Pentagon Wants IPv6 by 2008 376
anzha writes "The constant question for 'when' for IPv6 keeps wandering across good ole /. It seems that the Pentagon has decided to put a foot down and put a deadline on their dark and dangerous portion of the net."
Advantages of IPV6 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Advantages of IPV6 (Score:5, Funny)
Damn, thats it...I was hoping for at least a quintillion
oh well, w/ that many available ip addresses, i'll hopefully be able to get a static IP thru my service provider...(if several quadrillion time the worlds population is enough to allow for that)
Re:Advantages of IPV6 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Advantages of IPV6 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Advantages of IPV6 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Advantages of IPV6 (Score:3, Informative)
[The same thing is true for CPU address spaces (at least when you have an MMU) -- which is why the inevitable comments about how you could never afford 64-bits worth of memory are rather silly.]
Re:Advantages of IPV6 (Score:3, Insightful)
No, probably not. IPv6 encourages dynamic addresses, and has several mechanisms in place to aid in their use. This is a managability issue more than anything else -- one of the reasons IPv4 is running out of space is that the existing allocations are inefficient and renumbering would be too expensive. By using more dynamic addresses, the address space wastage can be significantly reduced.
Re:Advantages of IPV6 (Score:5, Informative)
Tunnel Broker to IPV6 network. (Score:2, Interesting)
This might help it happen sooner than we think.
Re:Advantages of IPV6 (Score:4, Funny)
And I've just hijacked [securityfocus.com] my own [arin.net] /16!
Re:Advantages of IPV6 (Score:3, Informative)
2008!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Ummm.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ummm.... (Score:3, Informative)
Addresses are in hex.
See the tutorial at [taclug.org].
Re:Ummm.... (Score:5, Informative)
2^127 / (.51*10^15 m^2 * 1,000,000 mm^2/m^2)
Or, roughly, the number of usable addresses (estimate) divided by the number of square millimeters on the surface of the planet still yields 3.33*10^17 addresses per square millimeter!
Anybody care to check my math?
I believe it works out to... (Score:2)
...something like 1200 addresses for each square meter of Earth's surface land. I forget who told me that.
Remember that, like IPv4, not every possible combination of those 128 bits is a valid address.
Re:I believe it works out to... (Score:2, Interesting)
An estimation had been made with a really pessimistic case, and the current addressing schemes (/48's to leaf sites)
they came up to 1200 addresses per square metre, which isn't that bad..
Yeah, but... (Score:4, Funny)
If we're using those tiny-ass quantum computers, we're going to need all that and more.
Re:Ummm.... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Ummm.... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Ummm.... (Score:4, Funny)
NAT of course. Duh.
Re:Ummm.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ummm.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Ummm.... (Score:2)
Re:Ummm.... (Score:2)
Re:Ummm.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:2008!!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:2008!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Nanotech, interplanetary wont exhaust 128-bit IPv6 (Score:5, Interesting)
I once wondered [slashdot.org] about whether nanotech would present problems for 128-bit addressing and did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to examine the issue. A little math to satisfy one's "what-if geek" tendencies:
earth's surface area = 5.1*10^11 m2 [hypertextbook.com]
earth's land area = 1.483*10^11 m2
That's surface area, but we live in a volumetric space; let's define that space as 1 km high above/below earth's land-mass(part of that 1km being underground, part being in the air.) Thus the volume of human space above/below land is 1.48*10^14 m3. With 10^6 cubic centimeters per cubic meter, and approximately 10^23 atoms per cubic centimeter, we get 1.48*10^43 atoms in our human-habitable slab of space on earth.
Now, how many IP addresses for that space? Well, 2^128 = 3.4*10^38th.
Ergo we have enough IP addresses for nanotech devices of 43,600 atoms each, in a human-habitable volume completely covering the land-mass of Earth and extending to fill a volume of space above and below the earth's surface for a full 1 km. Sure, you might get nanodevices smaller than that, but would they be independent enough and sensing/generating enough information to communicate via IP?
Well, if that isn't a problem for 128-bits, what is? Let's check a few other test cases that your friendly sci-fi reader might imagine...
