Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2014/021714-ipv4-278692.html

by kenrose • 12 years ago

112 146 12 years ago

gtirloni2• 12 years ago

I have noticed a change in approach, even if unconscious. Instead of predicting doom, they have started to celebrate small victories (like Google IPv6 traffic passing 3%). I think that's natural when the size of this undertaking is so great.

Unfortunately IPv6 adoption is not a matter of just providing access lanes to this wonderful new technology. IP permeates too much of the infrastructure, tooling, etc. How could it not? Some companies might find the cost/ROI of working around IPv4 limited address space to be less than migrating to IPv6.

einhverfr5• 12 years ago

There are also tons of little things. Here in Indonesia, I know my ISP (FirstMedia) runs IPv6 internally on some things. Their web sites are available over IPv6. But I can't connect from home over IPv6. Supposedly the consumer hardware on my side supports IPv6 but it doesn't do so very well and I haven't bothered trying directly through the cable modem yet.

agwa• 12 years ago

This is an extremely US-centric article. ARIN was never in as dire straits as the other RIRs. In Europe and Asia the situation is much worse. For example, lack of IPv4 addresses delayed DigitalOcean's growth in Amsterdam, and carrier-grade NAT is already being used by some consumer ISPs in Europe and Asia.

sp332• 12 years ago

The article also ignores the fact that running dual-stack (like Comcast) requires just as many IPv4 addresses as before. Even after ISPs get IPv6 working flawlessly, their customers still need to access IPv4 websites, and that means CGNAT or some messy kind of tunneling will still be necessary.

IgorPartola4• 12 years ago

Then don't run dual stack. Run native IPv6 and NAT64/DNS64. Or in DO's case make IPv4 access optional for smaller droplets and charge $1/month extra for it. In reality things like DB servers or backend app servers don't need public IPv4 addresses, and this would speed up IPv6 adoption considerably.

diminoten4• 12 years ago

ARIN requires the demonstration of need before it allocates space. RIPE does not, it's just first come, first serve. I'm not sure about APNIC or LACNIC, and since AFRINIC is modeled heavily off of ARIN, I think they require need too, but things are so fucked over there I have no idea if that policy transferred.

jlgaddis3• 12 years ago

ARIN requires justification as well.

-- https://www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html

neals• 12 years ago

A peak into the future of peak-oil. Let's see how this plays out and learn from it.

Zikes2• 12 years ago

If I could NAT my gas tank the world would be a very different place.

ch4ch4• 12 years ago

i.e. ride the bus?

kbutler• 12 years ago

If only the available IPv4 address space were growing as rapidly as the available oil...

1960s: Peak oil 1995 @12.5 billion barrels/year.

Today: Peak oil 2035, current production is over 2.5X the previously predicted peak.

There's also an increasing expectation that rather than "peak oil" being a supply-side constraint, it will be a demand-side constraint as more efficient use and alternative energy sources become available - that is, we will never "run out".

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130710114436.ht...

baq3• 12 years ago

peak oil is really about EROI; we'll never run out, but there are reservoirs that aren't going to be produced because it doesn't make economic/energetic sense to do so.

angersock• 12 years ago

What...I don't even...what does that even mean?

Don't be silly.

chimeracoder• 12 years ago

This article is focused on the US, a country which was never really going to feel the brunt of the IPv4 crunch.

For an example of a real victim, look at Qatar, a country which only has a single IP address for the entire country (everyone sits behind a NAT): https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Qatari_proxy_IP_address_tempora... [0]

Whenever someone from Qatar decides to vandalize Wikipedia, Wikipedia is forced (temporarily) to block the entire country from accessing Wikipedia. This has an adverse impact on the rest of the country.

Non-Qatari Wikipedia users also suffer, because Wikipedia makes those blocks very temporary (since they are effectively shutting off an entire country), which makes it easy for those vandals to regain access to Wikipedia quickly.

[0] This sad state of affairs is not solely due to IPv4 (incompetent/apathetic network administrators are also at fault), but it's a contributing factor.

shawabawa3• 12 years ago

Whenever someone from Qatar decides to vandalize Wikipedia, Wikipedia is forced (temporarily) to block the entire country from accessing Wikipedia

Can't they just block IPs from editing? Seems like that would solve the problem

insertnickname• 12 years ago

That's what they do. But this still prevents everyone in Qatar (who does not have an IP ban exception) from editing.

philwelch• 12 years ago

They can and probably do.

