Though IPv5 wasn’t a general-purpose Internet Protocol, it took the v5 designation in development documents. It was never ratified as a global protocol, but to avoid confusion, we moved straight to IPv6 as IPv4’s genuine successor.
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Mark Tyson Social Links Navigation News Editor Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
vanadiel007 You know what, I never questioned why 4 to 6. Never questioned where 5 was. Learn something new every day! Reply
ozadam I was the product manager for ST2/IPv5 at Wellfleet Communications in the 90s. We implemented ST2 and it was used in production in relatively large network at US DoD, dont think I can describe exactly who and the use case. Reply
Sam Hobbs This article implies that IPv6 came before IPv5. IPv5 used the same 4-byte values that IPv4 uses. ChatGPT says there is nothing that IPv5 can do that could not be done with IPv4 (with some insignificant exceptions). Reply
lpaln The problem with IPv4 is not that we don't have addresses, but that companies are totally abusing the IP addresses that we do have. To be clear at the top level, IPv4 supports 4.6 billion networks. A single IP address is simply a gateway to another local network. Using port forwarding, you can have a DNS server, a web server, A VPN server, etc, etc, etc all using 1 Public IP address. In the simplest setup, you need 1 IP for each connected webserver (using port 80) but even this is easily worked around. By using reverse proxies or load balancers, you can be running hundred of servers running thousands of sites all behind a single IP address. Like I said the problem is companies abusing the IPs they own. Circa 2010, I got a network admin job working for a company with about 150 clients and a dozen or so servers. They owned not one, but TWO class B segments. That is 255x255X2 externally routeable addresses. They were using private reserved internally (10.x.x.x) and needed maybe 5-6 external IPs without using any workarounds. In a small company, this was an easy fix for me. I dumped the entire segments, saved the company a bunch of money and kept a single /24 which was still greedy on my part. Flash forward about 10 years and I am working in a very large company and they own, get this, a class A network. 1/255 of all the internet addresses in the world belong to them. What do they do with them? Every single client in the company is assigned a public address. If you're following me here, as you can imagine, these clients are not externally accessible. They are just passing out public IPs to internal clients and the firewalls won't route them. I was working in another area in IT at this point, but I brought this up to the global network leads and they basically laughed me off. How dare I apply common sense? Totally wasteful. If you want to see what the real issue with IPv4 is, some school somewhere should do a survey. I'd be really curious to know out of all the public addresses available, how many of them are actually connected and serving anything. 1%? 2%? Who knows. My whole point is that the reason we are short on IPv4 addresses is because they are being used incorrectly, and being hoarded and abused by ISPs and large companies. Reply
Zeus574 I find it kind of funny that companies use them as collateral, but my ISP just hands them out to customers for no charge. Even better is it's a static IP for a residential account. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/ipv5-and-the-internet-stream-protocol-a-data-streaming-experiment-rendered-unnecessary-by-broadband#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.