IPv6? Why, you are the first one to ask for it!

Wed Mar 2 00:47:38 UTC 2011

> The board to the managers/sales people: "Please explain us again why we
> can't have more customers?"

Let's be real for a second, there are plenty of backbone-ish companies that have been around long enough to accumulate tons, and tons of IPv4 space. 

I remember an old SP that used to give every PC in their NOC, possibly their whole company, a /24 and /16s weren't hard to get either. Lots of shops that had IP-based hosting that have gone name-based probably have tons of available space too.

The "no more IP addresses available" will affect folks unevenly... if I were to guess, mostly the folks that aren't large/old enough to have gobs of space lying around but are too large to get provider space. I'm also guessing that these guys are the ones creating the most pressure for IPv6 in their upstreams, as it serves their interests to make IPv4 unneeded as soon as possible.

The next big surge of IT spend that isn't about reduction or consolidation will create pressure on Enterprises to use more address space, and if they are nearly out of IPv4 space (with firewalls, NAT, VPNs, etc, not a lot of pressure there) they will push their SPs for it. Government contracts for telecomm all require IPv6 support, and all the vendors on them say they support it, but gov't customers trying to order say that is a no-go. (As of two weeks ago)... so even gov't isn't a big enough buyer to make this happen sooner.

DJ