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Re: shim6 @ NANOG (forwarded note from John Payne)

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Thu Mar 02 19:07:06 2006 
On 3-mrt-2006, at 0:22, Mark Newton wrote:


You've probably seen Geoff Huston's comments about this;  I tend
to agree with him here.
Geoff tends to make lots of comments, it's hard to either agree or disagree with them all. :-)

When IPv4 space is exhausted, the sky won't fall;  We'll simply
work out an address space management policy which is different
from the one we have right now.
Of course. But don't underestimate how address-hungry some people/ organizations/places are. For instance, Comcast got 12.5 million addresses last year.

Right now we can hand them out to anyone who demonstrates a need
for them.  When they run out we'll need to be able to reallocate
address blocks which have already been handed out from orgs who
perhaps don't need them as much as they thought they did to orgs
which need them more.



Sounds like a marketplace to me.  How much do you think a /24 is
worth?  How many microseconds do you think it'll take for members
of each RIR to debate the policy changes needed to alter their
rules to permit trading of IPv4 resource allocations once IANA
says, "No!" for the first time?




This is what I wrote about this a couple of months ago: http://
ablog.apress.com/?p=835



An interesting aspect about address trading is that some
organizations have huge amounts of address space which didn't cost
them anything, or at least not significantly more than what smaller
blocks of address space cost others. Having them pocket the proceeds
strikes me as rather unfair, and also counter productive because it
encourages hoarding. Maybe a system where ARIN and other RIRs buy
back addresses for a price per bit prefix length rather than per
address makes sense.




We'll also have a reasonably good idea of what it'd cost to perform
an IPv6

migration as we gather feedback from orgs who have actually done it.



I don't think the cost is too relevant (and hard to calculate because
a lot of it is training and other not easily quantified
expenditures), what counts is what it buys you. I ran a web bug for a
non-networking related page in Dutch for a while and some 0.16% of
all requests were done over IPv6. (That's 1 in 666.) So even if it's
free, deploying IPv6 today isn't all that useful. But when you're the
last one running IPv4, you'll really want to move over to IPv6, even
if it's very expensive.