Creating demand for IPv6

Jon Lewis jlewis at lewis.org
Tue Oct 2 19:06:42 UTC 2007


On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, William Herrin wrote:

> As far as I can tell, IPv6 is at least theoretically capable of
> offering exactly two things that IPv4 does not offer and can't easily
> be made to offer:
>
> 1. More addresses.
> 2. Provider independent addresses
>
> At the customer level, #1 has been thoroughly mitigated by NAT,
> eliminating demand. Indeed, the lack of IPv6 NAT creates a negative
> demand: folks used to NAT don't want to give it up.

At the internet access customer level perhaps.  As a hosting provider, try 
telling your customers "here's your IPv4 /32.  If you need more IPs, just 
use NAT." and see how many customers you retain.

The problem is, when we can't get more IPv4 IPs, and we have to assign 
addresses to customers, what do we do?  Give them IPv6 IPs only?  Then how 
does the IPv4 internet (all those people who didn't need or want v6 
because they've got NAT) get to those customers?

At some point, everyone's going to need to upgrade in order to "stay on 
the internet."

----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Jon Lewis                   |  I route
  Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
  Atlantic Net                |
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