On Tue, 2008-06-10 at 05:36 +1000, Robin Whittle wrote: > The world in general uses IPv4. Enthusiasm for IPv6 is limited and > is much more prevalent in the IETF than amongst most users or > providers. (IOW, since its development in the mid-1990s, IPv6 has > not come close to meeting the needs of significant numbers of users > or ISPs. There is no evidence that the looming IPv4 address > shortage has changed this.) We should consider that such confidence > about IPv6 is likely to involve unrealistic expectations of imminent > dual-stack and IPv6-only adoption.
Far from everyone in the ops-community share that view. Technically, v6 has for some time already had virtually everything v4 has wrt provider and end-user functionality. However, the only really new feature of v6 is the extra addresses and there's a cost involved to get started. Hence the lack of interest. A safe bet on this planet is that scarcity brings out the worst in people. There's no reason to assume that IP will be an exception. Many providers that have a strategy beyond blindly copying others are already planning for solutions that enable growth through IPv6 at the customer edge. The widely anticipated steep increase in cost per IPv4 address will be a powerful catalyst to push investments towards more future-proof solutions. Regardless of an increased ability to slice-and-dice v4 address-blocks, nobody has yet presented a realiable scheme to reclaim enough v4 addresses to maintain anything that resembles current growth at network's customer edge past depletion. While IPv4 generally is expected to stay around for a long time there's also many people in the ops-community who believe that the majority of the internet may switch to v6 is as little as 3-5 years once it gets rolling helped by the ever shortening life-span of both software and hardware. Besides, it is also reasonable to expect a development in NA(P)T-PT/ALG solutions for v6-only hosts in the next few years that is similar to the rise of NAT in the late 90s. Summary: yes we want a new (or supplemental) scalable routing architecture, but the v4 run-out is highly questionable as an argument in favour of any particular solution. //per -- to unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body. archive: <http://psg.com/lists/rrg/> & ftp://psg.com/pub/lists/rrg
