Rate of growth on IPv6 not fast enough?

Mon Apr 19 22:04:08 UTC 2010

On Mon, 19 Apr 2010 10:01:25 -0500 (CDT)
Joe Greco <jgreco at ns.sol.net> wrote:

> > * Nick Hilliard:
> > 
> > > On 19/04/2010 16:14, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> > >> The eyeball ISPs will find it trivial to NAT should they ever need to do
> > >> so [...]
> > 
> > > Having made this bold claim, have you ever actually tried to run a natted
> > > eyeball network?  The last two natted eyeball networks I worked with could
> > > never figure out which aspect of NAT hurt more: the technical side or the
> > > business side.
> > 
> > I'm pretty sure the acceptance of NAT varies regionally.  I think
> > there's a large ISP in Italy which has been doing NAT since the 90s.
> > So it's not just the mobile domain.
> > 
> > It can be tricky to introduce a new NATted product and compete with
> > established players which do not NAT, though.
> 
> It's another opportunity to monetize things.  Give people the option of
> a "real" IP address for $5 extra a month in case they actually need it
> for gaming, etc., and default Grandma's average everyday connection to 
> NAT.
> 

That'd be easy if you were just starting up an ISP. What do you do with
your existing customer base? If their current service includes a
dynamic public IPv4 address, you can't gracefully take it away, without
likey violating services T&Cs, government telco regulations etc. So
you'll have to go through a formal process of getting agreement with
customers to take them away.

Or do you have a flag fall day when after that new customers get NATted,
but old customers don't? Do you offer a LSN vs non-LSN product at
different price points? The price difference must be large enough for people to care about, or better
described, bother with it, yet the problem might be that that discount
might need to be so large that it doesn't actually cover the costs of
providing a service to that customer.

Thinking about what sort of discount I'd find attractive enough on
roughly what I spend for ADSL Internet access, and putting myself in a
customers position, I'd figure it'd be at least 10%. You'd have to
state up front why you're offering a cheaper product, and for people to
make an informed judgement value, they'll need to understand the
problem i.e. the Internet running out of IPv4 addresses and what the
consequences of NAT are. Their eyes will probably glaze over at this
point, because all they want is "Internet" and don't care how it works,
and are probably not going to want to accept restrictions now that
might bite them in the future. At a certain point, the risks of going
with a cheaper limited service, when you don't understand or fully
understand it's restrictions, becomes higher than the price of the full
service. IOW, if it's too hard to understand why the LSN service is
cheaper, people will just pay the extra 10% - it's less riskier that
way. That extra 10% is insurance.

> The eyeball ISP's definitely have the easier end of things.
> 

Considering the above issues, I'd think it's the other way around.

> ... JG
> -- 
> Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
> "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
> won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
> With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
> 