/27 the new /24

Thu Oct 8 13:14:24 UTC 2015

On 10/7/15 7:00 AM, Mark Andrews wrote:
> I don't see anyone wishing it went differnetly. I see someone pointing 
> out the reality that lots of ISP's are way too late to delivering 
> IPv6. *Every* ISP should have been planning to deliver IPv6 by the 
> time the first RIR ran out of IPv4 addresses. 

Look, I'm as much a supporter of delivering IPv6 as anyone. I've had 
IPv6 enabled on my home network (and the small data center I run in my 
garage) for over a decade now. In 2004, I made sure that IPv6 was fully 
supported in the peer-to-peer stack I developed and that eventually 
became RFC 7016. And for the last 5 years I've been pushing for IPv6 
support in the product I work on for my employer.

But the reality is that there's a whole lot of small and medium-sized 
ISPs run by fine, upstanding individuals serving their communities -- 
even in and around the San Francisco Bay Area -- that have either no or 
very limited (tunnels only) support for IPv6. That's the reality of the 
transition. And threatening these folks with the attorney general isn't 
the way to get them to adopt IPv6, nor is shaming them. They will add 
IPv6 support when it is easy to do, when their staff has the time, and 
when the economics make sense.

Meanwhile we have app developers trying to use cloud platforms that 
don't support IPv6 well (or at all), writing code while sitting in 
offices that don't have IPv6 service due either to their ISP or their 
internal IT department... and so there's another reason ISPs need to 
keep concentrating on IPv4 as their first priority.

And so, in the current actual Internet, not some hypothetical one, if 
you want your website to be seen, you get it an IPv4 address. And with 
IPv4 going for $6-$8 each and it being possible to support hundreds or 
thousands of websites on a single IPv4 address, there's really no excuse.

Will this be different in the future? I sure hope so. But we're not 
there yet.

Matthew Kaufman