On 2011-02-28, at 17:04, Owen DeLong wrote:

> On Feb 28, 2011, at 12:34 PM, Joe Abley wrote:
> 
>> On 2011-02-28, at 15:27, Randy Bush wrote:
>> 
>>> o if ipv6 can not operate as the only protocol, and we will be out
>>>  of ipv4 space and have to deploy 6-only networks, it damned well
>>>  better be able to stand on its own.
>> 
>> Do you think I was suggesting that IPv6 as a protocol doesn't need to be 
>> able to stand on its own two feet? Because I wasn't; that's patently absurd.
>> 
> 
> It is both absurd and pretty much exactly what you said.

Well, you misunderstood what I meant, which I'm sure is my own fault. I'm sure 
my view of the world is warped and unnatural, too, but most of you know that 
already. :-)

To me, delivering IPv6 to residential Internet users is the largest missing 
piece of the puzzle today. Those users generally have no technical support 
beyond what they can get from the helpdesk, and the race to the bottom has 
ensured that (a) the helpdesk isn't of a scale to deal with pervasive 
connectivity problems and (b) any user that spends more than an hour on the 
phone has probably burnt any profit he/she might have generated for the ISP 
that year, and hence anything that is likely to trigger that kind of support 
burden is either going to result in customers leaving, bankruptcy or both.

Small (say, under 50,000 customer) ISPs in my experience have a planning 
horizon which is less than five years from now. Anything further out than that 
is not "foreseeable" in the sense that I meant it. I have much less first-hand 
experience with large, carrier-sized ISPs and what I have is a decade old, so 
perhaps the small ISP experience is not universal, but I'd be somewhat 
surprised giving the velocity of the target and what I perceive as substantial 
inertia in carrier-sized ISPs whether there's much practical difference.

So, what's a reasonable target for the next five years?

1. Deployed dual-stack access which interact nicely with consumer CPEs and 
electronics, the IPv4 side of the stack deployed through increased use of NAT 
when ISPs run out of numbers.

2. IPv6-only access, CPE and hosts, with some kind of transition mechanism to 
deliver v4-only content (from content providers and v4-only peers) to the 
v6-only customers.

Perhaps it's because I've never seen a NAT-PT replacement that was any prettier 
than NAT-PT, but I don't see (2) being anything that a residential customer 
would buy before 2016. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't hear a lot of people 
shouting about their success.

Note, I'm not talking about the ISPs who have already invested time, capex and 
opex in deploying dual-stack environments. I'm talking about what I see as the 
majority of the problem space, namely ISPs who have not.


Joe


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