legacy /8

Sun Apr 11 19:06:16 UTC 2010

On Apr 11, 2010, at 11:34 AM, David Conrad wrote:

> On Apr 11, 2010, at 8:09 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
>>> Part fo the reason folks aren't rushing to the V6 bandwagon is it's not needed.  Stop doing the chicken little dance folks.  V6 is nice and gives us tons of more addresses but I can tell you V4 is more than two years form "dying" just by seeing all the arm flailing going around.
>> IPv4 will not die in 2 years.  
> 
> I'd wager it won't be dead in 20 years. Of course, a lot depends on what is meant by "dying".
> 
Yep.

Assuming IPv6 catches on in the post-runout crisis (and I think it will), I suspect that IPv4 will be largely deprecated on the wide-spread internet within about 5-10 years of IPv6 practical ubiquity.  I suspect it will ALWAYS be used in some niches somewhere.

>> Growth in IPv4 accessible hosts will stop or become significantly more expensive or both in about 2.5 years (+/- 6 months).
> 
> Growth stopping is extremely unlikely. Growth becoming significantly more expensive is guaranteed.  Address utilization efficiency will increase as people see the value in public IPv4 addresses.  ISPs interested in continuing to grow will do what it takes to obtain IPv4 addresses and folks with allocated-but-unused addresses will be happy to oblige (particularly when they accept that they only need a couple of public IP addresses for their entire network).  At some point, it may be that the cost of obtaining IPv4 will outstrip the cost of migrating to IPv6.  If we're lucky.
> 
Eventually, utilization efficiency will get close to 100% and growth will, therefore stop.

Note, I was specific about IPv4 accessible hosts, as in hosts which you can send a TCP SYN packet to, not merely hosts which can originate connections. Multi-layer NAT may help increase the number of IPv4-non-accessible hosts, but, it can do little to help increase accessible host count.

Owen