If you "simply" added more bits to IPv4, you'd have a transition every bit (ahaha, ahem, sorry) as complex as the transition to IPv6 anyway, because IPv4+ would be a new protocol in exactly the same way as IPv6. A new DNS response record. Updates to routing protocols. New hardware. New software.

And no interoperability between the two without stateful network address translation.

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pavpanchekha 6 days ago | parent [-]

Author here. The point is that with 9-bit bytes we'd have designed IPv4 to have 36-bit addresses from the beginning. There wouldn't have been a transition.

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codebje 6 days ago | parent [-]

The post I replied to was speculating on IPv4's life being extended by "simply making the numbers bigger" rather than having more bits per byte, but nevertheless... there still would've been a transition, delayed by at most a few years.

Exhaustion was raised for 32-bit IPv4 in the very early 90s, when we had a few million active Internet users. Allocations were very sparsely used and growth in Internet usage was exponential. It didn't take much of an imagination to foresee a problem.

A 36-bit Internet would be little better. By the middle of the 90s we had ~45 million active Internet users, ending our 16x space advantage, even assuming we didn't just squander that with 8x as wasteful Class A allocations and bigger spaces reserved for uses that will never arise.

Today, we have ~70 billion connected devices: 5-6 billion home subscribers each with multiple devices in the home, 7.5 billion smartphones, 20 billion IoT devices, and all growing rapidly.

We'd need NAT. But NAT was a response to exhaustion concerns, as a stop-gap measure to provide time to design and transition to a proper solution. If we didn't have exhaustion concerns, there'd be no NAT. If we did have exhaustion concerns, brought on perhaps by the lack of NAT, we'd still have invented IPv6, because we'd still have been able to forecast that the Internet would rapidly outgrow 36 bits of address space.

edit: disclaimer, I work in this space, but my comments reflect my own opinion and are not necessarily those of my employer.

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pavpanchekha 5 days ago | parent [-]

Great reply, much appreciated. I searched a bit for a number like ~70B and didn't find one. Perhaps 36 bits wouldn't have actually worked. I do think we'd have wasted more Class As, but that's where the "minor market mechanisms" would have happened—most of the class As did get sold and would in this universe too. Again, if total internet-connected devices is now 70B that wouldn't help, you'd still need NATs.

	▲	codebje 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's extremely hard to get an accurate count of connected devices, so we're all just estimating. There's lots of sources giving rough values for things like smartphones or IoT devices, there's a reasonably common estimate of 5.6 billion connected Internet users, but it's largely guesswork for connected devices per user. It's improbable that I'm off by an order of magnitude: 7 billion is far too low (we have 7.5 billion smartphones in the world!) and 700 billion is far too high; how low an estimate could we make without being unreasonably optimistic? 40b seems quite low to me - 7.5b smartphones, 5.6b connected users, 20b IoT devices, and commercial use of IPs - but if we took that value we'd be sitting at saturation for 36 bits of address space (60% utilisation is pretty darn good!) and the next decade would kind of suck.