IP Addressing Fundamentals

The Need for More

Chapter 5, “The Date of Doom,” looked at many of the reasons that motivated the development of IPv6 and the incredibly successful stopgap tools. Remember, these stopgaps were intended solely to buy enough time for the IPv4 address space for IPv6 to be developed. The motivating factor was the impending depletion of the Class B address space. A “Date of Doom” was projected—the date on which the Internet would no longer be able to service the needs of many of its users because its address architecture proved to be less scalable than the Internet itself. The good news is that the scare tactic worked: The Internet's technical and engineering communities rallied and drew up a two-pronged battle plan. One group would be dedicated to ...