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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

"just upgrade every backbone router to handle it" - you've just recreated the same problem.

Routers don't run packet addresses through software, they run then through silicon ASICs which know the address is 32 bits, that's it.

Your solution is literally how Cisco implemented IPv6 on a bunch of it's switches: the IPv6 routing path goes through the firmware and is slow as hell compared to the pure ASIC IPv4 handling. It didn't catch on because it was terrible at any scale (we were building Hadoop clusters, 100+ big data nodes with constrained throughout is money down the drain).

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So how many backbone routers are 20 years old?

Your claim was that any change to the ASIC was the same design cost. But really? A 40-bit routing table design, where there is a 32-bit fall-back to preserve the top 8-bits vs a 128-bit routing table design. Why would these be the same cost?

How much cost in labor, disruption and time do you think upgrading every backbone router would be?

When would you have done it? When the hardware was 5 years old? 10 years old? I've been on change operations where the hardware was over a decade old and our biggest concern was making sure we had replacement PSUs on hand since the thermal shock of a reboot might take them out.

This is the problem, you have absolutely no idea what anything costs or how it works - you're simply thinking "lifting those bits sounds heavy, what if we made them lighter?" as though a committee of engineers, designers and industry didn't spend a lot of time considering exactly that problem.

If you could add 1 byte in software and be done with it, it would have already happened.

Upgrading hardware is an ongoing process. You are proposing a single point of change without any reason for it to be handled that way.

You are arguing that all change has the same cost. I don't see your reasoning for this. A smaller change to a system has a lower cost in R&D, and a lower cost in manufacture.

Although it is probably true that the cost of updating all equipment dominates the cost of redesign, this is only an issue for a big bang update rather than a rolling upgrade.

This shows a basic lack of understanding as to how any of this works.

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