IPv6 news

Mike Leber mleber at he.net
Fri Oct 14 03:31:45 UTC 2005



On Thu, 13 Oct 2005, Michael Greb wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 08:25:05PM -0400, K. Scott Bethke wrote:
> > That is not entirely the fault of the hosting companies..  Note that  
> > verio, he.net, towardex, and many other progressive hosting companies  
> > have been dual stack for a long time.  Perhaps the services that are  
> > not able to do dual stack will vote with their wallets and either  
> > move to a company who can help them with this or at least buy better  
> > engineers.  Something has to sort of make them do it though, I can't  
> > see united.com just coming up with this idea on their own.
> 
> I can't speak for the others but he.net doesn't seem to interested in
> customers making use of their "dual stack" network.  We looked into
> getting IPv6 space from them to go with our IPv4 assignments for a
> couple of racks of servers in one of their datacenters.  They wanted to
> double the monthly fee for data and drop a second v6 only port to our
> racks, not my idea of a "dual stack network".  Needless to say, we do
> not have native IPv6, a few of our customers that desired it are using
> HE's free tunnel broker service though.

(Appologies to Michael for using this comment as an opportunity to delurk.  
I've been biting my tongue for months through all kinds of IPv6 threads.)

Hurricane's approach to IPv6 is very simple.

We have the free IPv6 tunnel service and we have commercial IPv6 service.

If you want commercial IPv6 service, we need to charge a fee for it in
order to get the necessary funds that will eventually be required to
replace all of the older infrastructure that doesn't do line rate IPv6.
Hurricane's price for IPv6 is the same as IPv4 at any specific commit
level.

The free IPv6 tunnels are low traffic and completely automated, and the
user base has a different expectations than when paying for line rate gige
IPv6.

In business I find that you generally should not be doing things people
don't want to pay for.  Exceptions to this rule are for the sake of
charity, fun, or long term research and development.

Right now IPv6 is nearly a zero value add on for most of the people that
express interest in it.  This may change in the future, however that is
how it is now.

There are a few interesting questions here (partially rhetorical):

* Is the proper price to sell IPv6 at greater, less than, or equal to
IPv4?  (of course customers want the price to be less, however does it
cost you more to handle it?  besides it's new... shouldn't there be some
kind of premium value here?)

* How does the cost to provide IPv6 compare to IPv4?  (can you get used
equipment or do you have to buy new equipment?  are there as many
manufacturers?  how do your options for equipment in each case compare in
cost?  is the equipment you are using already bought and paid for?  do
you have to train customers and staff?  what do your existing
monitoring/billing/support systems use for hardware and software?)

Mike.

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