Angry Man Without Pants

I mentioned in an earlier post that with IPv6, you could “…give out a gazillion addresses a day every day until the sun becomes a cold dark cinder and not come anywhere near running out“. You might have thought I was kidding, or at least exaggerating for dramatic effect.

I wasn’t.

Let’s do the math.

IPv6 uses 128 bit addresses, which means we have a total address pool of 2¹²⁸, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses. Yes, that’s 340 undecillion addresses. I know that’s a weird sounding number, but I’m not making it up. By comparison, our current addressing scheme, IPv4, uses 32 bit addresses, which gives us a pool of 2³², or 4,294,967,296 addresses. (I’ll bet that may be one of the first times a number just north of 4 billion has looked small…)

Those of you who are quicker of mind might be thinking – Gee, we’re running out of addresses. Does that mean there are almost 4 billion people using the Internet already? That’s half the planet!

Actually, no. There aren’t anywhere near 4 billion people on line. Due to various historical quirks and design decisions, 605,422,592 IPv4 addresses cannot be allocated for general use. Yes, 15% of the total IPv4 address space is unusable. Also, because network and broadcast addresses must be reserved for every subnet allocated (and there are a whole lot of subnets on the Internet), about 2% of the remaining addresses are also unusable. That leaves about 3.6 billion usable addresses. Remember, however, that every single piece of Internet equipment out there consumes at least one address — every router, every web server, every mail server. You get the idea. Also remember that many people use the Internet both at home and at work, from two different IP addresses. In actual fact, world wide there are only 1,668,870,408 people using the Internet (as of June 30 2009).

Kinda sucks, eh? We’re just about to exhaust a 4.2 billion IP address pool, and we’ve only got a paltry 1.6 billion people on line. That means that, on average, each person on line is consuming 2.1 IP addresses. This means that, if we’re lucky, by the time we actually run out of version 4 IP addresses we’ll have about 2 billion people on line. That’s 50% efficiency folks.

That sucks.

That also means that we’re not likely to be any more efficient with IPv6, so lets adjust our numbers for that reality. Dividing 2¹²⁸ by 2 gives us 2¹²⁷, or about 170 undecillion addresses.

Now, how long until the sun burns out and becomes a cold dark cinder? I looked around on line, and the general consensus is that ol’ Sol has about 5 billion years left before it runs out of hydrogen and expands to a red giant, burning the Earth to a crispy cinder. However, this site goes into a little more detail. The bottom line being that the sun won’t actually achieve anything approaching both cold and dark until about 50 billion years have elapsed. I did say cold dark cinder in my original post, so I’m holding myself to that.

So, if you’ve got 50 billion years to give out 170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303,715,884,105,728 addresses, how many can you give out each day? Well, 50 billion years would be 18,250,000,000,000 days. That’s 18.25 trillion. So lets divide 170 undecillion by 18.25 trillion and see what we get.

We get a big number. We get 9,322,804,573,176,396,259,270,537. We could give out just over 9 septillion addresses each day for the next 50 billion years. So, as long as we can agree that a gazillion is somewhere south of 9 septillion, my original statement stands.

Postscript: I have IPv6 service via Hurricane Electric’s tunnel broker service. Current IPv6 allocation policy means I get a whole /64 subnet allocated to me. That’s 2⁶⁴ or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses. (18.4 quintillion addresses just for me seems a bit excessive, but that’s committees for ya. Maybe some day I’ll actually have a need for each individual cell in my body to have it’s own IP address. Who knows what the future may bring.)

How does this effect my earlier calculations? Are we giving away IPv6 addresses too quickly? I did the math and, surprisingly, we’re probably OK with this policy, as we can afford to give out 505,390 /64 subnets every day for the next 50 billion years.

I think I can live with that.

Enjoy it while it lasts folks, ’cause the ole Interwebs is gonna implode in just over 700 days. I’m talking about the IP address crunch. Kind of like peak oil, we’re burning though the last 10% of the available Internet addresses at a rate that puts us firmly on track to run out in mid-to-late 2011. If you take perverse pleasure from such a thing, you can watch the addresses running out before your very eyes, rather like sand though an hourglass. If that doesn’t turn your crank, Wikipedia offers a helpful executive summary of our digital plight.

“Oh NOs!”, say all the bloggers and gamers and porn site magnates.  “The sky is falling!  What will we do?”

Well, tadpoles, IP version 6 is supposed to be the answer — a new addressing scheme to replace the aged and venerable IP version 4.  (Don’t ask what happened to version 5.  I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.)  IPv6 encompasses an address space that is so super-large that we could give out a gazillion addresses a day every day until the sun becomes a cold dark cinder and not come anywhere near running out.

“Well great!” say all the facebookers and twitter addicts.  “Lets move over to that.”

Only one problem, I say (as does Dan Bernstien). When the bright boys and girls at the IETF sat down and designed IPv6, they designed it to be a replacement for IPv4 rather than an extension to it. In a nutshell, this means that there is no easy way to get IPv6 to talk to IPv4.

So, imagine it. The day finally comes in 2011 when they run out of version 4 IP’s. The next poor sod to request an address from the IANA will get, by default, a version 6 IP, and then he will discover that he can only talk to the rest of the Internet if he uses special, clunky and slow, translation services for his connection. Think Network Address Translation times ten, with horns and a pitchfork. His connectivity will suck, and it will only get worse as more and more sites are forced to adopt IPv6 and use these same translation services to reach the majority of IPv4-only sites on the Internet. Then, on top of that, imagine all the disruption that will be caused by other sites upgrading voluntarily to IPv6 and encountering all the bugs in various vendor’s implementation of the IPv6 network stack that will only come to light under sustained real-world use. Finally, imagine all the screw-ups that will happen as the Sympaticos and Verizons of the world start deploying a network stack that most of their staff have no experience with.

Changing the Internet from IPv4 to IPv6 will be rather like trying to change the tablecloth on a table that seats 500 million diners who are all eating boiling hot soup. Even if nobody gets permanently burned or maimed, it’s still gonna be a f**king mess.

But I’ll probably make a killing as an IPv6 transition consultant.

I want my…
I want my…
I want my Eff Tee Tee…

<insert drum solo>

Now look at them yoyos (that’s the way you do it)
Got fiberoptics from their ISP
That ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Fiber to the home and version 6 IP

Now that ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Let me tell you them guys ain’t dumb
Maybe run a server in your basement closet
Maybe go to work with a click of your thumb

We got to use ole DSL modems
A couple megs for a f**kin huge fee
We got to NAT all of our connections
We got to use that older IP

That little asian with the server and the markup
All comfy sittin in his lair
That little asian he got gigabit access
That little asian he got speed to spare

We got to pay for static addressin’
A tiny subnet for a f**kin huge fee
We got no speed for file sharin’
We got a shrinkin’ pool of IPs

Lookatthat, lookatthat
I should’ve moved to Scandinavia
I should’ve moved to Asia
Where they got fiber, stickin it in every home
Man, can I have some?
And who’s there? What’s that? Video conference?
Runnin it at 30 frames in HD!
Oh, that ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Fiber to the home and version 6 IP

We got to pay for cable that’s crawlin’
Telco’s chargin’ us f**kin’ huge fees
We got a trickle that’s called our upstream
Got no bandwidth symmetry

Listen here
Now that ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Get fiberoptics from your ISP
That ain’t crawlin’ (that’s the way you do it)
Fibre to the home and version 6 IP

That ain’t crawlin’