IP4 Space - the lie

Mon Mar 8 06:40:07 UTC 2010

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 at internode.com.au (W)
Network Engineer                          Email:  newton at atdot.dotat.org  (H)
Internode Pty Ltd                         Desk:   +61-8-82282999
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