This is not how routers look at it though. Routing is performed on the destination IP address, which is only 32 bits. Doubling from 32 to 64 would have had a s

This is not how routers look at it though. Routing is performed on the destination IP address, which is only 32 bits. Doubling from 32 to 64 would have had a significant impact on routing table size and it would have dropped the back pressure to keep it from growing too quickly for TCAMs. It would certainly be nice today, but it’s not a sure thing it wouldn’t have been killed off as “bloated” when there weren’t even 2^12 hosts.