Udo• 12 years ago

To be fair, Qatar's situation has nothing to do with the IPv4 crisis. It's a country-wide firewall/proxy that exists due to political reasons and it wouldn't behave any differently if it was implemented in IPv6.

davidw3• 12 years ago

Exactly - Qatar is not exactly some poor country. They have the cash to buy all the IP's they want, should they so choose.

okasaki• 12 years ago

Why not use something else to ban users in this case? For example the user agent, browser window resolution, installed fonts, etc.

Buge2• 12 years ago

Those can all be changed. A determined spammer could make a bot that automatically changes them.

danielweber2• 12 years ago

You act like Wikipedia has no agency in this matter and is simply forced to block Qatar's IP address from editing.

Wikipedia has choices, and it's choosing something well within its rights to prevent abuse of its property, but they could choose to do something different.

forgottenpass• 12 years ago

I think you're getting distracted by property for no real reason.

Given the type of website Wikipedia aims to be, it's hard for them to give Qataris the service they want to deliver.

gpvos• 12 years ago

I am curious. Which other criterion than IP address could they use to prevent anonymous users from Qatar from vandalizing?

(I guess one method could be to force everyone from this IP address to create an account, but that goes against their openness/ease-of-editing-for-new-or-casual-users principle.)

diminoten4• 12 years ago

What is the IP address, then?

I got lots of different answers while googling. Is it still a range (they rotate through their allocated space), or do my googling skills just stink?

ctrl_freak• 12 years ago

This is probably the address in question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:82.148.97.69/header

kordless4• 12 years ago

I can assure you the US is feeling the brunt of the IPv4 crunch. I'm building something that needs massive amounts of public address space and I simply can't get IPv4 addresses for it. I've asked multiple providers. You are LUCKY if you can get a /28 at this point. Hoarding. Rolling with IPv6 instead.

I get you have an interest in the Qatar/Wikipedia situation, but it seems to be unlikely due to IP address resource management issues. Probably more like tyrannical control, if anything.

jlgaddis3• 12 years ago

I know of multiple providers who have gotten allocations in the last month (up to /19) and will be requesting another one myself in the near future. ARIN has plenty of IPs.

lflux2• 12 years ago

I had absolutely no problem getting a /27 from my ISP here in Sweden the other week.

pbhjpbhj• 12 years ago

I'm building something that needs massive amounts of public address space //

You piqued my interest, what?

icedchai• 12 years ago

Then there are guys like me. I have a /24 routed to my home (pre-ARIN legacy space registered in the early 90's!)

finnh• 12 years ago

I just went shopping for vendors at my San Francisco datacenter and had no problem replicating my current /26 + /27. Some vendors offered a /24, even.

yeukhon• 12 years ago

This is because, as you may have found out already, ARIN is out of fresh IPv4. https://www.arin.net/knowledge/v4-v6.html

You may have better luck with other continents. Try AfraNIC.

AshleysBrain• 12 years ago

How could NAT work for an entire country of people behind one IP? My understanding was that NAT allows communication over separate ports, so for example a router with ip 123.45.67.89 can run three clients by sending their data over ports 50000, 50001 and 50002. How does this work when more than 65k people are trying to connect? There don't seem to be enough ports for that to be possible.

mmastrac• 12 years ago

This is a dramatic simplification, but TCP uses the quadruplet of source IP/source port/dest IP/dest port as a session identifier, so you can potentially get 2 billion people using one outgoing port to 2 billion different servers with different IPs in the absolute best case (which wouldn't happen, of course).

bartwe• 12 years ago

that limit only happens when 65k people try to use the same remote ip, otherwise the distinction can still be made for tcp streams.

nwh• 12 years ago

Qatar has a huge allocation of unused IP addresses. It's a matter of choice that their censorship proxy only exposes one IP address on the internet side.

mandeepj• 12 years ago

I am surprised to see a comment which got everything wrong to be top voted.

Is this the state of HN now?

Waiting for down votes for myself now.......

computator• 12 years ago

You make a case why IPv6 is good for traceability of users.

