Today’s Networks

Many industry experts predicted in the early 2000’s that IPv6 would be
ubiquitous within a few years
It hasn’t worked out that way – most enterprises today use RFC 1918
IPv4 addresses with NAT
RFC 1918 has the security benefit of hiding inside hosts by default
(they don’t have a publicly routable IP address), plus network
engineers have more experience with IPv4 than v6
Today’s Networks
IPv6 is mostly found in service provider networks, mobile services, and
large countries with later Internet adoption such as India and China
Spare public IPv4 addresses were exhausted in 2011 so IPv6 is still the
future path
Today’s Networks
You still need to understand subnetting – modern enterprises subnet
their RFC 1918 addresses to optimise performance and security
You also need to understand and be able to troubleshoot IP
Today’s Networks
Because they have the entire private IP address space to work with, it’s
common to see /24 subnets being used for end hosts, /30 for point to
point links, and /32 for loopbacks
Complex VLSM is more common in enterprises which use public IP
addresses on their inside networks and need to maximise their use
Contiguous Addresses and Route Summarisation

Region A Region B
10.0.0.0/24 Advertise
10.1.0.0/24
10.0.0.0/16
10.0.1.0/24 10.1.1.0/24
Advertise
10.1.0.0/16
10.0.2.0/24 10.1.2.0/24

Etc… 10.0.255.0/24 Etc… 10.1.255.0/24

Non-Contiguous Addresses

Region A Region B
10.0.0.0/24 Cannot Summarise
10.1.0.0/24

10.1.0.0/24 10.0.1.0/24

10.0.2.0/24 10.1.2.0/24

10.1.3.0/24 10.0.3.0/24