On Thu, Mar 02, 2006 at 10:44:01PM +0100, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
And why would those people consider migrating to IPv6?
Because they can't get IPv4 addresses or so many other people use IPv6 (because _they_ can't get IPv4 addresses) that communicating with them natively is important. But today there are still enough IPv4 addresses (I just checked: we still have 1444.12 million addresses or 86.08 /8s) so that won't happen for a few more years.
You've probably seen Geoff Huston's comments about this; I tend to agree with him here. When IPv4 space is exhausted, the sky won't fall; We'll simply work out an address space management policy which is different from the one we have right now. Right now we can hand them out to anyone who demonstrates a need for them. When they run out we'll need to be able to reallocate address blocks which have already been handed out from orgs who perhaps don't need them as much as they thought they did to orgs which need them more. Sounds like a marketplace to me. How much do you think a /24 is worth? How many microseconds do you think it'll take for members of each RIR to debate the policy changes needed to alter their rules to permit trading of IPv4 resource allocations once IANA says, "No!" for the first time? That'll be interesting, because it'll place a cost on not migrating to IPv6: If an ISP wishes to grow its business it'll need to have sufficient resources to buy the address space it needs. We'll also have a reasonably good idea of what it'd cost to perform an IPv6 migration as we gather feedback from orgs who have actually done it. My guess is that we'll keep using IPv4 until the cost of growing businesses with the old address space exceeds the cost of migrating to the new one. One thing that Geoff hasn't been cynical enough to put forward is the idea that orgs with lots of valuable, monetized address space may very well end up lobbying the IAB and RIRs to erect new cost structures around green-fields IPv6 allocations as well, to make sure that the profit-providing marketplace survives for as long as possible by making the IPv6 migration process as expensive and inconvenient as possible. What will happen when the MCI's of the world discover that the race to $0 for IP transit prices has created a world in which they make more money by selling their IPv4 addresses than they make by selling Internet access? Will we see them coming out as a strong supporter of restrictive RIR policies and IPv6 technologies which don't work as a way of artificially boosting the price of IPv6? It's going to be a fun ride :-) - mark -- Mark Newton Email: newton@internode.com.au (W) Network Engineer Email: newton@atdot.dotat.org (H) Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82282999 "Network Man" - Anagram of "Mark Newton" Mobile: +61-416-202-223