North American Network Operators Group

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Re: An Internet IPv6 Transition Plan

  • From: Stephen Wilcox
  • Date: Wed Jul 25 10:08:37 2007

On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 07:50:05AM -0400, John Curran wrote:
> At 12:30 PM +0100 7/25/07, Stephen Wilcox wrote:
> >Hi John,
> > I fully agree on that.. but I am disagreeing as to the timescales.
> >
> >There is some opinion that when IANA hands out the last of its IP blocks things will change overnight, and I dont see any reason for that to be the case. I think there are a lot of IPs currently allocated to ISPs but as yet unassigned to customers, and I think there will be a lot of policy changes to make more efficient use of the space that is already out there - I specifically think that will come from ISPs reusing IPs and setting costs that ensure they continually have IPs available to customers willing to pay for them.
> 
> In the ARIN region, we've got major ISP's coming back
> every 6 months with high utilization rates seeking their
> next block to allow customer growth.  While I'm certain
> that some internal recovery is possible, there's a realistic
> limit of how long any ISP can make their air supply last.
> 
> >I think the combined effect of these things means
> >- we will not be running into a wall at any time
> >- availability of IPs will slowly decrease over time (as cost slowly increases)
> >- adoption of NAT and v6 will be an ongoing trend with no sudden increase
> 
> Unless the policy changes you suggest somehow dramatically
> change the current usage rate, we're going to have a very
> serious rate of change when the IANA/RIR pool hits zero.
> That sort of defines "hitting a wall", by my definition.

Well, you already say you have major ISPs submitting requests every 6 months, and I guess that is your high water mark so everyone else should be longer (at lease here under RIPE you are supposed to be allocated space for 2 yrs at a time).

So, we have IANA out of space at eof 2009.. that will then take the RIRs 12 to 24 mo to allocate that out before there is any impact on ISPs.

Once that occurs we still have your 6mo-2yr+ period that ISPs have in their allocated and unused pool to be giving to customers.

Add all that together and you have 18mo-4yrs of 'greyness', no overnight wall.

And I'm saying each of the events plus that grey period will cause evolution in the market place to occur such that there are no walls or catastraphies from a continuity or economical point of view.

> Please propose the magical policy changes asap...  we need to
> get them through the public process and adopted in record time
> to have any affect on the usage rate.

Well, thats a different story. Inflating the price of IPs would have been a good thing but I think that horse has already bolted now.

> >This means no end of the world as we know it, and no overnight adoption of new technology.. just business as usual in an evolving environment.
> 
> Note:  I'm not advocating an "overnight" technology deployment;
> just advising those folks who presently rely on continuous availability
> of new address blocks from the RIR's that we're going to see a change.

Indeed they will, but it wont happen to everyone at the same time (as they all have months or years of IPs left) and they have plenty of time to figure out how to adapt their products and business models.

> At present, there's a few years for these folks to switch to IPv6 for
> their growth.  It requires cooperation from the Internet, in that we
> all need to recognize that there will be IPv6 customers out there soon,
> and even if you don't plan on having those, please make your public
> facing servers IPv6 reachable in the next few years.

I'm not sure there is time for v6 to be ready before companies find different ways to manage this. There are many things that need to happen to enable v6 and I dont think any of them are happening in a big way. Whether the large CDNs deploy v6, if v6 can be purchased in volume as transit are likely to be the major factors..

Steve