On Feb 4, 2011, at 10:47 AM, Heinrich Strauss wrote: > Hi, NANOG. > > Something's just struck me: every IPv4 allocation over a certain threshold > has a monetary cost (sometimes in the tens of thousands of USD) and according > to our RIR, the first equivalent IPv6 allocation is given as a freebie (to > encourage migration). (Disclaimer: I'm on the Dark Continent of Africa) > > So once the "early" adopters migrate their networks to IPv6, there is no > business need to maintain the IPv4 allocation and that will be returned to > the free pool, since Business would see it as an unnecessary cost. > > This would seem to counteract the forced move to IPv6, since, once the early > adopters move their services exclusively to IPv6 (or maintaining very small > IPv4 blocks), there would be plenty of IPv4 space for the late adopters to > request (after the RIR quarantine period, etc). Naturally, 6to4 functionality > must remain for a while to interoperability reasons, so their resources would > be available to the IPv6 world for time to come. > > Unless I'm misunderstanding the RIRs policy regarding IPv4 allocations; has > it been stated by all RIRs that IPv4 blocks are unallocatable once the > exhaustion phase kicks in? Or is there another mechanism to ensure that we > don't hand out the space being handed back once IPv6 is the norm? :) > > Regards, > -H.
The big providers will not be deprecating their IPv4 addresses until there is no longer a significant IPv4 internet. At that time, smaller providers could probably get them, but, they will need IPv6 in order to talk to most of the world. Owen
