Re: Fwd: Suggestion: charging for IPv4 space

[email protected] wrote:
> Do you really think that the the planning horizon was that much longer  
> ten years ago, when CIDR was implemented?

Not for a moment, but...

> Granted, CIDR may not have been as big a challenge for established  
> service providers to implement on the fly, but it would be hard to  
> claim that it actually added to anybody's bottom line in the short  
> term. I certainly don't recall end users clamoring for CIDR in the way  
> that some have suggested is necessary to justify implementing IPv6...
> 
> I'm not suggesting that the transition will be easy, only that there  
> is a real precedent for imagining that players in this industry are  
> capable of taking a slightly longer-term approach to calculating the  
> benefits of technological advances, even ones with nontrivial upfront  
> costs.

... it's a question of costs, direct and indirect.  The cost of
implementing CIDR was relatively low and its inconvenience level lower
still, in that there was no flag day or real protocol level
incompatibility.  The transport used was the same; there were end-user
stack upgrades required at the edge which were done incrementally, and a
backwards-compatible routing protocol upgrade was performed in the core
over time.  All very organised.   IPv4->IPv6 is not like that because a
migration - however we define that - will require moving to a different
transport layer.  This is a significantly more difficult and costly
operation.  Also, CIDR was implemented at a time when IP wasn't nearly as
popular or as mission critical as it is now.

> How confident are you that these changes will cause IPv6 and IPv4 to  
> be mutually substitutable (enough) before the lack of IPv4 represents  
> an absolute barrier to entry for aspiring new network enterprises and  
> routing service providers? 

Really, I have no idea - I worked with a small sample size, but the ISPs
that I dealt with that used NAT hated it thoroughly at all levels
throughout their businesses, because it hurt their business models badly.
But it is very difficult to extrapolate how this experience is going to
scale upwards, because in future, many access providers will be in the same
boat, so there's not going to be much of a difference in terms of access
products.

Worse still, enabling ipv6 at the access layer is not going to help anyone
until real quantities of content also support ipv6 (outside using nat-pt).
 How can Joe Bloggs ISP or John Doe Telco request that Google, Yahoo and
Microsoft put quad-A records into their DNS?  It's difficult to imagine
turning off ipv4 any time in the forseeable future.

With respect to new market entrants, all I can say for sure is that once
the barriers for new entrants reach a certain height, regulators and
politicans are going to jump into the fray, and who knows what will happen
then?  For sure, once they're involved in this area, they aren't going to
leave in a hurry.

Sorry that this sounds like beer-chat, but we are attempting to quantify
pain here. Everyone's pain threshold is different.  Some companies will be
innovators, and some laggards.  Some will stick to their guns that using
ipv4 is their inalienable right and will never implement dual stack
systems.  Others will use nat-pt from the time that it becomes feasible to
do so.

Nick
_______________________________________________
global-v6 mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.apnic.net/mailman/listinfo/global-v6