On Thu, 28 Jun 2007, Stephen Wilcox wrote:
First is the belief that the Internet will suddenly break on the day
when the last IP block is allocated by an RIR - the fact that most of
the v4 space is currently not being announced may mean we have many
years before there are real widespread shortages
Widespread? No. Pockets of problems? Yes.
A large corporation or .edu that got n x /16s or even a /8 of v4 space in
som cases and is only using a small fraction of that has no motivation
based on address exhaustion to migrate to v6. ISPs and other
organizations that regularly 'go back to the well' for more address space
are in a different boat. They want to be ready with a plan well in
advance of the day they'd go back to the well again and have have $RIR
tell them there are no more blocks to assign.
Second is the belief that this will prompt a migration to IPv6, as
though moving to an entirely different and largely unsupported protocol
stack is the logical thing to happen. Surely it is easier and far
cheaper by use of existing technology for example for organisations to
make efficient use of their public IPs and deploy NATs?
Large-scale NATs introduce their own large-scale problems. Many modern
OSes include v6 stacks already, but it needs to be enabled in a lot lf
those cases. Where you'll run into problems are either older machines or
hardware devices with built-in IP stacks. Running a dual-stack backbone
can ease some of those transitional headaches.
As technology people we are looking at v6 as the clean bright future of
IP, but the real world is driven by economics and I dont see v6 as being
economically viable in the near future....
That will change over time. Last I heard, the US government is in the
midst of a big push to v6. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see some
federal grants come with riders requiring v6 connectivity in the
not-too-distant future. That will get the attention of the large .edus
with legacy v4 assignments and the businesses that have federal research
grant funding as a significant part of their cash flow.
jms
