An Internet IPv6 Transition Plan

Wed Jul 25 12:02:13 UTC 2007

John,

On Jul 25, 2007, at 1:14 PM, John Curran wrote:
>> 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.
>    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.

Been there, done that, got several t-shirts.  Longer prefixes _will_  
hit the routing system.  ISPs will react by (re-)implementing prefix  
length filters.  Many people will whine.

>    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.

This assumes consumption patterns remain the same which is, I  
believe, naive.  In a world where you have to pay non-trivial amounts  
for address space utilization, people will only use the address space  
they actually need and you'll see even more proliferation of NAT for  
client-only services.

Rgds,
-drc