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Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Tue Jul 23 00:54:13 UTC 2019



> On Jul 21, 2019, at 12:28 , Sabri Berisha <sabri at cluecentral.net> wrote:
> 
> ----- On Jul 21, 2019, at 4:48 AM, nanog nanog at nanog.org wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
>> All of this puts more pressure on the access networks to keep IPv4 running and
>> inflates the price of the remaining IPv4 addresses.
> 
> Exactly. Which means that the problem will solve itself.
> 
> Why is it taking so long to get IPv6 adopted? I'll tell you why: because the cost does not outweigh the benefits at this time. To /you/ they may, but to the average corporate bean counter they don't. Money and resources spent on an IPv6 study and migration project today, will not provide an ROI tomorrow. They will /maybe/ provide a modest ROI in a few years from now, if any. So why would an SVP of Platform Engineering spend his budget on IPv6? 
> 
> Only when it becomes cheaper to go IPv6 than to use legacy V4 will V6 be adopted by large corporations. Well, the ones that are governed by beancounters instead of engineers. And by that time, I'll be charging $500/hr to assist $CORP with their IPv6 migration plans.

I can guarantee you that Akamai is very much run by beancounters in addition to engineers. I have first hand experience with that.

I can also assure you that it’s quite unlikely that any of Comcast, Netflix, Facebook, Google, AT&T, T-Mobile, or Verizon just to name a few of the biggest are managed without due consideration of input from the bean counters. (I’d bet at each of those companies, the day that engineer beats beancounter in a disagreement is rare, indeed).

Each and every one of those large companies has deployed IPv6. Some to a greater extent than others. Facebook and T-Mo stand out as the prime examples, having gone all-IPv6 in as much of their network as practicable today.

The problem with the approach you are taking to IPv6 cost-benefit analysis is that your claim of no ROI doesn’t actually hold true.

The cost savings from a full-on deployment of IPv6 and moving to IPv4 as a service at the edge can be significant. They are hard to capture without very good cost accounting and the problem really tends to be that engineers are lousy cost-accountants and good cost accountants have a hard time understanding what IPv6 brings to the table.

It’s also true that some fraction (though now diminishing) of the ROI from a v6 deployment cannot be realized until some other parties also deploy IPv6, but there’s good news on that front, too… More and more of those parties are realizing the need to deploy IPv6.

Owen




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