240/4

michael.dillon at bt.com michael.dillon at bt.com
Wed Oct 17 23:41:39 UTC 2007


> the other point as was mentioned later in the thread is that 
> this buys you very little in terms of time before v4 is gone.

On average, it buys everybody very little time. But that assumes that
240/4 is being released as a general solution for everybody.

This is not the case. We want to release 240/4 as a solution for those
organizations that are in a position to control enough variables to make
it useful. For those organizations, 240/4 space could buy a LOT of time,
maybe even years. And for the rest of us, the IPv4 addresses that are
NOT used by those organizations, do indeed buy only a little extra time.


But the point is that we are not gods. We cannot foresee all the
variables. We cannot engineer a set of solutions that will work for
everybody. Therefore, even if 240/4 only gives us a few extra months
before IPv4 is exhausted, it is still worthwhile because it is likely to
help some more organizations get their IPv6 transition completed before
hitting the brick wall. Since the value of the Internet, IPv4 or IPv6,
is in the near universality of access, it is to the benefit of
everyone's bottom line for more organizations to complete the transition
to IPv6 before IPv4 runs out.

We cannot cop out on releasing 240/4 just because it is no magic bullet.
How would you feel if your arguments against 240/4 and other
half-measures resulted in them not being carried out. And then we hit
the brick wall of IPv4 exhaustion and some businesses start to lose
serious money?

--Michael Dillon

P.S. and how will you feel if those businesses trawl the record on the
Internet to discover that you, and employee of one of their competitors,
caused 240/4 to not be released and thereby harmed their businesses. You
will be explaining in front of a judge.

We should do everything we can to remove roadblocks which would cause
IPv4 to run out sooner, or would cause some people to delay IPv6
deployment.





More information about the NANOG mailing list