There is no Plan B: why the IPv4-to-IPv6 transition will be ugly
One thing that doesn't make sense to me is that people are comparing the number of internet-connected devices to the size of the IPv4 address space, implying each device needs its own IPv4 address.<p>This is obviously not the case. NAT (Network Address Translation) techniques can hide thousands of devices behind one IP address. In fact, for security reasons, it's <i>advisable</i> to not have every device directly on the internet. I have an ADSL modem/router at home with NAT, which makes substandard firewall solutions as what is provided by Windows pretty much unnecessary.<p>So perhaps we simply need to reclaim large blocks (particularly those universities and companies that have large A blocks of ~16 million addresses) and save IP addresses for each machine for ISPs, servers and those that actually need them.<p>Of course that's hard to mandate but like many things you can solve it with market forces: charge people who have more than, say, 128 IP addresses on a scale such that the most economic thing to do is transition away from that and give up their addresses.