Am I just blind or is it others who believe IPv4 and IPv6 are REAL ? My guess is that both don’t exist really but just in the minds of the hardware that uses them – like, er, routers. Methinks therefore the only failure routers are those that can’t have their firmware updated to cope with the ‘next generation’ of addressing.

I’ve not yet found the technical details of IPv6 but assume it’s based on an expansion of IPv4 and is therefore similarly flawed.

Apart from roaming hardware, I see no ‘real’ advantage of having dynamic IP addresses – other than it being a cheap option to provide a potentially flawed network.

Why don’t ‘we’ do what’s been done with postal addresses and just concatenate increasing amount of detail to each address as necessary ? A letter addressed to me would need quite a lot of detail, whereas one addressed to ‘President Obama’ wouldn’t need anything more than that; wherever in the world it was posted.

Working on this basis while sticking to the familiar IPv4, why can’t this PC’s address be:

81.141.44.25
192.168.1.25

and written:

81.141.44.25.192.168.1.25

So basically the first half of this finds my global IP (i.e. router) and the second half the router uses to find the individual piece of equipment.

Taking it a stage further, the first number could be a country code, then county/state, then place, then organisation – based on the organisation’s head office – so that if they have offices in many countries, overseas (from Head Office) offices would appear to be in the Head Office’s country – as physical location doesn’t matter.

Anyway, have a think about a better addressing system before implementing IPv6

Mike.