On Aug 3, 2011, at 1:04 AM, sthaug@nethelp.no wrote:
Experience from IPv4 suggests otherwise. We (as an ISP) normally hand out dynamic IPv4 addresses to residential customers, and static IPv4 addresses to business customers.
- We have plenty of business customers who *want* dynamic addresses, even if static is available as a standard part of their product.
- There are quite a few ISPs here that offer static IPv4 addresses to residential customers. Those ISPs haven't captured the whole market, strangely enough.
So I completely disagree with the claim that (all) people will choose static over dynamic if it is available at the same price. From my POV the market here clearly wants both options - and both are available.
Europe is a little odd in that way, especially DE and NO in that there seems to be this weird FUD running around claiming that static addresses are in some way more antithetical to privacy.
I haven't noticed FUD like that here in Norway. From my POV the reason quite a few customers *want* dynamic has much more to do with ease of use:
- Dynamic address: Customer connects PC (defaults to DHCP) or router/ firewall with DHCP for the WAN interface plus NAT for the LAN side. Necessary configuration: Small to none.
- Static address: Customer needs to configure PC or router/firewall with static address(es). This is no longer a "small touch/zero touch" configuration.
That's only true if you don't make static DHCP lease available to customers that want static addresses. You are confusing auto configured addresses with dynamic addresses. They are not the same thing.
For a customer who doesn't know a lot about computers and networking the difference between these two alternatives can be dramatic…
I agree that autoconf is desirable. Now, please explain to me why it is desirable for the address to change at random intervals from the customer perspective? (i.e. why would one want dynamic rather than static auto configuration?) Owen