On 07/03/2010, at 4:37 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
I expect that once we all work out that we can use SP-NAT to turn "dynamic IPv4 addresses" into "shared dynamic IPv4 addresses," we'll have enough spare IPv4 addresses for much of the foreseeable future.
Ewwwww... The more I hear people say this, the more I am _REALLY_ glad I am unlikely to have to live behind such an environment. I cannot imagine that this will provide anything remotely resembling a good user experience,
To whom? My mom doesn't care, and isn't likely to ever notice. Gamers might care, but their gaming platforms are likely to be among the first to transition when the rubber meets the road, so they won't be significantly affected. P2P users already don't care because their apps use v6 already. You and I won't care, because we'll have v6 access to everything we need too. Content owners will care a fair bit at the beginning but less as time goes on, and more of their eyeballs become v6-enabled. There'll be bits of the internet that transition very, very quickly to dual-stack or straight-out IPv6, and there'll be other bits which won't. The impact of what I've suggested will be quarantined to that latter category. And frankly I can't see why anyone should be expected to invest engineering time and cost into solving a problem that only exists because the people who are causing it (by not transitioning to v6) expect everyone else to clean up their mess (by providing painless transition tools). To put it another way: The very last IPv4-only Internet user won't have any serious expectation that the rest of the world owes him/her an easy ride. So why should the last five of them, or the last 1000 of them, or even the last billion of them? There'll be a sliding scale of care-factor, and my guess is that it won't take very long to get to the bottom of it, and that the significant bulk of the transition will happen faster than anyone expects.
or, even close to the current degraded user experience most people tolerate behind their current NAT devices.
Sucks to be them. They'd better upgrade then, hadn't they?
If I have half a million residential subscribers and I can get ten subscribers onto each NATted IPv4 addresses, then I only need 50,000 addresses to service them. Yet I have half a million addresses *right now*, which I won't be giving back to my RIR. So that turns into 450,000 saleable addresses for premium customers after the SP-NAT box is turned on, right?
Interesting way of thinking about it. I suspect that rather than pay your premium prices, the customers you just degraded in order to charge them more for the service they had will look to your competitors for better service.
My competitors will have the same problem with the same array of available solutions with the same mixtures of cost, benefit and care-factor. Odds are that they'll probably make many of the same decisions. Sorry, perhaps I'm missing something here, but is there a general expectation that the v4-v6 transition is going to be an easy ride for everyone? - mark -- Mark Newton Email: newton@internode.com.au (W) Network Engineer Email: newton@atdot.dotat.org (H) Internode Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82282999 "Network Man" - Anagram of "Mark Newton" Mobile: +61-416-202-223