At 12:30 PM +0100 7/25/07, Stephen Wilcox wrote:
Hi John, I fully agree on that.. but I am disagreeing as to the timescales.
There is some opinion that when IANA hands out the last of its IP blocks things will change overnight, and I dont see any reason for that to be the case. I think there are a lot of IPs currently allocated to ISPs but as yet unassigned to customers, and I think there will be a lot of policy changes to make more efficient use of the space that is already out there - I specifically think that will come from ISPs reusing IPs and setting costs that ensure they continually have IPs available to customers willing to pay for them.
In the ARIN region, we've got major ISP's coming back every 6 months with high utilization rates seeking their next block to allow customer growth. While I'm certain that some internal recovery is possible, there's a realistic limit of how long any ISP can make their air supply last.
I think the combined effect of these things means - we will not be running into a wall at any time - availability of IPs will slowly decrease over time (as cost slowly increases) - adoption of NAT and v6 will be an ongoing trend with no sudden increase
Unless the policy changes you suggest somehow dramatically change the current usage rate, we're going to have a very serious rate of change when the IANA/RIR pool hits zero. That sort of defines "hitting a wall", by my definition. Please propose the magical policy changes asap... we need to get them through the public process and adopted in record time to have any affect on the usage rate.
This means no end of the world as we know it, and no overnight adoption of new technology.. just business as usual in an evolving environment.
Note: I'm not advocating an "overnight" technology deployment; just advising those folks who presently rely on continuous availability of new address blocks from the RIR's that we're going to see a change. At present, there's a few years for these folks to switch to IPv6 for their growth. It requires cooperation from the Internet, in that we all need to recognize that there will be IPv6 customers out there soon, and even if you don't plan on having those, please make your public facing servers IPv6 reachable in the next few years. /John