IPv6 Thought Experiment

Wed Oct 2 17:31:19 UTC 2019

> On 2 Oct 2019, at 20:23, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
> 
> In article <5DCAE7A8-1D33-4EA2-BBB1-7A3E8132D55B at gmail.com> you write:
>> What do you think would happen? Would it be the only way to reach 100% IPv6 deployment, or even that wouldn’t be sufficient?
> 
> If you have to impose an artificial tax to force people to use IPv6,
> you've clearly admitted that IPv6 is a failure and can't stand on its
> own merits.  Should this happen, I'd expect massive use of CGN to hide
> entire networks behind a single IPv4 address, and a mass exodus of
> hosting business to other places which are not so stupid.  Mobile networks
> would be less affected because many of them are IPv6 internally already.

I understand, but I think there’s something else here.. If we keep deploying IPv6 at this rate, we will have it in X years. If such a policy was enforced, it would *accelerate* the transition, not force it. It would kind of force it in a way that companies that can’t comply would maybe seize to exist, but overall it would accelerate the IPv6 adoption. This is the main thing I was trying to “achieve” here. And the question is, if instead of reaching 100% deployment in X years, we reached it in X/2 or X/10 or X/100, would we be ready? Would the RIRs be ready? Would the vendors be ready? Would the equipment be ready? Could we sustain the increase of the routing tables?

Maybe all of us got kinda lazy because it’s moving at a so slow pace.. I don’t know, maybe we didn’t, and we just have so many problems that we solve them at literally the last possible moment (or a bit after that). 

Antonis 