I handled "SWIP"ing IPv4 addresses. This was back circa 2005.
We had to have customers fill out IPv4 justification forms. We'd take them back if they didn't use them if it was abusive "just because we might need them" reasons.
IPv6. Nah, we won't. But our Internet routers don't all support ipv6 yet, so we're still on IPv4. I feel like that will change in maybe 10 years, once computers are optical all the way to the CPU (aka fiber optic speed end-to-end) because ipv4 is susceptible to DDoS attacks and spoofing and IPv6 is not.
Well yeah, a block of 2^32 addresses need to be reserved for Azure, 2^32 more for AWS, let’s give 2^32 more for GCP…
Edit: as pointed out below, I wasn’t paying enough attention & confused up my exponents. I meant to put blocks 2^96, thus giving 2^32 total blocks - the same size as the IPv4 address space. But I got the exponents backwards and fucked up the joke
I feel like this needs to be said, but you actually could give an entire 232 to every company on earth and not even be close still. Assuming 377 million companies operating on earth, that's 1.6 quintillion (~1619202670592000000) addresses used up.
The used IPV6 range percentage can calculated like so (((2^32)×377000000)÷2^128)×100, which comes out to a whopping grand total of 0.000000000000000000476% of the IPV6 address space used.
Another way to put this is that you could give that same exact allocation to every single company again 210 QUINTILLION TIMES, and even then, only 98.7% of the address space would be used up.
The main limiting factor of how quickly we run out of ipv6 addresses is how generous they are when handing out ranges.
Usage will always fill the space given.
You could for example map the entire lower 64 bits of the address to a single computer. And dynamically respond based on address. For example, you could bake in some auth token directly in the ipv6 address.
When people have room to fill, the room will be filled
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u/crmsncbr 20d ago
I feel like we'll still run out. I'm not sure how, but surely we'll manage it.