Creston wrote on Jul 29, 2013, 11:43:
IP6 in itself isn't magically going to make congestions go away?

Creston

IPv6 will enable all devices to have their own unique identifier which does away with NAT and a lot of other legacy protocols, but more importantly it allows for geographical load-balancing. It's similar to the local peer discovery and similar technologies seen in Bit Torrent. For example, it's a lot more feasible to get pieces of a YouTube video you're watching from other local users who are watching or have watched (cached) that video, or perhaps from the same relatively local cloud, than it is to get it all from the same giant central source. This process is very intensive with IPv4 but will be a lot more efficient with IPv6 and the technologies that will come with it for the cloud. The congestion goes away because a grid-like system is a lot more feasible when you aren't dealing with a system based on neolithic standards. BTW, this does have the downside of completely destroying privacy, but if you've used any sort of location metrics (say, on your mobile phone) then you're already prepared.

Fundamentally, the end-state for "the cloud" is something that includes all devices...every single device that is connected. This is something that is slowly happening over time, but some devices (like smartphones) are pretty much already there. IPv6 will break away the NAT over time but it's still a long way off. It's still happening, though, and research like this is a step in the direction of application.

This comment was edited on Jul 29, 2013, 11:57.