On Dec 9, 2011, at 1:37 PM, Franck Martin wrote:
I just had a personal email from a brand new ISP in the Asia-Pacific area desperately looking for enough IPv4 to be able to run their business the way they would like…
This is just a data point.
Franck - Thanks for the data point - I'm certain there are others folks out there with similar experiences that we're not hearing about. Of course, the theory was that at this point they'd be able to use IPv6 to connect customers up to the Internet. Such theory was predicated on a presumed strong motivation for everyone already connected via IPv4 to deploy IPv6 in parallel (i.e. dual-stack) and some elusive TBD transition mechanisms which were to make IPv6 customers interoperate with those that hadn't yet deployed IPv6 in parallel. Reality looks very different, in that existing organizations find it difficult to understand why to add IPv6 connectivity to their existing public-facing servers, and the state of the art in achieving transparent operation for IPv6 connected systems to the rest of the Internet running only IPv4 is still effectively a work-in-progress... While your data point may be from the Asia-Pacific region, that same story is going to repeated in every region (RIPE NCC will be running out shortly, and ARIN has 1 to 2 years depending on the actual request rate that materializes) Service providers in the ARIN region need to carefully consider their answer to that same situation, because it will be occurring here soon enough. There is one thing that everyone can do to reduce the impact of this transition, and this is getting in front of their business customers (and small business/power users who have public-facing content) to explain that the Internet is going be running IPv4 and IPv6 for quite some time in parallel and that getting their public-facing servers connected up also via IPv6 is a very good idea (if anyone wants help doing this sort of customer education ARIN's https://www.arin.net/knowledge, NRO's http://www.nro.net/ipv6, and APNIC's IPv6 Act Now http://www.ipv6actnow.org web sites are all good sources on materials for this sort of effort.) The sooner we get the content on IPv6 in addition to IPv4, the sooner that connecting new customers up via IPv6 without additional unique IPv4 address space becomes viable (and obviously if we had the vast majority of content already on IPv6, then connecting new customers via IPv6 would be simple indeed.) FYI, /John John Curran President and CEO ARIN