It just shows how badly even intelligent people may misunderstood the simple problem

Posted Jan 28, 2011 6:54 UTC (Fri) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312)
In reply to: It just shows how badly even intelligent people may misunderstood the simple problem by khim
Parent article: LCA: Vint Cerf on re-engineering the Internet

"This could have been handled by setting aside a special part of the IPv6 address space for addresses that mapped directly on to IPv4 equivalents."

This is done already.

Not on a routable basis it isn't. If the mapping was routable, the entire IPv4 network numbering plan could be routed through IPv6 only routers. But since the designers did not want to route the large number of prefixes from the existing numbering plan, we instead have a new numbering plan that requires the network configuration of a couple of decades now to be dumped and redone from scratch. A brave new world that no one wants to inhabit.

There were proposals on the table sixteen years ago that would have avoided this problem and made the transition process more or less transparent. Look up TP/IX sometime.