An Internet IPv6 Transition Plan

Wed Jul 25 11:14:49 UTC 2007

At 11:52 AM +0100 7/25/07, Stephen Wilcox wrote:
>On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 09:34:01PM +0100, michael.dillon at bt.com wrote:
>>
>> > However, what I'm trying to understand is why the motivation
>> > to rapidly go from v4 to v6 only? What are the factors I'm
>> > missing in operating v4/v6 combined for some time?
>>
>> Growth.
>>
>> Lack of IPv4 addresses will put the brakes on growth of the Internet
>> which will have a major impact on revenue growth. Before long stock
>> market analysts are going to be asking tough questions, and CEOs are
>> suddenly going to see the IPv6 light.
>
>What exactly will cease to grow tho? The 4 billion IPs that have always been around will continue to be. I think you overestimate the effects..
>
>All the existing big businesses can operate with what they already have, Google and Yahoo are not going to face any sort of crisis for the foreseeable future. And as I've been saying for a while and Randy put in his presentation, supply and demand will simply cause the cost of having public IPs to go up from zero to something tiny - enough to see IPs being put back into the pool to those who really need them.

Steve -

   Putting them back into circulation doesn't work unless
   its done in very large chucks to major ISPs.  If this isn't
   the model followed, then we will see a lot more routes
   for the equivalent number of new customers.  People
   complaining about the ability to carry both IPv6 and
   IPv4 routing need to think carefully about how long
   we'll actually last if the ISP's are injecting thousands
   of unaggregatable routes from recovered address space
   each day.

   Additionally, the run rate for IPv4 usage approximates
   10 /8 equivalents per year and increasing.   Even given
   great legacy recovery, you've only gained a few more
   years and then still have to face the problem.

/John