Well, that was just land-mass. What if we filled the sea with nanodevices, would that exhaust it?
The sea is 11km deep at worst, 3.8km on average. Water surface area is little over double land. Thus water basically requires a factor of 10x more devices. Given that you probably won't have more than 10% of the volume of any space being nanodevices (and this would seem to remain an extreme upper bound), this probably isn't an issue.
So what about interplanetary colonization? Still not too much of an issue for this solar system (ignoring the latency issues.) At least the first few planets (Mars/Venus/Mercury) which only add a factor of 3-4x expansion once 100% colonized form due to the roughly similar size of available nanodevice space on those planets as earth. True, a colonized Jupiter might pose problems down the line...
And if you used nanoprobes to fill/convert entire atmospheric systems, you end up covering a lot more volume (99% of earths' atmosphere fills approx 8.6*10^19 m3 by my calculations, five orders of magnitude more space than our 1 km slab.) Of course, any nanodevice design on that scale would probably use its own non-IP protocol.
Ah, but what other assumptions could be misleading us? For example, what is the efficiency of the 128-bit name space? Can we really use all those addresses? Well, I admit, I'm less an expert on this. The issue that Ethernet MACs will typically be your bottom 64-bits definitely chews up a lot of space, but if Ethernet doesn't make sense for nanodevices, we'll probably be using something else, or our self-assembling nanoprobes will build and configure themselves so that they share 1 higher-level IP but under the covers each have an colony-wide (not globally) unique ethernet address. How efficiently allocated is the rest of that (non-Ethernet) space? Well, I think CIDR-like tweaks can squeeze a fair amount out.
Still, even in the case where 128-bits isn't quite enough(!), I suspect reverting to NAT-type approaches in IPv6 will be workable. Certainly inter-stellar communications which will be limited to a relatively small number of transmitters will scale up with NATs for quite a while, assuming photon-based communications.
So I suspect the 128-bit addressing scheme of IPv6 will last us at least another 200 years, not just "decades" as
Re:Nanotech, interplanetary wont exhaust 128-bit I (Score:3, Funny)
That's such a quintessentially Slashdot quote, it makes me smile.
Hardware vendors have to come in line first. (Score:4, Insightful)
While it is good to see someone pushing for this, it really will take the efforts of all major networking companies to make IPv6 a reality.
Re:Hardware vendors have to come in line first. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hardware vendors have to come in line first. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hardware vendors have to come in line first. (Score:5, Informative)
Juniper have had IPv6 in production JUNOS releases on the M-series/T-series for quite a while.
Most other vendors already have production IPv6, so in reality the router vendors aren't a roadblock. The same is now true for host OSs - Linux, Windows XP and modern Unixes have had IPv6 for a while as well. The real issue is getting applications ported (not that hard) and networks deployed.
Re:Hardware vendors have to come in line first. (Score:4, Interesting)
With some high-end Cisco routers, the problem is not software but hardware. For example, only very, very few GSR line cards are currently able to route IPv6 traffic at reasonable packet rates.
It's the distomakers that are holding it up! (Score:5, Informative)
In theory, I can install a machine and plug it in, and it will do everything using IPv6. Configuring routers I admit requires some thought, but __nobody__, including the various Linux distributions by the default installs support being plugged into an IPv6 network and configuring themselves.
They all require installing "extra" tools, recompiling kernels, or manually configuring interfaces. Where is the automatic 6to4 address use in NAT gateways? Where is the automatic ipv4-compatible ipv6 addresses?
And thats for the PC operating systems, if we look at embedded devices (eg: Wireless bridges/AP's), most of them not only don't support IPv6, they "accidently" drop IPv6 thats forwarded across them!
IPv6 is designed to be so simple that you aren't supposed to realise that you're transitioning to IPv6. One day you update your OS and you just happen to be using IPv6 instead of IPv4 where possible. Except at the moment you have to spend a week futzing about playing with weird options.
The reason people aren't using IPv6 has nothing to do with if the core network is upgraded. IPv6 can support tunneling over that automatically if required using 6to4 addressing, the reason is that you have to conciously go and configure every frig'n device on your network to support IPv6!
