In a message written on Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 05:18:16PM +0200, Pekka Savola wrote:
Who has the other transition mechanisms in place? What is the cost of deploying those transition mechanisms? At present it's not obvious how you can explain to the bean counters that deploying these are profitable.
It's very hard, so most people aren't deploying, yet.
My point is that it seems somewhat premature to talk extensively of 2) -> 3) transition because we haven't even figured out 1) -> 2) yet. Getting to 2) is the challenge, from there it is straightforward.
The driver for 1-2 is the end of the IPv4 free pool. It doesn't much matter if the cause is IPv4 simply not being available anymore, or if the result is some way of moving IPv4 addresses around for money; they both will get the bean counters attention real quick. In essense the cost of IPv4 is going to dramatically rise, one way or another. And that's only the first order effect of getting the addresses. Second order effects like hanling the routing table deaggregation haven't begun to be calculated. So basically the IPv4 free pool exhaustion will drive 1-2 rather rapidly. Once we're in state 2, simple economics will drive the 2-3 transtion rather rapidly. 20 years ago was 1988. The World Wide Web did not even exist. AOL (the first service branded under that name) wasn't launched until 1989. A T1 served an enter university campus. 9600 baud was a fast modem. In essense, the entire industry as we know it was built in the last 20 years. Now think hard about a prediction we'll still be running IPv4 in 20 years. A two decade transition period just does not fit this industry's history. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/