IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

Tue Feb 19 02:35:41 UTC 2008

On Mon, Feb 18, 2008, John Lee wrote:

> IMHO the amount of technical effort to extract these final v4 addresses is more work and cost then transitioning to v6. All major router and switch vendors have been v6 capable / ready for two years and most tier 1 carriers support v6 traffic today.

As said by a network engineer, not someone who has obviously tried to deploy
the thing end to end. I've had a bit of experience playing with the emerging
v6 support in Squid and let me say this: handling v6 and gatewaying v6 are
wildly, wildly different problems.

To Network Operators: Your network may be ready. Thanks for that.
There's now at least 5, maybe 10 years of transition time for the edges
(content, consumer, enterprise) to catch up and make the transition.

As I ranted on #nanog last night; the v6 transition will happen when it
costs more to buy / maintain a v4 infrastructure (IP trading, quadruple NAT,
support overheads, v6 tunnel brokers, etc) then it is to migrate infrastructure
to v6.

If people were sane (!), they'd have a method right now for an enterprise
to migrate 100% native IPv6 and interconnect to the v4 network via translation
devices. None of this dual stack crap. It makes the heads of IT security and
technical managers spin.

But what do I know, I'm just an Arts student studying Linguistics atm..

Adrian
(ObRant: Want v6 to take off? Just give everyone who has a v4 allocation a
v6 allocation already. There's enough space to make that happen. Oh wait,
that reduces IRR revenues..)