In a message written on Wed, May 30, 2007 at 11:03:52AM -0400, Thomas Narten wrote:
Today we think of a 5,000,000 prefix Internet as an impossibility. No hardware could ever do that. However, 20 years on I'm not sure a 5 million route Internet will be surprising to anyone.
Who is the "we" you refer to above/
A number of operators keep standing up at ARIN meetings and telling us that if the IPv6 Internet had the same number of routes as the IPv4 Internet (e.g. ~200k) that the world would end. While I'm making a bit of an assumption, if we can't support that rate, how would we ever get to 5M in 20 years?
Actually, quite a few people are worried that a 5M prefix Internet is a possibility. There are also debates (i.e., no consensus) that when that happens, routers will actually be able to cope with the load in practice.
I have no worry. 1 order of magnitude growth in 20 years is way below the rate computing power and bandwidth are increasing. Heck, I think a 50 million entry table in 20 years is well within the advances in hardware we will see in that time.
Glad to see you are thinking of an lifespan of more than just a few years. Indeed, I think many are thinking of even longer time frames.
Which is excellent. I think a 50-100 year planning window may be pushing the limits of what we can achieve, but I'm all for trying! -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org