What Should an Engineer Address when 'Selling' IPv6 to Executives?

Tue Mar 12 20:46:38 UTC 2013

On Mar 12, 2013, at 12:27 PM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>> Once IPv6 is sufficiently ubiquitous (rough estimate,
>> but say 900+ of the Alexa 1000 sites have IPv6 and ~95%
>> of eyeball networks), you'll see a rapidly declining desire to
>> pay the increased cost of supporting IPv4.
> 
> While that is surely true, it's not on a trajectory to happen this
> year. Or next year. Or the year after that. Call dual-stack an
> "intermediate" solution. Treat is as "temporary" or "very temporary"
> at your peril.

That really depends on how you view the trajectory.

If you treat it as linear, you're absolutely right. OTOH, if you curve fit it,
it depends on which curve-fitting algorithm you use, but it still looks like
you might be right.

If you look at industry trends, however, it's been growth spurts due to
events that have created most of the growth. I suspect that most of the
Alexa 1,000 will be doing something around IPv6 in the next 2 years
and that anyone not doing IPv6 in 3 years will have a real hard time
staying in the top 1000.

Owen