Re: IP: Economist: Upgrading the Internet

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

>To: farber@cis.upenn.edu
>Subject: Re: IP: Economist: Upgrading the Internet
>Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 07:48:25 -0400
>From: "Mike O'Dell" <mo@ccr.org>
>
>
>gee, another nice IPv6 rah-rah piece
>
>the item such articles never mention is that IPv6 does
>*nothing* to address the fundamental problems of IPv4,
>but rather it makes them *worse*.
>
>true, IPv6 has larger addresses, but having lots more of
>a hard problem doesn't make it any easier.
>
>things that could sink the current Internet are not running
>out of addresses or lack of payments in packets, or even the
>non-existance of the mythical QoS beast, but a really fundamental
>matter: scaling.  scalability of the routing infrastructure,
>the ability to divorce abstraction boundaries from hardware
>boundaries, and the economic scalability of various product
>technologies, these will make or break future growth of the
>Internet.
>
>disclosure: i spent a lot of time working on IPv6 and was
>originally a booster, but came to the slow realization that
>we will not address these with a change to the IPv6 packet format.
>in fact, they have almost nothing to do with packet formats.
>
>another qualm I have with IPv6 is that i find it unlikely
>that deployment will be widespread before it starts running
>out of gas.  remember - the *usable* part of an IPv6 address
>is only 8 bytes long.
>
>i'll stop now, but i'm concerned that "happy talk" about
>the curative powers of IPv6 is an opiate.
>
>         -mo



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