Biggest mistake for IPv6: It's not backwards compatible, developers admit

[Fred Baker]

On Mar 30, 2009, at 11:47 PM, S.P.Zeidler wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Thus wrote Fred Baker (fred at cisco.com):
>
>> The issue with straight PI addressing is the issue that causes  
>> people to
>> wonder about the size of the route table. If you have never heard the
>> observation that "routing doesn't scale", I'm amazed. The thing that
>> makes routing "not scale", and so drives memory volumes and their
>> implied costs, both capex and opex, is that PI places a prefix on  
>> every
>> thing that can be routed to (now on the order of 10^6, within the  
>> decade
>> on the order of 10^7, per Marshall Eubanks' analysis at NANOG) as  
>> opposed
>> to the number of entities that require routing to (autonomous  
>> systems or
>> something like them, O(10^5)).
>
> I don't see that following, at least not with a sane PI assignment  
> policy.
> PI space being available does not mean that there would be no more  
> PA at all.

See, on that you and I agree. There is a place for PI addressing. I  
might even hazard a guess that it is similar to today's place for AS  
numbers.

Problem is, folks in that range are getting PI addressing now, and  
we're still hearing statements like

On Mar 30, 2009, at 9:48 AM, Udo Steinegger wrote:
> But for the commercial non-ISP world, at least in old Europe, one of  
> the bigger Problems is to get
> the same level of provider independence in IPv6 (read: PI address  
> space), that they are used to in the IPv4 world.
>
> As long as this is not properly addressed, then people are very  
> reluctant to move towards IPv6 and stick with IPv4 until the last day.

The alternatives are fine for "someone else", but ask anyone, and they  
want their PI. Give them that, and the IPv6 route table very quickly  
mirrors the IPv4 route table for complexity.

And hence I raise my question. There are a number of alternatives on  
the table today that give one both multihoming and ISP independence.  
Who has given them five minutes though before rejecting them out of  
hand?

And what is the outcome of that?