IPv6 Confusion

Michael Thomas mike at mtcc.com
Wed Feb 18 20:39:20 UTC 2009


Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Feb 2009, Justin Shore wrote:
> 
>> different vendors, I asked each of them about their IPv6 support and 
>> they all unanimously claimed that there was no demand for it from 
>> their customers.
> 
> Well, this is just ignorance or a kind of a lie. There might be few 
> customers who are willing to treat IPv6 support as a showstopper, but 
> saying that there is no demand simply isn't true, it's just that they 
> can get away without IPv6 support right now. We all hear the same thing 
> when we ask for IPv6 support.

 From my experience in the v6 wars, the express aversion to "No Flag Day
for Operators" makes an implicit "Flag Day for Vendors Instead". That
is, the ipv4/networking world doesn't stop, so even a well intentioned
business unit/group/whatever of pick-your-network-vendor is constantly
treading the v6 water furiously and usually sinking. And of course, most
BU's are at best sort of ambivalent about v6 unless it translates to $$$
the next quarter. Also: the operators from what I've seen are also sort
of ambivalent too, so there's a catch-22: the operators don't want to
deploy something that they can't deploy or manage, and vendors don't want
to drop everything to get parity for something that isn't going to make
next quarter's numbers. And as if it were just one quarter; you'd really
be talking about a year of quarters to get to real parity.

So, round it goes. As far as I can tell, we're pretty much destined to
drive right over the address depletion cliff. It should make for great
theater for those of us not in the vendor/operator community anymore,
in that train-wreck kind of way.

Has somebody made an IPv4 address depletion marque? Maybe we could put
it next to the National Debt counter in Times Square.

		Mike




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