How long will it take to completely get rid of IPv4 or will it happen at all?

Sat Jun 27 18:02:05 UTC 2015

Bob Evans wrote:
> 
> Our fundamental issue is that an IPv4 address has no real value as
networks
> still give them away, it's pennies in your pocket. Everything of use needs
to
> have a cost to motivate for change. Establishing that now won't create
> change it will first create greater conservation. There will be a cost
that will
> be reached before change takes place on a scale that matters.
> 
> Networks set the false perception and customer expectation that address
> space is free and readily available. Networks with plenty, still land many
> customers today by handing over a class C to customer with less than 10
> servers and 5 people in an office.
> 
> We have a greater supply for packets to travel than we do for addresses
> required to move packets. Do you know how many packets a single IP
> address can generate or utilize, if it was attached too "The World's
Fastest
> Internet" in someplace like Canadaland or Sweden on init7's Fiber7 ?  No
> matter how large the pipe the answer is always, "all of it". It's address
space
> we should now place a price upon. Unlike, My Space's disappearance when
> Facebook arrived there is no quick jump to IPv6. There is no coordinated
> effort required that involves millions of people to change browser window
> content.
> 
> But to answer your question...
> 
> Everything that is handed over for free is perceived as having no value.
> Therefore, IPv4 has to cost much more than the cost to change to IPv6
today.
> While the IPv6 addresses are free, it is expensive to change.
> Businesses spend lots of money on a free lunches. It's going to take at
least
> the price of one good lunch per IP address per month to create the
> consideration for change. That's about $30 for 2 people in California.
> Offering a /48 of free IPv6 space to everyone on the planet didn't make it
> happen.
> 
> There is no financial incentive to move to IPv6. In fact there is more
reason
> "not to change" than "to change". The new gear cost $$$ (lots of it didn't
> work well and required exploration to learn that),  IT people need hours
to
> implement (schedules are full of day-to-day issues), networks keep growing
> with offerings that drop Internet costs and save everyone money, business
> as usual is productive on IPv4 (business doesn't have time for
distraction),
> many of us get distracted by something more immediate and interesting
> than buying a new wi-fi router for the home.
> 
> What will come first ?
> A) the earths future core rotation changes altering the ionosphere in such
a
> way that we are all exposed to continuous x-rays that shorten our lifespan
>                  OR
> B) the last IPv4 computer running will be reconfigured to IPv6
> 
> Thank You
> Bob Evans
> CTO
> 

Rewind the clock 20 years s/ipv4/sna/  s/ipv6/ipv4/   and/or
rewind the clock 15 years s/ipv4/tdm/ s/ipv6/voip/ 
and your rant is exactly what was coming out of enterprises and carriers at
those times. The only thing more constant than change in this industry is
the intransigence of the luddites that believe they are the masters of the
universe and will refuse to move with the tide. Sometimes (like in the case
of IPv4) they can build a strong seawall that will hold the tide back for a
decade, but rest assured that the tide always wins. 

I have looked and can't find the references, but I distinctly remember
Businessweek or Fortune magazine covers in the late 90's with phrases to the
effect of 'SNA Forever' or 'SNA is for real business/IPv4 is an experimental
toy'. I have also been in meetings with carriers and been told "No end
customer will ever fill a DS-3. Those are inter-city exchange circuits, and
there isn't enough data in the world to fill one", having just told them we
were connecting CERN to Cal-tech. 

To the point of the original question, look to history for some indication.
While people in the late 90's were busy trying to figure out how to
translate web pages to SNA terminals, within ~ 5 years, the noise was gone.
I am sure you will still find pockets of legacy SNA in use, but nobody
cares. Then look at the education system. Once you retire-out the tenured
dinosaurs that are still teaching classfull IPv4, followed by a generation
of upstarts that never learned about those tiny 32-bit locators which could
only possibly identify <1% of the connected devices they are aware of, it
will die off. Until then, it will move to the backwaters where nobody cares.

When you ignore the costs of maintaining an ever crumbling foundation, and
just look at the cost of replacement, then you can mentally justify staying
in the past. If you are honest about the TCO, and include both the wizardry
created by the network masters and the difficult to quantify increased cost
of all the software that has to work around that, then a cost based analysis
is valid. Unfortunately there has been enough myopic focus on
network-specific costs on this list that a decade has been lost that could
have been used to update software and reduce the future  timeframe that IPv4
needs to be supported.

While many on this list have bought into the hatred of the automated
tunneling in Windows, that was put there specifically to provide a working
API for the application developers. Breaking the stalemate between
lack-of-apps that might use a network and lack-of-network on which to
develop those apps, was possible by having the API mask out the lack of
function in the underlying network. Unfortunately rather than enhance that
capability, the angry mob took up arms and blocked it. The only thing wrong
with 6to4 was the one-liner that said you could only announce a /12 into the
IPv6 DFZ. If everyone had ignored that and set up local relays announcing
the appropriate /20-48 matching their IPv4 prefix into the DFZ, and the
IPv4-anycast only to their own customers, you would have had the
functionality of 6rd in deployed code at least 5 years earlier.  The fact
that it was vilified rather than adapted speaks volumes about the
unwillingness of the community to face the inevitable. 

There was a recent comment on the list that the IETF pushed dual-stack out
the door and patted themselves on the back, which is absolutely untrue. I
was the one that pushed the dual-stack mantra, and was put in the position
of WG chair because I was standing in the back of the room during the BOF
for the transition WG mumbling to myself 'been there, done that, doesn't
scale' at the proposals being tossed out by the research community. Having
just transitioned a collection of protocols to IPv4, the thing that worked
best at a SYSTEM level was to deploy the new protocol alongside the old one,
and let each app move in its own timeframe. Yes that was duplicate effort at
the network level, but there are many more parts to the system, and from my
experience those cost an order of magnitude more. While dual-stack does
require IPv4, it was over 15 years ago when that statement was made, while
it was still possible. In any case, the point of dual-stack was not to solve
all problems, just to set a baseline of the long term  network that apps
could move to. For the cases where it was not economical to move the app,
wizardry was appropriate, and the WG was defining additional corner-case
tools. In another unfortunate case, one of those escaped over the objection
of the chairs and was forced onto the standards track because several AD's
insisted we needed a standard translator. That set back the process another
3-5 years, but the bigger failing was that the responsible AD (on this list)
decided that 'we had enough tools already, we needed deployment', and shut
the WG down. I really don't know what additional tools might have developed
or been identified, and I really don't care about the WG closing, but this
was not a case of one-size-fits-all and pat yourself on the back.

This has been a long-winded way of saying, IPv4 will be replaced EVENTUALLY,
and as Randy said, 'news at 11'. 

Tony

> 
> 
> 
> > Randy,
> >
> > How long do you think it will take to completely get rid of IPv4? Or
> > is it even going to happen at all?
> >
> > On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 4:57 AM, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:
> >
> >> the rirs have run out of their free source of short ints to rent to us.
> >> i am sure everyone will move to ipv6 in a week.  news at eleven.
> >>
> >> randy
> >>
> >