On the other hand, IPv4 and NAT are a boon to privacy. We'd be exquisitely trackable if NAT didn't exist and every single device had a unique, unchangeable, life-long IP address. That's more-or-less how IP addresses were supposed to behave and IPv6 brings that back.

We need to be thankful for NAT for the privacy it brought by accident.

warp• 12 years ago

IPv6 only brings that back if you want it too. By default Windows, OS X and iOS have privacy extensions enabled which will generate random IPv6 addresses which change every few minutes, which makes tracking a device more or less as difficult as with NATted IPv4.

gonzo2• 12 years ago

NAT is not a privacy mechanism. For IP addresses to be lifelong (and therefore portable) the routing mechanism would need to change.

Now you have two problems.

72deluxe2• 12 years ago

Not a comment on the article, but IPv6 adoption relies on significant upgrades of existing hardware. Think of the size of the lookup table that a new bit of hardware has to be able to look up against and store compared to IPv4. Significantly more processing power is required, particularly if the hardware is a device that does inspection of some sort, even if basic! It isn't just a case of switching end machines to use IPv6.

huxley• 12 years ago

Is that really that significant a problem? Moore's Law should have dealt with memory and processing power issues severalfold in the time since IPv6 rollout was called for.

It strikes me that it's more likely a lack of strategic investment in infrastructure.

jauer2• 12 years ago

Generally speaking even now you can't do route lookups fast enough to handle provider traffic volume with current general-purpose CPUs (although it seems to be on the edge of possible). Instead routes are loaded into special ASICs (TCAM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_memory) that seem to not follow Moore's Law, be it due to low volume or other limitations (perhaps not technical).

Routers using TCAM seem to max out between 1-2M routes (divided across v4, v6, MPLS, etc). More recent routers are using slightly more flexible processors so there's some hope but the router product cycle is fairly lethargic.

lmm4• 12 years ago

IPv6 makes the global routing table much smaller (because there's enough space for the subnets to be logical parts of the network, rather than squeezing as many addresses in as possible), so the core routers for the IPv6 internet ought to need less hardware than the IPv4 ones.

72deluxe2• 12 years ago

Ah thanks! Does this mean that the end routers can be simpler too, or do they still need significant processing power?

tjgq• 12 years ago

It's worth noting that during the transition period the core routers will actually need more memory and processing power, since they'll have to route both IPv6 and IPv4 prefixes for most destinations.

spindritf• 12 years ago

It's here. IP addresses are costing more and providers are less generous with them. It used to be common to get a handful with a dedicated server, now you get one or two.

I have a friend who runs a small low-cost minecraft hosting. He stopped giving his customers dedicated IPs at all. They get a range of ports and a hostname with appropriate srv records added.

That's the other result, technical work-arounds. You can point to a particular service on a particular port with an srv record, host multiple websites on one IP, even SSL-enabled ones with SNI, etc.

davidw3• 12 years ago

This is basically how it should work. Prices rise until alternatives become worth thinking about.

baq3• 12 years ago

that's the economic way of thinking. the engineering way would be to fix the artificial scarcity by implementing a technically superior solution.

gwright• 12 years ago

SRV records are terribly underused/underimplemented

inopinatus• 12 years ago

That will change if, and probably only if, we can get https://github.com/http2/http2-spec/issues/381 off the ground.

lflux2• 12 years ago

Unfortunately if you have customers using IE on XP or older Android phones, SNI doesn't work and you need to use SAN certificates. EV-certificates with SAN is another huge amount of hassle I wish on nobody.

csense• 12 years ago

The SRV record is interesting -- basically extending DNS from a (name) -> (address) mapping to (name, service) -> (address, port) mapping

For whatever its drawbacks, IPv6 at least requires few application-layer changes. So I think it's a better solution to the problem than SRV records.

jfasi• 12 years ago

The day of reckoning still looms – it’s just been pushed out as the major Internet players have developed ingenious ways to stretch those available numbers.

