Someone did the math on this:
> Now, average daily assignment rates have been running at above 10 /8s per year, for 2010, and approached 15 /8s towards the end. This means any reclamation effort has to recover at least 15 /8s per year just to break even on 2010’s growth. That’s 5.9% of the total IPv4 address space, or 6.8% of the assignable address space. Is it feasible to be able to reclaim that much address space? Even if there were low-hanging fruit to cover the first year of new demand, what about there-after? Worse, demand for address space has been growing supra-linearly, particularly in Asia and Latin America. So it seems highly unlikely that any reclamation project can buy anything more than a years worth of time (and reclamation itself takes time).
* https://paul.jakma.org/2011/02/03/why-dont-we-just-reclaim-u...
There are 'only four billion IPv4 addresses, and there are eight billion people on the planet. There are just as many smartphones (I have two: personal and work):
* https://www.weforum.org/stories/2023/04/charted-there-are-mo...
Even if you (CG-)NAT an IPv4 address for some number of people, you still need to have IPv4 addresses for public services (web, mail, NTP, etc).
There is no scenario where 2^32 addresses is enough for humanity's needs: as some point you need to go to a protocol with more that 32 bits of address space.
Unless all of these devices are running a dedicated full time server that must be reachable inbound by everyone this is not required. At any given time "all the people" are not online. That is why DHCP (per ISP) takes care of this. Maybe some day all the people may become terminally online but I would not count on it.
Yeah some day IPv6 may be required. Maybe in 100 years or so. IPv4 has plenty of unused allocated addresses that can be ripped away from greedy people. There was a time when ARIN would check to see what was in use and would take back anything people were squatting on. I think the reclamation project works if we dont assume everything has to be reachable as a server.
I should add that cell phones (where people are terminally online) were already IPv6 a long time ago for the most part so it's really a non issue. The only risk I see is if someone wanted to start a new massive dedicated server and VPS provider. Most of those are dual stack IPv4+IPv6 now and doing that means clawing some IPv4 space away from those I mentioned earlier.
I think this is a lack of imagination. The fact that (CG-)NAT is in the way could be precluding the development of software that could take advantage of incoming/P2P connections.
It's a form of (negative/inverse) survivorship bias: kind of like zoning for only single-family homes and yet saying "no one wants mid-rise towers/apartments as evidenced by the fact no one building them". The current rules/structure preclude any other options.
When we went from dial-up speeds to DSL/cable to fibre we were able to have all sorts new applications due to higher bandwidth. Are there classes of applications that we don't / can't have because of NAT? We're stuck with things that often need a central server (TURN/ICE/STUN) and I'd like people to have the ability to explore a more distributed/decentralized Internet.
"IPv4 is all we need because half the internet is already on IPv6 anyway" sounds like a weird argument to me.
I am very special, mama said so.
I stand by what I said. Get countries to do what I said and DHCP will take care of the rest. CGNAT can be binned once people do what I said.
Yeah, your mama was not wrong - you indeed are a special one. Now, let's bring you to a nearby playground...
In our exponentially growing world that wouldn't help. By the time we ran out of Class As we were allocating a new one every month. Reclaiming all the unused addresses would barely make a dent in demand.
Err... you do realize that the number of humans currently living on planet earth is twice the number of IPv4 addresses... right?
We can't all have an IPv4 address for each of our devices. We can't all even have one IPv4 address, period. But maybe they should just try not being poor, eh?
