Sad IPv4 story?

John Curran jcurran at arin.net
Sun Dec 11 11:52:21 UTC 2011


On Dec 9, 2011, at 1:37 PM, Franck Martin wrote:

> I just had a personal email from a brand new ISP in the Asia-Pacific area desperately looking for enough IPv4 to be able to run their business the way they would like…
> 
> This is just a data point.

Franck - 
 
  Thanks for the data point - I'm certain there are others folks
  out there with similar experiences that we're not hearing about.

  Of course, the theory was that at this point they'd be able to 
  use IPv6 to connect customers up to the Internet. Such theory 
  was predicated on a presumed strong motivation for everyone already
  connected via IPv4 to deploy IPv6 in parallel (i.e. dual-stack) and 
  some elusive TBD transition mechanisms which were to make IPv6 
  customers interoperate with those that hadn't yet deployed IPv6  
  in parallel.  

  Reality looks very different, in that existing organizations
  find it difficult to understand why to add IPv6 connectivity to 
  their existing public-facing servers, and the state of the art in 
  achieving transparent operation for IPv6 connected systems to the 
  rest of the Internet running only IPv4 is still effectively a 
  work-in-progress...

  While your data point may be from the Asia-Pacific region, that
  same story is going to repeated in every region (RIPE NCC will
  be running out shortly, and ARIN has 1 to 2 years depending on
  the actual request rate that materializes)  Service providers in
  the ARIN region need to carefully consider their answer to that
  same situation, because it will be occurring here soon enough.

  There is one thing that everyone can do to reduce the impact of
  this transition, and this is getting in front of their business
  customers (and small business/power users who have public-facing
  content) to explain that the Internet is going be running IPv4
  and IPv6 for quite some time in parallel and that getting their
  public-facing servers connected up also via IPv6 is a very good
  idea (if anyone wants help doing this sort of customer education 
  ARIN's https://www.arin.net/knowledge, NRO's http://www.nro.net/ipv6, 
  and APNIC's IPv6 Act Now http://www.ipv6actnow.org web sites are all 
  good sources on materials for this sort of effort.)

  The sooner we get the content on IPv6 in addition to IPv4, the sooner 
  that connecting new customers up via IPv6 without additional unique 
  IPv4 address space becomes viable (and obviously if we had the vast
  majority of content already on IPv6, then connecting new customers 
  via IPv6 would be simple indeed.)

FYI,
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN






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