C'mon disto-makers, spend a bit of time getting IPv6 support working in your distro by default. Make sure IPv6 tools are shipped by default (where they exist). Make sure that kernels are compiled with IPv6 support. Make sure that your startup scripts configure ipv6-compatible ipv4 addresses on interfaces that have ipv4 addresses, configure 6to4 addressing by default etc. It's not hard!
Re:Hardware vendors have to come in line first. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hardware vendors have to come in line first. (Score:2)
I can see the headlines now... The US is invading the Middle East to over throw their IT infastructure for their refusal to use our Zionist IP addressing scheme. We insert puppet US controlled operating systems (via 10240 bit encrypted SSH) and force our Democratic IPv6 networks on them. We say that it will give them freedom! No more 2 hour DHCP leases given out by an autocratic (MS?) OS. We will give everyone their own static IP to do wi
Re:Hardware vendors have to come in line first. (Score:2)
This will happen eventually, no doubt, and the DoD won't have much influence here. A major obstacle for moving to IPv6 internally is the lack of IPv6 support in all those devices that are neither routers nor real hosts---e.g. printers. I think the DoD deadline might actually encourage vendors to enhance their firmware.
The sad truth... (Score:4, Insightful)
I would like to see something critical go IPv6 exclusively. If... say, most of the world's search engines ran only IPv6, think of how much that would inspire people to adopt it, from the consumer all the way up to the corporations that rely on the consumer's business. We just need someone important enough to put their foot down and say "You must have IPv6... now."
Not just search engines. Yahoo! could start serving their mail, chat, and games through IPv6 exclusively. MP3.com could only stream via IPv6, hardware corp's could stop producing IPv4 hubs and routers, which would still allow people to use IPv4 (the old ones won't be removed from the market, just no longer manufactured), but at the same time it would make the cost of staying with IPv4 increasingly expensive (as our supply of IPv4 hardware grows thin, the cost of using it will become too expensive).
yeah but.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:yeah but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
My car gets three rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!
Re:yeah but.... (Score:2)
"Hey Jim, how tall are you?"
"Gee I dunno Bob, how long are the King's feet?"
Of course, they've since standardized the length so that it doesn't change every time we get a new King...
Re:yeah but.... (Score:2)
Re:yeah but.... (Score:2)
Then I realized, "Oh.. but a 2x4 isn't really 2"x4".. So why not just quietly convert everything to metric and not tell any of them.. They won't know the difference! *shhh*
Re:yeah but.... (Score:2)
Excerpt from NASA Policy Directive 8010.2C:
Re:yeah but.... (Score:5, Informative)
- the problem before the beginning of the SI (International System) was that every basic measure came from a local source. While, for the meter, everybody has access to water or carbon (well, apart from some hundreds of million of people but that's another topic)
- base10 the only natural system : no. But it appears that this is the one the most people are using. Moreover, this is base10 across everything not any arbitrary number to convert from one length unit to another, fo example.
- you apparently missed a big point of those units, which is the consistency across different measures. If you start from the basic units, you can deduce every other ones.
For example : force : F = ma, hence Newton = kg * m / s^2.
So, when you finish with a formula containing many different units, you can just throw the numbers without any conversion needed and, for the unit, simplify them like normal fractions and find the resulting one.
Re:yeah but.... (Score:4, Funny)
Newtonian psychics don't need equations to work out accelerations, they just *know* the answer.
Re:yeah but.... (Score:2, Funny)
you dont get
26mm to 1cm
68cm to 1m
153m to 1km
154grms to 1kg
2346kgs to 1ton
and what ever handfull of
change your given, though that
isnt a problem anymore with the
euro..
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Already happening (Score:3, Insightful)
George W Bush (Score:5, Funny)
BTW does Bush even know what IPv6?
I called up one of my customers ISP's for support and asked if they support IPv4 and they said no.
Re:Of course (Score:3, Informative)
In 1986 he introduced legislation to enable the Office of Science and Technology Policy to provide Congress with an analysis of U.S. networking needs. In 1988 he introduced the National High Performance Computing and Communications Act that was signed by President Bush into Public Law 102-194 in 1991.
To quote a friend of mine: "You, out of the gene pool, now!"
