On Thu, 10 Feb 2011 06:35:42 GMT, Matthew Moyle-Croft said:
That's an assertion I've heard, but has anyone quantified it? How much time and money would it take? Has anyone just asked the 22 /8 holders mentioned above nicely if they might just like to give them back for some good publicity?
There's only two minor problems with the idea: 1) How long will 22 /8's delay the inevitable if they were all available immediately? How much good will they do if only 3 or 4 actually return their /8? How much good will any of them do if they take 6 or 12 months to become available? If you get 2 a quarter from 4Q11 till 3Q13, how much does that change the basic point that people really should be deploying IPv6 rather than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? 2) "Little Red Hen, Inc just completed a multi-hundred-thousand dollar project to renumber their entire network to return a /8 to benefit the lamb, the cat, and the pig, while Ant Co completed their own renumbering to return a /8 to benefit the grasshopper. The lamb, cat, pig, and grasshopper were all grateful for the ability to avoid deploying IPv6 even longer". Is that the sort of publicity you really want, and is it good enough to justify the cost of renumbering your entire network? At least in the current US climate, if a corporation has a /8 allocation, it's really hard to make the business case that you should spend money to renumber out of it, to the benefit of your competitors who then get to *not* spend money deploying IPv6.