re: IPv6 Ignorance
From: Matthew Kaufman <matthew () matthew at>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2012 08:18:52 -0700
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
Current thread:
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance, (continued)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Owen DeLong (Sep 17)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Nick Hilliard (Sep 17)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Adrian Bool (Sep 17)
- RE: IPv6 Ignorance Mike Simkins (Sep 17)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Adrian Bool (Sep 17)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance joel jaeggli (Sep 17)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Blake Dunlap (Sep 17)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Mark Blackman (Sep 17)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Owen DeLong (Sep 17)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Owen DeLong (Sep 17)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Matthew Kaufman (Sep 17)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Owen DeLong (Sep 17)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Eugen Leitl (Sep 17)
- RE: IPv6 Ignorance Blake Pfankuch (Sep 17)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Owen DeLong (Sep 17)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance joel jaeggli (Sep 17)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Owen DeLong (Sep 17)
- RE: IPv6 Ignorance Beeman, Davis (Sep 18)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Dan Wood (Sep 18)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Jason Baugher (Sep 18)
- Re: IPv6 Ignorance Cutler James R (Sep 18)