On Sat, Sep 18, 2021 at 2:39 PM John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
The cost of putting flyers in the bills rounds to zero, so yes, really. I expect these companies all have plans to support v6 eventually, someday, once they're retired and replaced all of the old junk that handles v6 poorly or not at all, but you know about accountants and depreciation.
Unless their infrastructure runs significantly on hardware and software
It appears that Owen DeLong via NANOG <owen@delong.com> said: pre-2004 (unlikely), so does the cost of
adding IPv6 to their content servers. Especially if they’re using a CDN such as Akamai.
I wasn't talking about switches and routers. I was talking about every single piece of software and equipment that they use for support and marketing and customer service and all the other stuff that big companies do.
As I may have said once or twice, eventuallly it'll all be replaced so it works on IPv6 but we're not holding our breath.
Glad you noted this. Thinking this was/is purely a hardware cycle problem related to normal/forced upgrade strategies. On that point, most hardware I know of from 2004 in larger networks is long fully depreciated and sweating assets 15+ years can happen, but I don't personally think this is the biggest issue. As you noted John, its the plethora of software, support systems, tooling, and most important in many environments - legacy customer management and provisioning systems that can be the limiting factor. I recall looking back when leading IPv6 turn-up, those were the biger problems to solve for. Often such systems are extremely expensive to touch and working on them required prioritization against direct revenue generating projects (opportunity cost) . Replacing routers was just a money problem. I am by far not saying I agree with choices made by hold-outs, but I also understand this is for many, not just an engineering problem to solve. regards, Victor K
R's, John