I sometimes wonder if the larger, established ISPs, sitting on their old
allocations of IPv4 addresses, have a vested interest in preserving the
status quo since without a functioning IPv6, the lack of IPv4 space is a
barrier to new competitors entering the market.
I don't see a need to invoke any conspiracy theories.
I hope people won't be offended if I give a highly simplified model of
the participants in the Internet:
end user(1) ----- access ISP(2) ----- transit ISP(3) ----- hosting
ISP(4) ----- content provider(5)
Now, only one of these groups is really feeling the pain of address
depletion, and that's the access ISPs(2). Some feel that pain badly, and
it's certainly true that there's no way you could enter the market as an
access ISP in the UK given a /22 of address space.
The hosting ISPs(4) also feel some pain - especially if they are doing
things like VM hosting, one IP per instance. If you want to become the
next Amazon EC2, you are not going to get far on a /22.
But I'd say nobody else is affected by this problem. In particular, the
content providers(5) have been sharing IP addresses for years (with HTTP
virtual hosts, reverse proxies/load balancers, and CDNs). A /22 is
plenty of space for a new content provider.
So the first point to make is: if you want to throw subsidy money at the
problem, you don't necessary want to do this to the access ISPs, but to
everyone else.
To be fair, the transit ISPs(3) have pretty much finished the rollout.
Essentially it was just pasting some config into their routers.
Now, what about the content providers? As it would be pretty simple for
them to IPv6-enable, why don't they? To take a random example, why isn't
www.bbc.co.uk reachable via IPv6? That's an organisation which is not
short of either technical expertise or budget.
I suspect the problem is finding a reason *for* them to turn on IPv6.
Any website's users fall into these groups:
(1) IPv4 only
(2) IPv6 + IPv4, dual stack
(3) IPv6 + NAT64/DNS64, maybe a few
(4) pure IPv6 only, of which there are precisely zero
By putting their content on IPv4, they reach all their users. By putting
it on IPv6, they reach nobody else. Putting it on IPv6 carries some
setup cost, and some risk, and some ongoing support cost. So where's the
business case? Will they do it from the kindness of their hearts, just
to help out the poor Access ISPs who are being squeezed?
Here's another question: at what point will IPv6-only content start to
appear? Won't that force access ISPs and end users to pick up IPv6?
What content providers care about is getting to the maximum number of
eyeballs. If they need an IPv4 address to do this they will get one, and
even if that address costs $1,000 that's still cheap. They often pay
many, many times more than this just to get an attractive domain name.
Looking back in history, remember when websites stopped supporting IE5:
it was when the proportion of IE5 users fell below about 1%. So I'd
predict the same here: that is, content providers might put up IPv6-only
content when IPv4-only users account for less than about 1% of their
audience. Not all eyeballs are equally valuable: in some cases it might
be when IPv4-only *business* users account for less than 1% of all
*business* users.
As for the end users, in general they don't know or care. They are using
HTTP(S) for buying and selling stuff, and just want it to work. You may
be a geek who wants to ssh into your fridge, but if so, you are not
representative.
And lastly, back to the the access ISPs. If they're the ones suffering
the pain, shouldn't they be leading the way? Well, yes and no. Access
ISPs only succeed at scale, working on miniscule margins in a cut-throat
market, and have to minimise every cost. The tiniest increase in support
calls will have a big impact on their bottom line. So if they have
enough IPv4 addresses, and given they know all the content will be on
IPv4 (see above), then unless their target market is geeks or gamers,
they may be more profitable not deploying IPv6.
All because IPv6 was not built as an extension to the Internet, but as a
replacement for it :-(
Regards,
Brian.
