Creating demand for IPv6

Tue Oct 2 21:25:03 UTC 2007

On 10/2/07, Jon Lewis <jlewis at lewis.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, William Herrin wrote:
> > 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.

Jon,

Let me spin you a tale. More of a nightmare really.

During early phase of free pool exhaustion, when you can't deliver
more IPv4 addresses to your customers you lose the customer to a
hosting provider who still has addresses left. So sorry. Those will be
some nasty years. Unless you're Cogent, Level3 or one of the others
sitting pretty on a /8. They'll be in phat city.

What should you do about it? Buy stock.

And make no mistake: it will drag on and on. Even when everybody is
well and truly out, there are a heck of a lot of addresses that can be
reclaimed in dialup pools, residential DSL pools and other uses
retroactively deemed wasteful by converting them to NAT. And with NAT
inbound you can load a lot of functions on a single IP address.

How long will it drag on? I'm not that great an oracle. But let me
offer you a mild heresy: when you combine aggressive CIDR with double
and triple NAT do you really believe that 4B addresses can't be enough
for the pushing 7B people on Earth? Must it ever truly end?

IPv4 forever. One possible price for failing to deliver an IPv6 that
customers want today.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William D. Herrin                  herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr.                        Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004