On 20/01/2010 10:54, Paul LeoNerd Evans wrote:
A major problem with IPv4 "addressing" is that global IPv4 "addresses" have become simply names, not addresses. They do not give any information on where to send the traffic, simply who it is. You need a BGP router with a full route set to know where to send it. On our border routers at $company we're currently looking at 305,000 prefixes. Supposing an absolutely minimal implementation of, say, 5 bytes per prefix (4 address, pack prefix length and next hop ID in a single byte), that's still 15MB. More likely it'll take much more space than that.. possibly more than the, say, 64MB that smaller Cisco routing boxes come with. That's every internet-BGP-talking box in the world, has to have that table. And it grows all the time..
Indeed, I suspect the ever-enlarging global routing table and consequent hardware upgrades have done far more for Cisco's bottom line than IPv6 so far.
- Mark
