thomseddon

Yeah it's certainly not without issue, the network is full of blockages, collapsed ducts etc.

Traffic management and road closures can be hard work, we've had to wait over a year before for a road closure as it would affect multiple bus routes. (And as an aside, lockdown was extremely productive for network build like this!)

I'm planning to release this as a plugin :)

Both are valid addresses and can be assigned to hosts.

Network address is only really used for directly attached networks, non directly attached networks will route to any address in the block correctly.

Same for broadcast address, they're also relative to whatever block you're talking about at the time, so whilst 3.255.255.255 is the broadcast for 3.0.0.0/8 subnet it's just another "usable" address in the 3.0.0.0/5 subnet and when you send a packet then you, and probably your router, don't know what subnets in use on the other side :) (unless it's directly attached)

Too many customer devices don't support /31 subnets unfortunately, for example with Draytek we've seen an issue where it would accept the 255.255.255.254 subnet but we'd see a whole raft of connection issues making the connection unusable.

If we provide a dedicated IP for a connection where we provide the LAN we just put a single /32 on the loopback and NAT onto this which is obviously much more economic with addresses.

We're an ISP, most of our customers are businesses. Of those, around 50% opt for a pre-configured LAN (i.e. we do NAT and usually CGNAT too).

For the rest we provide a static IP address, so we'll allocate a /30 (block of 4), and they get a single usable address which they will assign to their own manged router/firewall.

For the majority of our customers "networking" is either handled as overflow for their in/out IT resource or often by someone remotely savvy with tech.

For most of these people networking ranges from an infrequent concern to a vague mystery that can be sorted with a bit of googling.

For most, deploying and testing IPv6 has absolutely no upside and quite a bit of potential downside, that's because "everything works" on IPv4 and configuring IPv6 is just another potential source of error.

In addition, most people who opt for this setup do so in order to expose some internal service to the internet (port forward), again there is usually zero incentive to also deploy IPv6 as they can't be sure their client device will be using v6 when they come to connect, but they know it will support v4, everything does.

And so herin lies the issue, it's chicken and egg, they know they need v4, not every server they access or client who accesses their forwards supports v6, so they _have_ to implement v4. As such they see no reason to "faff" about with IPv6, and I don't really blame them.

We're considering charging more for dedicated v4 and possibly offering a free translation service (another point of failure :() but honestly, most would just pay the extra and then just resent us a little more. Our competitors continue to acquire v4 space as we do, this is what our customers want.

Until there is v6 only content (but who is incentivised to do this?) then I can't see any incentive for these users.

Homo Deus (the sequel as mentioned) answers the question of why he has formed his particular view of the future.

In essence, yes economic incentive is the basis for much of today's human corporation, but with growing AI/robotics, the same economic incentive will make much current human input unnecessary.

Then, for example, would counties see so many humans as a big cost? How do they solve that if they no longer need them to work?

Scary stuff.