Re: IPv6 mistakes, was: Re: Looking for an IPv6 naysayer...

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch () muada com>]

On 17 feb 2011, at 17:35, George Bonser wrote:

> Considering v4 is likely to be around for another decade or two, getting
> Class E into general use seems easy enough to do.

You really think people will be communicating over the public internet using IPv4 in 2031?

It will take a long time before the first people are going to turn off IPv4, but once that starts there will be no 
stopping it and IPv4 will be gone very, very quickly.

(Of course there will be legacy stuff, just like some people are still running IPX or AppleTalk today. I'm talking 
about the public internet here.)

Today people are complaining how annoying it is to have to learn new things to be able to run IPv6, but that doesn't 
compare to how annoying it is to have to learn OLD things to keep running a protocol that is way past its sell by date. 
I still need to teach class A/B/C despite the fact that CIDR is old enough to drink in most countries because without 
knowing that you can't configure a Cisco router. That's annoying now. Think about how insane that will be in the 2020s 
when the notion of requesting IPv4 addresses from an RIR is ancient history and young people don't know any better than 
having a /64 on every LAN that is big enough to connect all ethernet NICs ever made.

Speaking of class E: this address space could be usable for NAT64 translators. That way, only servers and routers need 
to be upgraded to work with class E, not CPEs or client OSes.