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Re: Creating demand for IPv6

  • From: Jon Lewis
  • Date: Tue Oct 02 15:09:14 2007

On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, William Herrin wrote:

As far as I can tell, IPv6 is at least theoretically capable of
offering exactly two things that IPv4 does not offer and can't easily
be made to offer:

1. More addresses.
2. Provider independent addresses

At the customer level, #1 has been thoroughly mitigated by NAT,
eliminating demand. Indeed, the lack of IPv6 NAT creates a negative
demand: folks used to NAT don't want to give it up.

At the internet access customer level perhaps. As a hosting provider, try telling your customers "here's your IPv4 /32. If you need more IPs, just use NAT." and see how many customers you retain.

The problem is, when we can't get more IPv4 IPs, and we have to assign addresses to customers, what do we do? Give them IPv6 IPs only? Then how does the IPv4 internet (all those people who didn't need or want v6 because they've got NAT) get to those customers?

At some point, everyone's going to need to upgrade in order to "stay on the internet."

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis                   |  I route
 Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                |
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