The Choice: IPv4 Exhaustion or Transition to IPv6

Thu Jun 28 17:25:42 UTC 2007

At 6:09 PM +0100 6/28/07, Stephen Wilcox wrote:
>Hi John,
> I am not offering an elegant technical solution that would be worthy of an RFC number! :) But I am saying that the Internet of today will evolve organically and that there are a number of ways you can get by with what we have for a long time until things get really ugly.

Interesting...   We likely differ on how long "a long time" is, and
definitions of what happens when things get really ugly.

>Justin suggested that ISPs will be hit first because they are the distributors of IPs and when they cant go back for more they will be in trouble. I can turn that around tho, as an ISP if I cant get more IP space but I have customers who NEED public IPs and are willing to pay I will just 'find' some.. if I charge a small nominal monthly fee per IP or start pushing my DSL base onto NAT rather than static or dynamic public IPs I'm sure I can quickly free up a significant portion of IPs that I can capitalise on.

You can, and this will work for a while.  When it stops working
(which is not at all predictable) you're going to need a fairly
sizable IPv6 Internet so that you can continue to connect new
customers up, and unfortunately, that means we need to start
getting folks moving ahead of time since we don't exactly know
how long your workarounds will last.

>I still dont believe the current Internet is a hierarchy. Theres something like 25000 ASNs out there with maybe 3000 of them interconnecting in a serious way (ie peering). If that were a corporate org chart you'd be describing it as flat not hierarchical!

I'm guessing we've got tens of millions (if not hundreds
of millions) of organizations connected to the Internet,
and that's being done with 25000 ASN's and 400000
routes...     That's absolutely the result of hierarchical
provider assigned addressing in extensive use.

/John