True.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Which is a good thing, I suppose. Or does IPv6 have some evil bit that can track down Saddam?
Re:True.. (Score:5, Informative)
Hate to break it to ya, sonny, but the rest of the world is the reason that the US is finally getting their ball in the game. It ain't America that's hurting because of IPv4, it's China, Japan, Russia, and the world at large: demand for IPv6 in the US is low because Americans have better than 80% of all the IPv4 addresses.
--porsche_lover@hotmail.com
Re:True.. (Score:2, Insightful)
And again, nobody would dispute that the 80% figure is understandable from a historical perspective; when IP adresses started to be doled out, nobody envisioned a n
Japan leads (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, well,,, (Score:5, Interesting)
free ip's (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:free ip's (Score:3, Informative)
The Military... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it doesn't reflect that well on mankind that we display the most ingenuity and brilliance when it comes to finding ways of beating each other into a pulp, or trying to prevent the others to do the same for us.
But then again, it's biologically understandable: intelligence is the mean by which groups of human were succesful in preserving food supply, territory, mates from competitors.
-- MG
Re:The Military... (Score:2)
It should be noted that it is not the human intelligence that elevates us above the competition of our own species, but rather, what elevated us above the rest of the animal kingdom.
Strife and warfare are part of nature in the animal kingdom. We are part of nature. Our military o
Re:The Military... (Score:2)
Do these interests include oil ?
Re:The Military... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:OpenBSD (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, that's quite simple. If someone breaks our encryption - people die. It's not like someone will find out trade secrets or read embarrasing emails. People will die quite possibly horrible deaths. As one of those protected by that encryption, I'd just as soon see them as much money as they reasonably believe necessary.
P.S. Back off the bold tag before you put someone's eye out with that thi
That's a long time. (Score:3, Interesting)
Good to Hear (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, I suppose the reason they are committing to use of IPv6 is because of security. Both security and quality of service were mentioned as reasons they were making the switch, but I suspect that the former has more to do with it. But I suppose that they have been securing their communications, maybe with IPsec or with any other similar method. I don't know as much about the Pentagon's communications. It'd be interesting to find out about them.
Re:Good to Hear (Score:2)
Also, QoS (both DiffServ and the less common RSVP) works fine on IPv4 and IPv6.
IPv6 makes sense to the military for the same reasons as everyone else, I'd guess. Addressability and avoidance of NATs is the most obvious benefit.
Re:Good to Hear (Score:2)
Have men in black suits shown up knocking on your door yet? (I'd post AC, but hiding from the DoD is like trying to fit 5 cows into a Honda Civic.)
Re:Good to Hear (Score:2)
Not yet. Actually, I'm surprised that they didn't show up within a few minutes of me posting that message. They seem quite inefficient these days. :)
Seriously though, it is now public knowledge that IPv6 is what the Pentagon will be using. So why would what they are using now be classified information? While the U.S. governemnt keeps plenty of secrets, it is
And who told you that load? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good to Hear-Antisocial engineering. (Score:2)
Heh. Once I wrote that I figured I'd get a reply like that one. So anyway, if Slashdot posts are included as criteria in the Total... I mean Terrorist Information Awareness project, (or any other similar projects they have) then I just became a suspected terrorist in their databases. If that doesn't do it, then maybe including words such as "bomb" and "hijacking" in my posts will. Uh-oh. I'd better delete these words before I click the "submit" button!
But it may be too late.
just curious (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:just curious (Score:5, Informative)
Re:just curious (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope the example you gave wasn't intended as a serious one. First of all, there is the issue that most of the time hex numbers are case insensitive. The additional trouble caused by a difference between a and A would be quite a hassle. Once more, for any alphabet that reaches through l (as in 'el', not 'one') or O (as in 'oh', not 'zero') suddenly has problems with font choice for representation. Secondly, consider if you used all of the symbols you recommende. 0-9,a-z,A-Z. That's 62 unique characters, and we need a number of characters that is a power of two for things to work out. So next we have to throw in some other symbol. How about we just say we follow that with ' and " (there are probably better choices, but that's not pertinent). That gives us 64 total characters which represent log2(64)=6 bits in our address. This means that we still need 22 of these hexaquartadecimals. If we wanted to drop this back down to the current 8 characters required, we'll need a system which represents 16 bits per character, or 65,536 unique characters per position.
