Re: [RRG] Moving forward... IPv4 now, IPv6 less urgent and perhaps more ambitious

[Per Heldal <heldal@eml.cc>]

On Tue, 2008-06-10 at 05:36 +1000, Robin Whittle wrote:
> The world in general uses IPv4.  Enthusiasm for IPv6 is limited and
> is much more prevalent in the IETF than amongst most users or
> providers.  (IOW, since its development in the mid-1990s, IPv6 has
> not come close to meeting the needs of significant numbers of users
> or ISPs.  There is no evidence that the looming IPv4 address
> shortage has changed this.)  We should consider that such confidence
> about IPv6 is likely to involve unrealistic expectations of imminent
> dual-stack and IPv6-only adoption.

Far from everyone in the ops-community share that view.

Technically, v6 has for some time already had virtually everything v4
has wrt provider and end-user functionality. However, the only really
new feature of v6 is the extra addresses and there's a cost involved to
get started. Hence the lack of interest. 

A safe bet on this planet is that scarcity brings out the worst in
people. There's no reason to assume that IP will be an exception. Many
providers that have a strategy beyond blindly copying others are already
planning for solutions that enable growth through IPv6 at the customer
edge. The widely anticipated steep increase in cost per IPv4 address
will be a powerful catalyst to push investments towards more
future-proof solutions. Regardless of an increased ability to
slice-and-dice v4 address-blocks, nobody has yet presented a realiable
scheme to reclaim enough v4 addresses to maintain anything that
resembles current growth at network's customer edge past depletion.

While IPv4 generally is expected to stay around for a long time there's
also many people in the ops-community who believe that the majority of
the internet may switch to v6 is as little as 3-5 years once it gets
rolling helped by the ever shortening life-span of both software and
hardware. Besides, it is also reasonable to expect a development in
NA(P)T-PT/ALG solutions for v6-only hosts in the next few years that is
similar to the rise of NAT in the late 90s.

Summary: yes we want a new (or supplemental) scalable routing
architecture, but the v4 run-out is highly questionable as an argument
in favour of any particular solution.


//per



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