Moving to IPV6

[Josh Smith]

<snip>
> Anyway, the *real* problem that IPv6 fails to fix is one that I'm
> surprised that Mike didn't mention since he had an IETF draft or three
> that would have fixed it.  That problem is one of routing table
> growth.  In the middle of the Internet are large routers - not like
> the one that you have on your cablemodem, but ranging in size from 2
> rack units tall and weighing some 40 pounds to several adjacent 42u
> racks and weighing a couple of tons.  They carry the routes for
> Internet provider allocations.  This is called the default-free zone
> or DFZ, because you don't carry a default route or gateway - you're
> supposed to know how to get everywhere.  A full routing table in IPv4
> land is 375k routes, approximately.  In IPv6 land it is 4500 routes.
> Both are growing exponentially.  Processing power on the routers'
> management systems to sort out the routing information is not.  You
> can see where this is headed...  eventually...
<snip>

Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm definitely not an expert on global
routing or the DFZ, but isn't one of the driving factors behind the
current ipv6 allocation policy
(http://www.iana.org/reports/2002/ipv6-allocation-policy-26jun02) to
allow for greater route aggregation than is currently possible with
ipv4 allocations.  I believe the thought is that if an ISP is
delegated enough contiguous address space upfront they are able to
better aggregate the routes they advertise upstream thus reducing the
number of routes making it to the global routing table?

Thanks,
-- 
Josh (KD8HRX) Smith