Re: [Int-area] Introducing IPv4 Unicast Extensions with new draft-schoen-intarea-lowest-address

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

> As we
> will describe in more detail in future posts, we expect these changes will
> create enormous economic value, and they are not intended as an attack on
> the IPv6 transition.

Most of the consolidation of IPv4 usage by ISPs in recent years has been
in the deployment of CGNs and aggressive address sharing. As far as I can
tell, most consolidation of IPv4 usage within enterprises has been based
on Net 10. So I am not at all clear where this economic value would be,
or why the IETF should even care about it. 

Regards
   Brian

On 02-Aug-21 17:59, Seth David Schoen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> John Gilmore, Dave Taht and I have proposed a recent Internet-Draft that
> relates to the Internet Area.  We hope you'll read it and discuss it:
> 
>   https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schoen-intarea-lowest-address/
> 
>   With ever-increasing pressure to conserve IP address space on the
>   Internet, it makes sense to consider where relatively minor changes
>   can be made to fielded practice to improve numbering efficiency.  One
>   such change, proposed by this document, is to increase the number of
>   unicast addresses in each existing subnet, by redefining the use of
>   the lowest-numbered (zeroth) host address in each IPv4 subnet as an
>   ordinary unicast host identifier, instead of as a duplicate segment-
>   directed broadcast address.
> 
> Our IPv4 Unicast Extensions team is working on several related
> proposals for improving address space utilization, of which this is
> the first.  We are also editing I-Ds for each of the other proposals
> and will upload them to the datatracker when they're ready.  Each
> proposal changes the status of some particular unused IPv4 addresses
> in order to make more address space available, and each has involved
> experimentation with real-world operating systems to explore the ease
> with which the proposed change can be made and learn about its
> consequences.
> 
> These proposals would, if adopted and deployed, produce another tens
> to hundreds of millions of IPv4 addresses usable for unicast traffic.
> This can be accomplished by making quite small, easy to make, easy to
> test, incremental changes in popular TCP/IP implementations.  (The Lowest
> Address patch for Linux is less than 10 lines long, and the BSD patch is
> similar.  They interoperate with each other and are already addressable
> by unpatched implementations when distant from the local subnet.)  As we
> will describe in more detail in future posts, we expect these changes will
> create enormous economic value, and they are not intended as an attack on
> the IPv6 transition.
> 
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