shim6 @ NANOG (forwarded note from John Payne)

Fri Mar 3 00:05:25 UTC 2006

On 3-mrt-2006, at 0:22, Mark Newton wrote:

> You've probably seen Geoff Huston's comments about this;  I tend
> to agree with him here.

Geoff tends to make lots of comments, it's hard to either agree or  
disagree with them all.  :-)

> When IPv4 space is exhausted, the sky won't fall;  We'll simply
> work out an address space management policy which is different
> from the one we have right now.

Of course. But don't underestimate how address-hungry some people/ 
organizations/places are. For instance, Comcast got 12.5 million  
addresses last year.

> Right now we can hand them out to anyone who demonstrates a need
> for them.  When they run out we'll need to be able to reallocate
> address blocks which have already been handed out from orgs who
> perhaps don't need them as much as they thought they did to orgs
> which need them more.

> Sounds like a marketplace to me.  How much do you think a /24 is
> worth?  How many microseconds do you think it'll take for members
> of each RIR to debate the policy changes needed to alter their
> rules to permit trading of IPv4 resource allocations once IANA
> says, "No!" for the first time?

This is what I wrote about this a couple of months ago: http:// 
ablog.apress.com/?p=835

An interesting aspect about address trading is that some  
organizations have huge amounts of address space which didn't cost  
them anything, or at least not significantly more than what smaller  
blocks of address space cost others. Having them pocket the proceeds  
strikes me as rather unfair, and also counter productive because it  
encourages hoarding. Maybe a system where ARIN and other RIRs buy  
back addresses for a price per bit prefix length rather than per  
address makes sense.

> We'll also have a reasonably good idea of what it'd cost to perform  
> an IPv6
> migration as we gather feedback from orgs who have actually done it.

I don't think the cost is too relevant (and hard to calculate because  
a lot of it is training and other not easily quantified  
expenditures), what counts is what it buys you. I ran a web bug for a  
non-networking related page in Dutch for a while and some 0.16% of  
all requests were done over IPv6. (That's 1 in 666.) So even if it's  
free, deploying IPv6 today isn't all that useful. But when you're the  
last one running IPv4, you'll really want to move over to IPv6, even  
if it's very expensive.