To me, this indicates something either broken about IPv6 or a lessened severity of the IPv4 problem: If it's better to apply bandaids to IPv4 than to roll out IPv6, then either IPv6 is not easy and flexible enough to be a viable alternative, or the problems faced by IPv4 are not as intractable as was suggested.

rqebmm2• 12 years ago

It's both. IPv6 is not an easy migration, and people already have decades of experience squeezing the most they can out of IPv4, so the short-term solutions have just been to just squeeze IPv4 a little harder until everyone working on IPv6 gets it fully operational.

sschueller2• 12 years ago

Doesn't the US defence department hold a ridiculous amount of the address space? What would it take for them to give some of that up?

thematt• 12 years ago

Why bother? The switch needs to be made eventually, so why kick the can down the road?

sschueller2• 12 years ago

Because places like Qatar are suffering as a result of the US and others dragging their feet.

diminoten4• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addres...

Looks like they've got more than one /8. ARIN has been trying to get the holders of legacy space to sign new SLAs and to get them to give over some of the space, but considering the IP address market, why not just sell the space instead?

lmm4• 12 years ago

The growth in internet-connected devices is exponential. By the time the last blocks were issued they were going out at 1 class A (i.e. 1/256 of the entire IPv4 address space) every month. So it's not worth the effort to recover existing addresses.

tacticus• 12 years ago

iirc they were using more than a /8 every month at the end of apnics lot (also cidr is a more useful notation)

jlgaddis3• 12 years ago

There are a ton of what are called "legacy" assignments -- to DoD, .edu's, etc. By policy, ARIN can't take those back, even if they aren't being used.

msbarnett• 12 years ago

Entire /8s wouldn't last a single month at current demand (and demand is only going to continue to increase), while consolidating usage to free up the /8 would take many times that long.

It's simply not worth the time and cost for such a short-lived bandaid.

keypusher• 12 years ago

http://www.caida.org/research/id-consumption/census-map/imag...

nnieiss• 12 years ago

nat

jokoon• 12 years ago

still wonder how much of the internet is not IPV6 compatible.

einhverfr5• 12 years ago

Quite a bit actually. Our experience at Efficito may be interesting.

We previously had backups located in Denver and production servers located in Europe, both through the same hosting provider (FDC). We never could get IPv6 working flawlessly (high packet loss, etc) intercontinentally and the problems weren't on our side.

We moved to Hetzner and have our systems spread throughout their datacenters (backups, and some backend systems on one side, customer data on the other) and have had absolutely no problems with ipv6.

What this tells me is that somewhere between the Czech Republic and Colorado there are routers which although they sort of support ipv6 don't do so in a usable way.

MichaelGG3• 12 years ago

Were they using HE as an ISP? I ask because HE makes a big deal of IPv6, and we regularly get packet loss between LA and Denver on IPv4. Way overloaded. FDC says they use Cogent -- Cogent used to be not-so-great (they're better nowadays).

js2• 12 years ago

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html (circa 2003)

gtirloni2• 12 years ago

Thanks, very interesting read. While reading his argument about all the extensions that need to be done everywhere, I thought about this: since many protocols/etc have to be reworked, will that lead to consolidations (since some protocols will be left behind)? Can we say that currently the IPv6 Internet is a place (almost) free of legacy stuff?

zaphoyd• 12 years ago

Essentially yes. It is also wonderfully free of ads. =)

lmm4• 12 years ago

I'm hoping the opposite, that people upgrading their routers to forward more than just IPv4 packets might mean we can finally start using SCTP in the real world. (It won't happen, of course, but one can dream)

FedRegister• 12 years ago

That was always a question I had in the back of my mind. We have this huge address space. Why not reserve a single prefix that means "look at the lower 32-bits of this address and use it as an IPv4 address"?

karlshea• 12 years ago

There are, there's a prefix that maps to IPv4 addresses.

jewel• 12 years ago

This can be done by the ISP with a combination of DNS64 and NAT64.

1c4050b092• 12 years ago

So sort of exactly like 64:ff9b::/96 in NAT64?

vklj• 12 years ago

Every IPv4 packet needs a source address. If the client is IPv6, what is the IPv4 source address?

You would want to assign an IPv4 address to the client transparently; and, since they're scarce, share it with several clients. That's what NAT64 does.

giovannibajo1• 12 years ago

That covers ipv6 hosts sending a packet to ipv4 hosts. How do you propose they answer though? They can't put a ipv6 address in the ipv4 header.

