IPv6 woes - RFC

Sat Sep 18 19:34:38 UTC 2021

On Sat, Sep 18, 2021 at 2:39 PM John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:

> It appears that Owen DeLong via NANOG <owen at delong.com> said:
> >> The cost of putting flyers in the bills rounds to zero, so yes, really.
> I expect these companies all have plans
> >to support v6 eventually, someday, once they're retired and replaced all
> of the old junk that handles v6 poorly or
> >not at all, but you know about accountants and depreciation.
> >
> >Unless their infrastructure runs significantly on hardware and software
> pre-2004 (unlikely), so does the cost of
> >adding IPv6 to their content servers. Especially if they’re using a CDN
> such as Akamai.
>
> I wasn't talking about switches and routers.  I was talking about every
> single piece of software and equipment that
> they use for support and marketing and customer service and all the other
> stuff that big companies do.
>
> As I may have said once or twice, eventuallly it'll all be replaced so it
> works on IPv6 but we're not holding our breath.
>

Glad you noted this.  Thinking this was/is purely a hardware cycle problem
related to normal/forced upgrade strategies.  On that point, most hardware
I know of from 2004 in larger networks is long fully depreciated and
sweating assets 15+ years can happen, but I don't personally think this is
the biggest issue.

As you noted John, its the plethora of software, support systems, tooling,
and most important in many environments - legacy customer management and
provisioning systems that can be the limiting factor.  I recall looking
back when leading IPv6 turn-up, those were the biger problems to solve
for.  Often such systems are extremely expensive to touch and working on
them required prioritization against direct revenue generating projects
(opportunity cost) .  Replacing routers was just a money problem.

I am by far not saying I agree with choices made by hold-outs, but I also
understand this is for many, not just an engineering problem to solve.

regards,

Victor K

>
> R's,
> John
>
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