* Anfinsen, Ragnar > I am working with my management team to implement IPv6, but I got an > interesting question from one of the managers; Why do we need more > IPv4 if we are moving towards IPv6?
IPv6 doesn't relieve you of IPv4 growth pains until you can start shutting down IPv4 in parts of your network, and reassign those reclaimed IPv4 addresses to more valuable end-points (such as the CPEs). However, once you have implemented IPv6 (and I understand that your new network architecture supports native IPv6?), you can actually do stuff like that. Mikael already mentioned MAP and lw4o6, and I'd just like to add that this does not necessarily mean oversubscription of IPv4 addresses - at least with MAP, you can still assign "whole" /32s to customers (or even larger prefixes for that matter). These technologies also allow for more efficient utilisation of your available IPv4 address space then what you're usually able to accomplish in a traditional IPv4 network. If you assign a /24 to the MAP service, you can make use of every single one of the 256 IP addresses - including the .0 and .255 if you so desire. You can do similar stuff in the data centre BTW, and I'm sure my employer would be happy to have me help you out with that. ;-) > A quick background; We are having discussions around IPv4 and IPv6 > and the need to eventually buy more IPv4 addresses to keep a premium > level on our Internet access. Can you really with a straight face today call your product «premium», when it lacks the IPv6 support at least two of your largest competitors offer? If you consider the existence of optional/opt-in IPv6 support as sufficient to call the entire product «premium», then perhaps you could extend that line of reasoning to public IPv4? In other words, give your customers to shared IPv4 by default, but allow them to opt-in to get a public IPv4 address. Some percentage of your customers won't care to do so as they're perfectly happy without (just as they might be perfectly happy without IPv6), leaving you with available IPv4 addresses you can assign to your CGN/MAP/lw4o6/whatever equipment and to those of your customers who opt in to get public IPv4. Tore