With hexadecimal, we have a well-established system used several decades for a shorthand form of long binary numbers that required 32 significant characters with no typographic duplicities. This new proposed system will require recoding all software dealing with IPs to be case-sensitive as well as accept new characters, introduce duplicities, and save us not quite one-third of the length. Quite possibly a bit more of a hassle than it's worth.
Re:just curious (Score:3, Informative)
The problem of overly-long IPv6 addresses has already been, um, addressed.
You may be interested in perusing RFC 1924 [sunsite.dk], "A Compact Representation of IPv6 Addresses", from April 1996.
Re:just curious (Score:3, Informative)
RFC 1924 [isi.edu] defines Base-85, a compact encoding scheme for 128-bit IPv6 addresses. An address represented in the usual form would be ' 1080:0:0:0:8:800:200c:417a'. That same address in Base-85 becomes '4)+k&C#VzJ4br>0wv%Yp'. Unfortunately, Base-85 addresses aren't very memorable, and worst of all, they're case-sensitive. Try reading that out ov
Re:just curious (Score:2, Informative)
Like that.
Yes, that's hexadecimal - yes, that's 16 bytes.
(That's also part of the registered AOL/Time Warner [216.239.39.100] block, incidentally.)
Re:Localhost? (Score:2, Informative)
Wired article (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, smart move by the DoD (Score:5, Informative)
Recently in one of our training excercise out in the California desert, every soldier, truck, helicopter, etc. was connected in a very integrated and dynamic network which allowed the commanding officers to witness the mock battle in real time, seeing which forces were where, and how to adapt to a changing situation extremely quickly.
In military theory, and well in any competitive environment, the goal is to gather information, assess the situation, decide on a course of action, and execute that decision. Whoever can complete this loop or cycle first has the clear advantage. By connecting everyone on the battlefield so that they can gather and pass on information as fast as possible is clearly a necessary step for this to work.
So, if all our soldiers need to be connected to the information infrastructure, it is clear that this will be accomplished with information technology. And how else to do this? Well, over cheap, abundant, and "easy" to configure systems. And what do these systems use as an underlying framework?
IP addressed based systems. (right? im a soldier, not a network architect, so my appologies if i am wrong)
So, from the military's standpoint, it would be a good idea to have as many IP addresses as possible. They will sure need them when there are hundreds of thousands/millions/billions of information nodes dispersed across the battlefield of the not too distant future.
Cooool. (Score:5, Funny)
Just need to add the black-armored bodysuits, exotic eyepieces, conspicuous tubes, deathly white complexion, and Windows networking.
Re:Actually, smart move by the DoD (Score:5, Funny)
I found this was generally made easier by pressing [ESC], selecting 'Options', 'Video', and turning 'Fog of War' to be off.
Actually, these theories are hotly debated (Score:4, Interesting)
Modern warfare is theorized by two overlapping schools of thought: "Maneuver" warfare and "Traditional" warfare (or whatever you want to call it).
The model of the period of iteration in decision making to action is from the maneuverist camp, but it has been more widely accepted. As maneuver types propose it, the decisions should be as distributed as possible, hence your IPv6 address for every device on every soldier inference. However, in this model, every node does not need to be addressed by every other node, and indeed the maneuver warfare proponents usually say that communication should be as decoupled as possible from the central structure. A global namespace/address space is (on the surface) antithetical. It provides means for centralized Command and Control, which is the opposite of what you suggest IPv6 would do for our soldiers.I suggest that the generals would be crippled by the human manipulation motive in an attempt to micromanage everything, because their orders can reach the sub-soldier granularity: "Tune all of the field units' fire-control to safe. We don't want any hot-heads escalating right now."
Hours later: "Sir, we just lost a whole platoon because they couldn't return fire ..."
True, there is LOTS of theory saying why this kind of order is bad, and it is starting to become a dominant influence in military doctrine (field manuals), but neither of those preclude that particular order from being executed in a battle situation.
