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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: When IPv6 ... if ever?
| The bottom-line appears that everyone is waiting for everyone else to | twitch first, then the shoot-out starts. However, no one is all that | interested in twitching. Also, nobody is willing to get shot! The deployment of IPv6 is going to be EXPENSIVE in terms of real opex and probably real capex as well, it IS going to be visible on the bottom line of every ISP on the planet, eroding whatever margins one has. I can't see the deployment of IPv6 *ever* leading to any but the shortest-term revenue upside (if even that), therefore until the entire aggregate gross revenue of transit-providing ISPs up and down the entire food-chain is threatened, nobody will be deploying v6. The only alternative scenario I can think of is the deployment of IPv6 by a large provider who believes it can trigger a huge consolidation by pushing smaller ISPs it is competing with into an expensive deployment through sheer hype. I am inclined to believe that the second thinking is the REAL reason behind the recent announcements by a monopolistic and internationally expanding ISP in Asia that they will do an aggressive IPv6 deployment. | The real question is whom is benefiting from sustaining the current | situation? Everyone who wants cheap, sustainable Internet transit, with the continuation of plummeting prices combined with soaring available bandwidths. Introducing a whole new protocol requiring massive global operational changes is going to push up consumer prices and stall on investment in available bandwidths. There are only so many people and dollars out there, and one or the other is inevitably spread pretty thin in the current market. The scariest thing to an IPv6-Lover is that an early deployment is not to anyone's advantage because untili there is real uptake by a sizable number of ISPs, the exact changes required on the dynamic routing side are simply not obvious, although the fact that the two protocols will run ships in the night is (e.g. www.microsoft.com works just fine with IPv6 but you see a blackhole with IPv4. ftp.cdrom.com's IPv6 path is much slower and lossier from where your customer is than ftp.cdrom.com's IPv4 path. have fun finding and fixing the square of the number of problems you observe now, kids!) In other words, it's all risk and absolutely no reward, and until it really honestly IS impossible to do hacks around the IPv4 shortage, nobody will deploy IPv6. Now, ironically, in the whole IPv6 selection process in the IETF, there were multiple proposals which paid a considerable amount of attention to the problems of partial, incremental deployment at the initial design level. CATNIP in particular was clever, because it provided not just a new packet format (which is all IPv6 did), but also a strategy to transition to practically ANY new packet format, should the initial assumptions about the pervasiveness of IPX and CLNP be wrong (which they were). IPv6's initial assumptions are WRONG (we will die from routing dynamicism long before we die of IPv4 address depletion), and there is NO mechanism whatsoever to abandon the IPv6 packet format even at the primitive level of curiosity-based microdeployment we see now. Who will take the chance of a huge investment in managing IPv6 deployment, when it is not a given that IPv6 really will be the header networks will use after IPv4? We're talking about stranded assets being the only thing one gets for the money... Sean.
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