shared address space... a reality!

Fri Mar 16 19:35:28 UTC 2012

> From: Octavio Alvarez 

> Sure, this lets CGN to be more organized for operators, but those that
> already have RFC5735 addresses implemented will not switch to 100.64/10
> just because there's a new block. Only new players will actually
> benefit  from this. It will only make it easier for new players to play
> in
> IPv4 instead of being pushed to IPv6.
> 
> 
> --
> Octavio.

This is yet one more moving parts in the growing assemblage of moving parts that is required to make v4 work going forward.  At some point (soon) we will reach a point of diminishing return and people are simply going to realize that it is easier to deploy v6 native than it is to attempt to keep v4 limping along.  A new player is probably going to buy new gear.  New gear isn't going to have the problems with v6 that older networks might have who could still be using ancient gear and can't afford to "forklift" their stuff out.  A new player entering the market these days looking to use this for a native v4 deployment going forward any significant period of time ... is probably not making the wisest choice.

And with every additional moving part there is something else that impacts performance, something else to break, something else to become CPU or memory bound ... performance over v4 will become increasingly poor, increasingly unreliable, and people are just going to realize that any pain of v6 migration is a lot less than keeping the bailing wire, super glue, and rubber bands around v4.  This will be true of their own networks and the networks they are communicating with.  V4 performance in general from here on out is simply going to go south.  Umpteen NATs, routing table bloat as the nets shatter into smaller and smaller blocks, at some point v4 isn't worth it.  Maybe we should just propose more and more and more Band-Aids.  

Many choose not to migrate to v6 out of simple laziness (if it ain't broken, don't fix it).  At some point it will take so much more work to keep v4 going that the path of least phone calls in the middle of the night will be IPv6.  