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.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 advisable 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.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.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.