Hallam-Baker, Phillip writes: > That is not a real problem. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard _that_. Eight bits, sixteen bits, thirty-two bits, sixty-four bits, and now 128 bits ... they are all "good for eternity" for at least a few years, and then suddenly they are out of space. > It is not practical to manage router tables with greater than 2^64 > entries. In fact it is impractical to manage router tables with more > than 2^48 entries using technology forseable in the next ten or so > years. It will never be possible to put an entire gigabyte of memory into a computer. Processor speeds cannot exceed around 10 MIPS without running into fundamental physical barriers. The maximum transmission speed of a modem can never exceed 2400 bps. > The other side of the coin is the fact that many devices will effectively > require no more than a /128 because of the way they connect up to the > network. For example cell phones will be serviced on plans where the > subscription fee is per device. Verizon, T-mobile, cingular need no more > than one /64 each to service those networks. No more than 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses each? Well, that's comforting. But I suspect they will run out, anyway, for the same reason that all address spaces run out. Throwing away essentially the entire address space (/64) from the beginning is not a good sign. It just demonstrates that the address space will be exhausted in linear time, not exponential time. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf