CIDR FAQ

>    BTW - I have not studied the RFC's - so what will IPv6 do for us in
>    the contect of routeing aggregation and latger boxes etc ?
> 
> Absolutely Nothing.  You end up back at hierarchical routing.  IPv6
> gets you a bigger address space, so it actually hurts in that it takes
> more memory to store a prefix.
> 
> Tony

the plan is that IPv6 addresses will be allocated hierarchically from day 1,
and with proxy aggregation it should be possible for sean's stated goal of
"4 routes in the table on some defaultless networks" to be reached.

the routing table is no longer doubling every nine months.  we've been sort
of hanging out in the 25,000 - 30,000 range for almost six months now.

the largest single component of the table size comes from old allocations of
class c nets, which are 2/3 the total.

thus if ipv6 actually comes to pass, and we do start over with new prefixes
allocated pseudohierarchically, we may have a lot fewer prefixes, each taking
more memory than an ipv4 prefix, yet taking dramatically less memory overall.

that's the _plan_, mind you.  i don't believe any of it.