The full solution is NAT64.

Consultant32452• 12 years ago

More than likely the people in charge will not act pre-emptively by upgrading to IPv6 during the normal upgrade/replacement cycle of their network hardware. Instead, they will wait until there's a real crisis so they can ask the government to fund their next hardware upgrade.

walshemj3• 12 years ago

The main problem the 20 years ago with the take off of the internet as a mass networking standard it was blindingly obvious that ipv6 was deeply flawed - IPv6 should have been taken out behind the woodshed back then and ipv7 or 8 done properly.

When I looked at it 19 or the 20 involved in the RFC for ipv6 where from academia plus one guy from bell labs.

Migration and Interpenetration should have been the highest priority in the design on a replacement for ip4

dasil003• 12 years ago

Maybe. Or maybe we will suffer tremendous amount of pain for some period of years after which we will have a much brighter future as opposed to an ipv7 that made too many concessions and left us with a mess that would be politically impossible to ever fix.

walshemj3• 12 years ago

mm yes or maybe know when to let a flawed standard die when it is over taken by events.

Even 20 years ago the Internet was obviously not going to be able go on as before where you could make major changes over a long weekend during the summer at the few core university's that where the the internet.

That is why ipv6 should have been replaced.

sopooneo• 12 years ago

What you say makes sense, but what about the new thing that will have to change when we finally have our ideal IP version in place? There will always be a new hardware standard, a new language version, a new this or that, which can be done now or can be done well.

It is a balancing act, but at some point we have to cash in our chips and make things usable in the short term.

damm• 12 years ago

The problem is the majority of the companies who are stalling the IPv6 upgrade are in the US; which as chimeracoder stated is not going to feel the crunch as bad as other countries. People are very short sighted for one; and for two are afraid of 'breaking' what works.

I have even setup organizations with native IPv6 addresses (no tunnel) to watch them fear and lament it.

There's a thousand excuses and people need to look upon this as an opportunity; to up their skill set and mentor a new generation.

trout2• 12 years ago

Here's a report you can see the current projects with a bit of history: http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html

The potaroo site by Geoff Huston has been running for over a decade tracking address consumption.

Some history for ARIN consumption predictions: Feb 2014 predicts Mar 2015.

Oct 2013 predicts Jan 2015 [0].

Apr 2013 predicts Apr 2014 [1].

Nov 2012 predicts Sept 2013 [2].

Sep 2012 - RIPE out of addresses.

Apr 2011 - APNIC out of addresses.

Feb 2011 - IANA out of addresses.

Dec 2011 predicts July 2013 [3].

July 2011 predicts Nov 2013 [4].

Prior to this it's simply about IANA calculations, though with some algebra some dates could be extracted.

As well, here's a Cisco article from 2005 describing some of the painful parts of trying to predict the address consumption (where they guess 2016 in 2005): http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archived_issues/i...

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20111227105916/http://www.potaroo... [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20111227105916/http://www.potaroo... [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20121122120407/http://www.potaroo... [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20111227105916/http://www.potaroo... [4] http://web.archive.org/web/20110709090704/http://www.potaroo...

einhverfr5• 12 years ago

Trying to plot this it means that the crunch will probably really hit increasingly hard from about 2015 through 2016. You go from predicting two years out to one year out (two years later).

These aren't brick walls but the shortage is already being felt. I know that at Efficito, one of the reasons we switched hosting providers was that we couldn't get ipv6 connections working flawlessly to our backup connections before (meaning more ipv4 space required). I don't think we will ever hit exhaustion per se.

todd8• 12 years ago

This is an interesting article, but it contains some rather surprising innumeracy in its cavalier comparison of 2^128 to the number of grains of sand in the earths crust. 2^128 is an enormous number, roughly 3.4e38:

                               2**128 = 3.4 * 10**38
  grains of sand to one mile down [1] = 5.1 * 10**26
 stars in the observable universe [2] = 7.0 * 10**22
         estimated grains of sand [2] = 7.5 * 10**18

This means that every star can have 100 planets (equals 7e24 planets) each with 50 trillion IPv6 addresses.

[1] [http://www.teracomtraining.com/tutorials/teracom-tutorial-IP...]

