GoKawiilIP address exhaustion is still with us. Back in the early 1990s, when the scale of the problem first became obvious, the projections were grim. Some estimates had us running out of IPv4 addresses as early as 2005 and even the optimistic ones didn’t push much beyond the following decade.
As the years passed, we got clever. Or perhaps, more desperate.
We managed to put off that imminent exhaustion for decades, breaking the Internet in the process in small, subtle ways. Want multiple home machines behind a single IP? No problem — we invented NAT. ISPs want in on that “multiple devices, one address” trick? Sure, have some Carrier‑Grade NAT. Want to run a server on your home machine? Er… no.
And through all of this, IPv6 has been sitting there patiently. It fixes the address shortage. It fixes autoconfiguration. It fixes fragmentation. It fixes multicast. It fixes almost everything people complain about in IPv4.
But hardly anyone wants it.
The problem isn’t that IPv6 is bad, but that deploying it means spending money before your neighbors do and no one wants to be the first penguin off the ice shelf. So we’ve ended up in a long, awkward stalemate. IPv6 is waiting for adoption and IPv4 is stretched far beyond what anyone in 1981 imagined.
But what if it hadn’t gone that way? What if the “IP Next Generation” team that designed IPv6 had chosen a different path? One that extended IPv4 instead of replacing it.
Let’s take a visit to that parallel universe.
“Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes, they call me on and on across the universe. Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box, they tumble blindly as they make their way…”
1993 — The Birth of IPv4x
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