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Wait, why couldn't it?

Just split the address into two 32-bit chunks (call the top word the "pool", bottom word "address") and assign the full IPV4 range to pool 0x00000000. Done.

 help



Well for starters, IPv6 has 128 bit addrs.

But then think about what the routing tables would look like, how would an IPv4-only host find an IPv6 host not in pool 0? You'd be reinventing NAT, but in a less-structured context than how NAT works today. There's more issues to it too.

If it was really that simple they would have done exactly that. "Just adding more bits to IPv4" just isn't possible to do backwards-compatibly. IPv6 is the closest you can get to that while also dealing with the complexity that arises with longer addresses.


>how would an IPv4-only host find an IPv6 host not in pool 0?

Ah.


Until you upgrade every router between 2 hosts so that it understands the IPv4b addressing scheme, those 2 hosts can't talk. And if you're going to upgrade them all anyway, then might as well do it right.

In what world does is such a protocol any more *”””compatible”””* with IPv4 than IPv6 already is? It is a different header after all.

That doesn't change anything - until everyone adopts the new chunk nobody can use it (even one windows XP machine that you don't personally care about is enough to still kill it today). IPv6 is better because at least it can work side by side by IPv6.



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