[2] [http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/09/17/161096233/which...]

exabrial• 12 years ago

Truth is NAT works just fine for the vast majority of cases, and makes a layered (IE not-eggs-all-in-one-basket) approach to security much simpler.

The real problem is routing table size with BGP. As we continue to divide the internet into smaller routable blocks, this is requiring an exponential amount of memory in BGP routers. Currently, the global BGP table requires around 256mb of RAM. IPv6 makes this problem 4 times worse.

IPv6 is a failure, we don't actually _need_ everything to have a publicly routable address. There were only two real problems with IPv4: wasted space on legacy headers nobody uses, and NAT traversal. IETF thumbed their noses as NAT (not-invented-here syndrome) and instead of solving real problems using a pave-the-cowpaths-approach, they opted to design something that nobody has a real use for.

Anyway, I'm hoping a set of brilliant engineers comes forward to invent IPv5, where we still use 32 bit public address to be backward compatible with today's routing equipment, but uses some brilliant hack re-using unused IPv4 headers to allow direct address through a NAT.

Flame away.

elric1v• 12 years ago

No need to flame, we will just let yoau re-read this in a few years...

trout2• 12 years ago

Not a flame - your perspective is very typical for people that don't have a lot of experience with networking past the host or server level. (Very little experience with networking in the core, provider, or putting together network services architecture).

1. In theory the routing table with IPv6 can be smaller. The address design should be hierarchical, which means you should be able to have much fewer routes. It's too early to tell if this is actually true or not, but the addresses themselves are 4x larger - which isn't going to be the determining factor in routing table size.

2. Not everything needs to be publically routable, true. IPv6 has the idea of link local and autonomous system local addressing which IPv4 doesn't have. The RFC 1918 block was used instead. But think for a second - there's only 4 billion addresses (less when you count bogons and multicast ranges), and it's only a matter of time until those are taken up. So we can choose to do it now, 2 years from now, or 5 years from now, but devices are growing faster than ever and it's only a function of time.

3. NAT is not a security feature, is not good for the internet, and the sunk costs spent building an ALG for every protocol to work around it is a significant development sinkhole. It's a workaround often masqueraded as security, and does cause many application problems. It's just not normally the application developers that have to fix those problems - it's the network and security teams.

4. IPv6 was created in the late 90's. People have been waiting for brilliance to supercede IPv6 for a while. I'll admit it's not the easiest, but there are a certain set of problems you have when you expand the address space.

5. I'm familiar with all the IPv4 headers, and nearly all of them are used. ID is used for packet identification, particularly through network services, DSCP is used heavily, DF and other flags are used - they're just obscure. If you look at IPv6 those same headers are basically recreated, though with slightly different names. The ones that aren't included are addressable through the extension headers.

So, yeah. That's another perspective that may help you understand why IPv6 is a bit of a quagmire. The faster people understand this, the sooner we get to a place where the chicken-egg problem fades away.

MichaelGG3• 12 years ago

1. In theory.. IPv6...hierarchical.

Is that even remotely close to being true in practise? Would we expect to see it be smaller than IPv4? Given the quadrupling of address sizes, wouldn't that mean there'd need to be 1/4th the number of routes? And peering destroys the hierarchy, does it not?

I was under the impression that the hierarchical routing had an assumption that networks could renumber at will. So multiple subnets might map to the same host or something to that effect. Is that incorrect?

3. NAT is not a security feature

Except it turns out that proper NAT is equivalent to a firewall with inbound deny, outbound allow. Which is a pretty good start for security.

ALG for every protocol

Applications that break with NAT usually do so due to poor design (hey SIP and FTP). With a firewall with default inbound deny, programs can't just accept inbound connections without doing work anyways (UPnP or whatnot). Although sure, it makes known-two-way datagram applications easier since you start transmitting and get a flow opened. Wouldn't help TCP based applications, for instance.

btilly• 12 years ago

I only care about one point. That NAT is not a security feature.

The original reason that I began using NAT was so that my ISP couldn't charge me per device. You just plugged in a NAT enabled router, and ran everything behind it. That became so ubiquitous that ISPs gave up on trying.

My concern about IPv6 is that ISPs will want to go back to charging per device. I didn't like that then, and I don't want it now.

Whatever happened to the IPv4 address crisis?

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