Brian, Dan,
> |
> |Because one of their competitors decides to do so, forcing them to do
> |so as well. Absent scarcity, charging for something that has zero cost
> |simply isn't sustainable in a competitive market.
>
> That's what they said about the phone companies, yet I still pay lots of monthly
> fees for certain bit settings in the switch. I even pay for DTMF service even
> though it costs less for the phone company to support than dial service.
>
Brian's argument would be correct if the act of moving from one ISP to
another ISP was free of cost to the end user. But renumbering is anything
but free, absent a way to maintain internal communication across a renumbering
event and something like RFC 2894. ISPs know that renumbering isn't free
and they will set the price of addresses accordingly. Absent cost-free
renumbering, a one time charge for a NAT device will always look cheaper
than the ongoing cost for maintaining existing and acquiring new global
address space. Whether it is in fact cheaper is very questionable given
the headaches that NATs cause for administrators and users.
I would like to believe that once ISPs aren't faced with real address
scarcity they won't behave the way Dan and I believe they will, but there
are enough examples of ISPs that don't face IPv4 address shortage but still
charge for address space anyway, that betting the IPv6 architecture on this
belief doesn't seem prudent.
If we don't want people to use NAT and all we have are PA addresses then we
have to make renumbering free. There isn't even the beginning of a strategy
for how to accomplish this without stable local addresses.
Tim Hartrick
Mentat Inc.
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