AT&T UVERSE Native IPv6, a HOWTO

Tue Dec 3 01:07:40 UTC 2013

On Dec 2, 2013, at 16:15 , Ricky Beam <jfbeam at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 02 Dec 2013 17:59:51 -0500, Mark Andrews <marka at isc.org> wrote:
>> ... A simple RA/DHCP option could do this.
> 
> Great.  Now I have to go upgrade every g** d*** device in the network to support yet another alteration to the standards.
> 
>> For the few residential ISP's that do this what is it? $5 / month
>> per IP and how many ask for a second address? 1 in 10000, 1 in
>> recover the setup costs.
> 
> It varies.  Bellsouth DSL, it was $15(?) for /32 (it was included in mine) Uverse is $15 for /29. TWC-BC $29(?) for /29. (twc-res doesn't offer it)
> 
> It turns out to be a mark-up of over 200x their annual cost (and they charge that per month) -- so it's a significant income stream. (how many people are buying, they aren't saying.)

Actually, on DSL, it's ridiculous, but for Cable operators, most of the cost is that static addresses are a major pain due to the way cable works.

Whenever they split or combine a CMTS or head-end (which is apparently a frequent operation for capacity management according to people I know at MSOs), the static addresses require all kinds of additional configuration effort. Likely, they aren't making much money on it, but that's not address quantity, that's static address management. Admittedly, they do charge by the address, but I think that's only in IPv4.

> 
>> Go ask the bean counters about the cost of having different sized
>> customers.  Those costs will dwarf the income from charging for
>> bigger address space.  For IPv4 there wasn't a choice.  For IPv6
>> there is the choice of one size for all vs the additional cost of
>> managing different sized customers.
> 
> As one who has dealt with such accounting and billing systems, it's actually not that much work. (unless the system pre-dates the internet.) And even more so if the system was designed from the beginning to support it. (as this was already there for IPv4, it should've been included in any additions for IPv6 support.)  I doubt we're going to see anyone from the big boys popping up to admit having setup their systems to support micro-allocation billing, but it's a safe bet they have, or they're working on it.

I actually tend to doubt it. All of the people I've talked to from the major operators have said that the charges in IPv4 were not a revenue source, they were an effort to discourage the consumption of the addresses and/or the use of static addresses and to try and recover the costs of dealing with them in cases where customers were willing to pay.

There's a reason we don't (generally) pay for metered long distance within the US any more. IPv6 addresses should be pretty much the same.

Owen