2011/06/23

Another way to look at IPv6 address space

When talking about the huge capacity of IPv6 address space, people tend to describe it in a static way like the address space is large enough to assign an IPv6 address to every sand particle or every single leave on earth. In my view, this is conceptually not correct since sand particles and leaf do not need to use TCP/IP for communications.

I like to try to think of it in a dynamic way. If 1 million /64 subnets are assigned to people or electronic devices every second, then it would take 584,942 years to make the address space completely exhausted ((2 ^64 / (365*24*3600*10^6)). This is longer than the history of human civilization. Will IPv6 addresses be completely exhausted ? No way, no need to worry.

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