if not v6, what?

Sun Sep 5 21:28:05 UTC 2021

On 9/4/21 10:43 PM, Saku Ytti wrote:
>
> I view IPv6 as the biggest mistake of my career and feel responsible
> for this horrible outcome and I do apologise to Internet users for
> it. This dual-stack is the worst possible outcome, and we've been here
> over two decades, increasing cost and reducing service quality. We
> should have performed better, we should have been IPv6 only years ago.
>
> I wish 20 years ago big SPs would have signed a contract to drop IPv4
> at the edge 20 years from now, so that we'd given everyone a 20 year
> deadline to migrate away.
> 20 years ago was the best time to do it, the 2nd best time is today.
> If we don't do it, 20 years from now, we are in the same position,
> inflating costs and reducing quality and transferring those costs to
> our end users who have to suffer from our incompetence.
>
I can't see how an "end of the tunnel" clause would be helpful. As with 
everything, nothing would be done until the very and then they'd just 
extend the tunnel again which is functionally no different than running 
out of IP address.

I looked up CGN's this morning and the thing that struck me the most was 
losing port forwarding. It's probably a small thing to most people but 
losing it means to get an incoming session it always has to be mediated 
by something on the outside. Yuck. So I hope that is not what the future 
hold, though it probably does.

So is there anything we could have done different? Was this ever really 
a technical issue? Even if we bolted two more bytes onto an IPv4 address 
and nothing more, would that have  been adopted either?

Mike