[Noisebridge-discuss] How big is the internet? eom

[Jonathan Lassoff]

Excerpts from Jason Dusek's message of Fri Nov 20 20:12:25 -0800 2009:
>   None too large. It can only talk about ~4 billion addresses
>   before you get into NAT and networks that are (by definition)
>   off the Internet.

NAT is used in plenty of places where there are legitimate needs for it.
I don't think the use of NAT implies that there is address scarcity, but
it is indeed one mechanism we can use to combat address scarcity.

>   While IPv6 allows us 65K times that, it's
>   still just not that many addresses. In comparison, the number
>   of molecules in a liter of water is well over 2^84.

How did you get that number? IPv4 is 2^32 (4294967296) addresses (not
accounting for reserved space like 127/8, 224/4, etc.) and IPv6 is
2^128 (340282366920938463463374607431768211456) addresses (again,
counting everything and not just global unicast space).

That like 18446744078004518913 times bigger, no?
 
--j