Posters of the IPv4 and IPv6 internet as of Jan 1, 2023

IPv6 is handed out using sparse allocation inside &#x2F;12 from IANA ensuring two goals: minimal recall on IANA and maximum utilisation inside each &#x2F;12 preserving second call headroom for the original delegates announcing the space in BGP. They can take a &#x2F;32 to a 31 or 30 or 26 or whatever and not have to announce disaggregated blocks in BGP. (They can disaggregate, but it&#x27;s not forced by being given discontinuous blocks) The sparse model is like binary chop: it tends to equalise the size of the &quot;hole&quot; across all delegations. It&#x27;s a reservation system without having to make reservations: within limits everyone who hasn&#x27;t yet requested subsequent space can request it, and everyone within reason has the same growth potential to market against other delegates of the same size at that point in time.<p>APNIC runs modified sparse: the &#x2F;12 is divided up into pools and bigger and smaller parts are used to make two sets of binary chop headroom reflecting the scale.<p>The outcome should be visible in the chart: a grey peppering of blocks spread throughout the &#x2F;12s and for APNIC evidence of at least two densities of scatter.<p>Broadly speaking, it&#x27;s worked. The RIR collectively haven&#x27;t gone back to IANA very often, a lot of IPv6 space remains. Scarcity isn&#x27;t driving the dynamics of BGP announcement and disaggregation. Compare that to IPv4, costs of entry to market for new players, avg number of prefixes and relative disaggregation of holdings.<p>(Disclaimer: work in an RIR)

The ghostly amount of v6 space is so exciting to see. One day we’ll need to physically route a whole block to another planet — there’s no point using BGP when the ping from Earth to Mercury is 230,000ms at best.<p>I love IPv6 and it’s so exciting to see it used widely at last. My mobile device is v6 although it’s still dual stack. Home networks are doomed to by v4 forever so your 1990s eToaster can display Yahoo! News! but I wonder how many ISPs are doing 4to6 or CGNAT nowadays? That’s what my cell provider does.<p>I only know a little bit about BGP. Why does Tesla announce 6x &#x2F;48s instead of having a &#x2F;32 of their own and handling their routing internally? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bgp.he.net&#x2F;AS394161#_prefixes6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bgp.he.net&#x2F;AS394161#_prefixes6</a>

IPv6 only is still unusuable :( I bought new Sony TV and allocated it a new VLAN with IPv6 only network just to see how it works TV couldn&#x27;t even detect that it connected to the internet, despite it receiving ipv6 address from my router. It looks like it couldn&#x27;t use IPv6 DNS servers. If I try to configure IP address statically it wont let me enter IPv6 address at all.

Can anyone write a little bit on 240.0.0.0&#x2F;4 (&quot;Future use&quot;), 48.0.0.0&#x2F;8 (&quot;Prudential securities&quot;, same as Wachovia?) and 25.0.0.0&#x2F;8, what they are about and why they&#x27;re seemingly entirely unused?

Why does Ford still have an entire &#x2F;8 (and even worse, completely unused)?

Really surprised no one has yet posted the software that’s almost certainly used to create these images, the Measurement Factory’s ipv4-heatmap package, on GitHub here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;measurement-factory&#x2F;ipv4-heatmap">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;measurement-factory&#x2F;ipv4-heatmap</a><p>And, yes, it was absolutely inspired by Randall Munroe’s xkcd Map of the Internet, which someone has already linked.<p>There’s a fork that uses ColorBrewer palettes, which may be what they actually used: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hrbrmstr&#x2F;ipv4-heatmap">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hrbrmstr&#x2F;ipv4-heatmap</a><p>(I used to work at Akamai and used this to produce monthly versions with each &#x2F;24 colored based upon how many addresses within it had connected to the company’s network.)

In considering the rollout of IPv6, end users often get marginalized. This is frustrating to me. When we try to highlight ISPs who refuse to deploy IPv6, mobile services get highlighted - as if homes and businesses could just use them instead of wireline. If that doesn&#x27;t end the discussion then IPv6 acolytes will go on about transit traffic or anything else until IPv4-only users go away and stop ruining their optimism.<p>Personally, I&#x27;m very positive about IPv6. I find a lot to like in the protocol. From an end user standpoint tho, it&#x27;s very much a club. If your ISP is in you&#x27;re golden. If not, you don&#x27;t exist to other members.

240&#x2F;4 was reserved for future use more than 30 years ago. When is &#x27;the future&#x27; if not now. Furthermore, reservations for 0&#x2F;8, 127&#x2F;8, and 224&#x2F;4 seem mostly useless at this point.<p>Also Ford, Daimler, and Prudential owning huge network blocks and neither even doing business in networking, nor announcing prefixes can be referred to as outright IP squatting (if that term exists). The US DOD seems to be a squatter, too.<p>Based on professional experience, I doubt that networking equipment can not handle reserved blocks. And if it does not indeed, patches could be provided by vendors for sure within reasonable time.<p>The problem is not severe enough: neither for a switch to IPv6 (also conceived almost 30 years ago!) nor to make use of unused blocks.<p>I refuse to believe that IPv4 address exhaustion is actually a thing.

Does anyone have a good resource to really get ipv6? I have an intuitive understanding of ipv4 but still struggle to understand ipv6 in a way that would make me feel comfortable switching over. So far, all docs I read made it look vastly more complicated than ipv4.

I still remember my university mini project from 20-25 years ago about the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space :-) Nice poster&#x2F;visualization, even with the small preview image.

The 2006 version from xkcd <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;195&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;195&#x2F;</a>

I noticed that 240.0.0.0&#x2F;4 is reserved for &quot;Future Use&quot;. As IPv4 is going to be replaced by v6 (slowly, ok, but still...), what is that future use supposed to be?<p>Edit: I just saw that my question has already been answered in this thread.

There is quite a block of multicast addresses in IPv4. Is it used for anything in real life?

IPv6 is so expansive and seemingly endless that it reminds me of driving through the Midwest

So how do we get those IPv4 blocks back from Ford and Prudential?

Why does it all start with &quot;2&quot;? e.g. 2000 -&gt; 2f00? Where are the other prefix segments?

Is 3ffe::&#x2F;16 (6bone) still active on the Internet?

Serious question: why would I want to purchase this as a poster?<p>Asking as a nerd, but maybe not a very specific data oriented nerd.