OMB: IPv6 by June 2008

Wed Jul 6 17:23:01 UTC 2005

On 6-jul-2005, at 17:56, Edward Lewis wrote:

> The Internet serves society, society owes nothing to the Internet.  
> Members of this list may prioritize communications technology,  
> other members of society may prioritize different interests and  
> concerns. That is why IPv6 must offer a benefit greater than it's  
> cost.

You are approaching the problem at the wrong end by asking "what's in  
it for me to adopt IPv6 now". The real question is "is IPv6  
inevitable in the long run".

It's hard to be sure that the answer for that question is "yes",  
since all kinds of things can happen between now and, say, 2020. But  
it certainly looks like IPv4 addressing issues are becoming more and  
more painful over time. For instance, so far this year 98 million  
IPv4 addresses were assigned or allocated by RIRs. There are  
currently 1.1 - 1.2 billion usable addresses marked "reserved" (=  
"unused") by the IANA, so at this rate IANA be flat out in 2011. Now  
it's possible that the past 6 months were a fluke and it will take  
twice as long, or it's the start of a new trend and it's going to go  
even faster.

In any event, in the year 2020 we're NOT going to run IPv4 as we know  
it today. It's possible that the packets that travel over the wires  
still look like regular IPv4/TCP/UDP packets and all the complexity  
is pushed out to the application or political/economic layers, but  
that's not a possibility that appeals to me.

So by all means, be an IPv6 hold out as long as you like, but don't  
assume that just because adopting IPv6 doesn't make economic sense  
for you now, it isn't going to happen at some point in the next  
decade. No rush, though.