From: Ben Butler Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2010 10:18 AM To: 'Marshall Eubanks' Cc: NANOG Subject: RE: Only 5x IPv4 /8 remaining at IANA
Hi,
What is the consequence of not managing to transition the v4 network and having to maintain it indefinitely. I think if the cost / limitations that this may place on things is great enough then the "how" will reveal itself with the interested parties.
Is there a downside to being stuck with both address spaces rather
than
just 6, idk, you tell me, but there seems to be from what I can tell.
I am not suggesting any form of timeframe in the exact number of years / decades, just that a timeframe should exist where after a certain date - whatever that is - we can say ok, now we are turning off v4.
The first step will be a registrar saying "after this date, we will no longer issue any IPv4 addresses for whatever reason" and at the same time, getting very aggressive in reclaiming space from dead entities, hijackers, etc. As time goes by, the amount of v4 space being routed declines through natural attrition. It is a combination of liberal v6 assignment coupled with aggressive v4 reclamation. At some point the network operators themselves will announce their own "drop dead" dates for supporting v4. When the amount of v4 traffic drops to some point where the infrastructure required to support it becomes unreasonable, they will stop supporting it. As v4 becomes harder to route, it will become harder to find v4 providers ... sort of like v6 is not available from *all* providers in a native sense today. Sure, there will probably be people out there who will offer v4 over v6 tunnels long after most providers have stopped routing it sort of like 6 over 4 is offered today, but even those will become scarce at some point. Once no more addresses are issued for any reason and once people stop handling the traffic natively, it will die its own natural death and kids entering the networking field will look at a v4 config and wonder why it is even there.
In the absence of any form of timeframe what is the operational benefit of any existing v4 user migrating to v6 if the service provider is going to make magic happen that enables them to talk to v6 only host via some mysterious bridging box.
Yeah, that does delay things but is required glue for the moment.
I can see none, which tells me they are not going to bother spending there time and money renumbering and deploying v6 - ever!
Yes they will, see above.
There needs to be a technical, commercial or operational reason for them to want to go through the change.
Ben
Yeah, the "we decided to make a completely incompatible protocol with really no other immediate technical benefit other than more address space ... and each route takes up 4x more router resources" decision was probably a bad call. Heck, simply expanding the number of ports from 16 bit to 32 bit would have greatly reduced ip address requirements from people having to add IPs to NAT pools and other source NATs due to port exhaustion.