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We Love IPv6, We Love IPv6 NotBy Steven J. Vaughan-NicholsJanuary 30, 2004
So it was that plans began for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) with its 128-bit address space, which generates orders of magnitude more addresses than today's commonly used IPv4 32-bit 4.3 billion possible addresses. It may be possible to run out of IPv6 addresses, but we'll probably have to have interstellar colonies and a faster than light networking medium before it becomes a concern. Today, IPv6 is very popular in China and India, and is supported by such major operating systems as Microsoft's Server 2003, XP, Apple's Mac OSX, and Linux. It also has hardware support from such major network switch and route vendors as Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Foundry Networks. So why aren't Americans using it? Partly it's because Americans already have the lion's share of IPv4 addresses assigned to them. In countries like Korea, where the country is, according to the Korean Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, "the most advanced country in the world in terms of broadband Internet network connections," there simply weren't enough IPv4 addresses, 23.6 million, to go around so Korea has quickly adopted IPv6. Alternative network technologies, like network address translation (NAT) and Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) have also hindered IPv6 adoption. NAT solutions, like Microsoft's Windows Internet Connect Sharing (ICS), make it both easy to deploy TCP/IP inside of a local area network while requiring a minimal number of Internet addresses. Another problem has been that IPv6 rules forbid multiple Internet connections. In practice, this means that companies can't obtain service-provider-independent addresses. In practice, this means that if you have an IPv6 address from one backbone provider and they were knocked offline, you couldn't, as you can with IPv4, simply fallback to your backup backbone provider. Page 2: Fat packets
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