Reference: ISBN 0-89141-518-1 [amazon.com]
Not that IPv6 is bad: it just won't work like that.
New version (Score:4, Funny)
From the article:
I think I only have the old version of the Internet installed. Does the new version have better warez and porn support also? Where can I download it from?
(Yeah yeah, I know. I run IPv6 too:)
IPv6 by 2008 or ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:IPv6 by 2008 or ... (Score:5, Funny)
Liberate it.
Re:IPv6 by 2008 or ... (Score:2)
In other thoughts. It's not just the military that will likely go over but the major military contractors as well. After all, who wants to have to make connectivity with your major customer hard? So it'll end up be
Re:IPv6 by 2008 or ... (Score:2, Insightful)
They don't need to cancel the Internet, just VOID your lucrative military contracts unless you comply.
This is standard governmental practice and works on pressing the only button industry responds to (IE: the wallet button). Virtually all major software companies foreign AND domestic do business with the DoD so yes, this will be an effective way to escalate IPV6 propagation.
Damnit! (Score:5, Funny)
IPv6 sounds great but I see that we will need more TLDs and a domain name will be absolutely necessary.
Frickin' Rainman will be the only one able to remember xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.
At least the giant corporations that are our new overlords will have to spend some serious $$$ to cover all the new 'name.new tld'. Perhaps after all this is done, they can work on flying cars. 'cause we are like 50+ years behind the times here, people.
But all that has to take a back seat to hard to remember IPv6.
Here's a plan, why don't we just take the internet away from all the AOLers, the Flash greeting card senders, the 'Great Story! Read this LOLRFLOLRLOL!!!!'ers, Zone Bejewled players and the cheaters at Counter Strike and we'll have enough IPs for all of the elitist bastards that are going to make my toaster talk to me.
Tell you what. I will trade all my IPs (192.168.x.x) for a friggin' flying car.
Let's make it happen. I'll even have a bumper sticker, "IPv6, but my doctor says I'll be fine!" with a smiley!
Gimmme my flying car.
Get Your Free IPv6 tunnel (Score:3, Interesting)
Regional Networks (Score:3, Interesting)
What is IPv6? (Score:5, Funny)
shortsighted fools! (Score:5, Funny)
Proof:
numOfPeople = 7000000000
def uniqueIP(n):
return 2**n
def ipPerPerson(numOfIP, people):
return numOfIP / people
>>> ipPerPerson(uniqueIP(1024), numOfPeople)
25681330498033084396132931296986067623113956842
By my calculations, that is the minimum number needed per person. With all the nano-devices we will have by 2008, that number will go quickly, trust me.
Even if there are production delays and the nano-devices are not here by 2008, they will still be coming soon, so we may as well be prepared.
Also, for those who are going to complain, having 1024 bit IP addresses will not be much overhead.
What I'd Like to See... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No thanks (Score:2, Interesting)
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Defense Dept. help develop the current IPv4 system decades ago? If so, they've (the Pentagon) had a part in the Internet for a long whiles now.
Re:Why must we have static IPs? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We wouldn't *need* IPv6... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hint: People on other countries don't exist for the sole purpose of serving us.
I've been to Mexico, England, Finland, Russia and Latvia. People actualy have lives there, too. You'd be amazed.
Note to non-USians: I won't judge your country by your most outrageous people if you don't judge mine by ours. Deal?
Re:Why does the US think there all so mighty? (Score:4, Insightful)
I freely admit this is somewhat of a bad thing.
In the last few years, IP addresses have become a scarce resource that people are willing to pay for. Demand is literally outstripping supply, and you can tell it is because people are paying good money for blocks of addresses. (Down at a more personal level, you'll pay more for a broadband connection with a static IP address.) People are buying numbers. This isn't something the designers of the Internet, who foresaw a system with a few tens of millions of nodes at most, could have anticipated. They didn't imagine that every Chinese citizen might want to wander around with a cell phone connected to the 'Net.
There are infinitely many numbers, so it's basically pointless to compete economically over them. The right answer from an efficiency standpoint is to transition to IPv6. Sure, it'll be a pain in the butt as we get it done, but the rewards will be significant.