Comment by colmmacc
1 month ago
The transition to 7200 VXRs as core routers really hit a tipping point around 2000. They could handle millions of entries in the FiBs and really led to a relief in pressure. Subsequent devices had to match that.
On the IPv6 side; by 2002, nobody was really experimenting with A6 records any more, and EUI64 was needless. Both were parts of IPv6 designed to facilitate "easy" renumbering, so that single prefixes could be replaced with larger ones. But the ISPs weren't complaining any more about table size.
It's interesting to consider that the IPv4 address space is only 32 bits wide. Back in the early 2000s asking for 4GB of RAM was unthinkable, but today (well last year) that's not even a big ask. If your routing decision can fit in a single byte (which interface to use next) you could load the entire thing as a 4GB table easily. 8GB if you need two bytes for the next hop. Multicast might be a problem but since multicast doesn't work on the backbone anyway I think we can ignore it.