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It could be 'five to ten years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

Peter2 Silver badge

... Why not?

There are 254 usable addresses per octet, so my math is running at 254*254*254*254 gives you the ip v4 address space (0 & 255 being unusable, obviously) which gives you 4.2 billion addresses, minus the ~600k reserved addresses.

254*254*254*254*254*254 = two hundred sixty-eight trillion five hundred thirty-five billion addresses.

Think about that for a moment. 268.535 trillion addresses. That .535 trillion? That's five hundred and thirty five billion addresses. IPv4 has 4 billion. The existing IP space would sink into this scheme without leaving a ripple.

A new top level block would be 1,057,227,821,024 addresses under this scheme. That's one trillion, fifty seven billion each. You could literally reserve a top level block to contain IPv4 (which would waste one trillion, 53 billion addresses), allocate the 192 countries in the world a block each and still have 61 blocks that size left spare.

Even China which has a population of a billion and a half would still have seventy addresses per person in it's address block. How is this not enough? How many do you think are needed?

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