IPv3.1416β

TV Commercial Promoting the New IP Standard

IPv3.1416β is the IP numbering standard of the 21st century.

For many years, the Internet community has been pushed to move to IPv6 as the address space of IPv4 is getting exhausted. Even though IPv4 provides for about 4 billion of IP-addresses, this is not enough. Even the world population has exceeded that number and every person walking on the globe has the right to allocate at least 1024 devices with an IP-address to give it Internet connectivity, according to the Convention of Winterthur.

To make sure the human rights that are laid down in the Convention of Winterthur can be respected, IPv6 was invented, which provided a whole lot more of IP addresses than IPv4 did. However, after years and years of pushing people to move to IPv6, in the end must users stuck with IPv4, with the exception of a handful of nerds. At a certain point, the patience of the IPv6 engineers reached its limit, and they desperately looked for alternatives that might actually appeal to the general public.

In their attempt to make the new protocol more appealing, very unconventional means were used, like TV comercials with scantily ladies standing perkily in the rain, waiting for the rollout of the new protocol to happen.

Etymology

Paradoxically, the attempt to make a new IP numbering scheme more appealing to the wider public resulted in a name of the protocol that can barely be pronounced and that hardly has any appeal to most people. The origin of the word IPv3.1416β is somewhat obscure. In the IPv6 labs of the IETF, the following anecdote was made up by a spokesman who had to address a pesky journalist. Googling for the strings IPv7, IPv8, IPv9 etc. revealed, that many alternative projects had been started and finding a unique name for the new IP addressing scheme appeared to be nontrivial. That is why the name IPv3.1416β was chosen. The algorithm for choosing this name was very simple: Take a piece of a pie leaving out the decimal, like 3, 31, 314, 3142, 31416, etc., prefix it with 'IPv', suffix it with the German Eszett and make sure the result has 0 google hits after the decimal had been inserted again, which in hindsight did not need to be removed at an earlier stage after all. The reason to use pi as a basis for forming the name of the protocol is accidental: One of the engineers made a typo and wrote 'PI' instead of 'IP', and his colleagues thought that was funny. Once the name had been published in the internal literature, it was too difficult and costly to change it into a more reasonable name. The Eszett was added to make sure that both the Greek speaking people, who would interpret that as the Greek letter beta would accept the standard, as well as the German speaking people, who would recognize their Eszett.

Differences between IPv6 and IPv3.1416β

One of the outstanding differences between IPv3.1416β and its successor IPv4 and its competitor IPv6 is the fact, that it is far more ambitious: Whereas IPv4 and IPv6 leave the TPC/IP stack and the OSI stack intact, IPv3.1416β has as a side effect that it makes all 7 OSI layers and all 4 TCP/IP layers collapse into one single layer: the IPv3.1416β layer. One of the toughest problems with rolling out IPv6 was the fact, that many applications in the application layer were not IPv6 compliant. Making sure this highest layer collapsed into the lowest layers of the model, resulting in one single layer, eliminated this problem. There was no application layer anymore, so nothing needed to be fixed in that layer in order to be able to roll out IPv3.1416β. The designers of IPv3.1416β hoped, that the simplified model would appeal to the general public and make the rollout of the new IP addressing scheme more likely.

Simplicity of the Model

A layered model can be compared with a pie with layers. A simple pie with just one layer can taste just as well as one with many layers. A simple model with one layer can be just as effective as a complicated model with many layers

The addressing scheme and DNS setup of IPv3.1416β is far simpler than that of IPv6 and even simpler than that of IPv4. There is no distinction anymore between forward and reverse DNS as every network device that uses IPv3.1416β is configured with one single address: 314.159.265.358.097.093 and has the name node3141592653589793. Because of this simplified approach, no packets need to be routed and no networking is necessary anymore. As a result of this simple approach, the security of the IPvIPv3.1416β model is very high.

Critics hold that the simple approach of the IPvIPv3.1416β standard is not very practical. In their view, IPv3.x is actually a downgrade of IPv6. They think that it results in millions of stand alone computers with limited functionality. The most common response to this by proponents of the IPv3.1416β standard is, that at least this standard is actually adopted by the general public.

Defense of the One Layer Model

Proponents of the one layer model of the IPv3.1416β standard usually reason as follows:

• The OSI standard has 7 layers
• The TCP/IP standard has only 4 layers (3 less than the OSI standard) and also accounts for all facts and explains everything
• By extrapolation, the IPv3.1416β standard has only 1 layer (3 less than the TCP/IP standard) and also accounts for all facts and explains everything