Dobbins, Roland wrote:
On Nov 28, 2012, at 11:18 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
If the entire deployment path automatically requires 84 layers of NAT sludge, that's what gets tested, cause it "works" for "everybody".
Hence my questions regarding the actual momentum behind end-to-end native IPv6 deployment. Inertia is generally only overcome when there's a clear positive economic benefit to doing so - 'savings', assuming there actually are any, are a) almost always exaggerated and b) generally not a powerful enough incentive to alter the status quo.
That is why the preference is biased toward IPv6 when it is available. If you expect the end users to make a conscious choice it will never happen. If the underlying OS components make that choice for them, you end up with a transition. Open the page that Tim Chown sent out : http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/ Select World-scale data : then open IPv6 Prefix & User graphs. Look at the correlation between IPv6-alive prefixes & user %. Those users never made a conscious choice, the OS did it as soon as it had a path to the target. As more prefixes light up, the 'unconscious pent up demand' will make that User curve even steeper. The primary bottleneck at this point is and will be CPE. Fixing that will likely require a financial incentive to get consumers to 'upgrade' their working box. Normal lifecycle replacements will take a long time, requiring larger investments in cgn's, so as soon as the new cpe is available in sufficient quantity at a reasonable price point, any MBA can go make the case you are looking for about why it is cheaper to do a cpe subsidy than it is to invest in a never-ending cgn saga (if they can't figure it out have someone hire an MBA from the mobile providers who transition handsets off the old network all the time). Getting the cpe vendors to ship in quantity requires the ISP engineering organizations to say in unison "we are deploying IPv6 and will only recommend products that pass testing". As long as there are voices calling for 444nat in the flavor-of-the-week, cpe vendors will not focus on the long term goal, because they will see the interim steps as opportunity to extract more cash for short-life products. So will infrastructure vendors for that matter. Indecision and scatter-shot approaches only increase the number of things that need to be bought, deployed, and operated. That overall additional cost is a complete waste to the operator / end user, and clear profit for the vendors. You claim to be looking for the economic incentive, but are looking with such a short time horizon that all you see are the 'waste' products vendors are pushing to make a quick sale, knowing that you will eventually come back for yet-another-hack to delay transition, and prop up your expertise in a legacy technology. The same thing happened with the SNA faithful 15 years ago, and history shows what happened there. Tony