IPv6 woes - RFC

Thu Sep 9 19:55:00 UTC 2021

> On Sep 8, 2021, at 18:55 , Valdis Klētnieks <valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 08 Sep 2021 11:39:50 -0700, Owen DeLong via NANOG said:
> 
>> The reality is that if we get content dual-stacked and stop requiring IPv4
>> for new eyeball installations, that’s the biggest initial win.
> 
> The problem is "get content dual-stacked".
> 
> Somebody made this handy page of the IPv6 status for the Alexa Top 500.
> 
> http://www.delong.com/ipv6_alexa500.html
> 
> Awful lot of red spots even in the top 100.  Hell, even amazon.com
> isn't IPv6 yet.  And the long tail is going to be the death of a thousand
> cuts for the call center unless you have a way to deal with those sites.

This is my point… That is why I think an announcement of “On X date,
we will begin charging extra for IPv4 services and define Internet Access
to be IPv6” by a couple of the larger eyeball ISPs would light a pretty
big fire under those laggards.

Think about it… Amazon doesn’t want to lose access to Comcast, T-Mobile,
Verizon Wireless, and/or AT&T eyeballs any more than those ISPs want
to deal with the call center consequences if they turn off IPv4 before those
content providers are ready.

If they put that date, say, 5 years out, perhaps January 15, 2027 for
example, so that it doesn’t happen during the retail cash cow season,
I suspect it would drive that long tail to shorten. Right now, it’s costing
Amazon (amazon.com, not AWS) nothing to ignore IPv6 and continue
lagging, they’re able to externalize all of those costs onto the eyeball ISPs.

> And the devil is in the details.  cnn.com itself has a quad-A. But looking
> at Chrome loading it with the IPvFoo extension, I see that of the 145
> addresses it hits, only 38 are IPv6, the rest are IPv4.

You don’t think they’d be motivated by a drop-dead date agreed upon
by the eyeball ISPs? I think they would.

> On the other hand, looking at *who* are the IPv4, they seem to be
> overwhelmingly ad servers and analytics sites - so maybe hitting cnn.com as
> IPv6-only is a win for the consumer.  I rather suspect that the CFO of CNN
> would see it differently though....

I rather suspect that an announcement of a drop-dead date 5 years out by
a select group of major eyeball providers would get the situation corrected
likely well short of 5 years.

> (Eerily reminiscent of the factoid that 60% of the cost of a long distance
> phone call before the AT&T breakup was keeping the accounting records
> so they could bill the customer)

Yes… IIRC, After the breakup, that jumped to more like 80% until things finally
got to the point that everyone recognized that eliminating the billing records
for such things saved tons of money.

Owen