Daniel Karrenberg (founder/CTO RIPE NCC) has for decades said "I sell IP
address space". The price has historically been low, but it has always been a
finite resource, and that goes for IPv6 address space too (when the RIPE NCC
opened up for IPv6 address space, it took half an hour to receive enough
requests to exhaust the entire IPv6 address space.) It isn't uncommon for ISPs
to charge for a static IPv4 address these days, and it may well be that one day
the norm will be that you can have IPv6 for free (or, rather, included at no
charge), pay something moderate for NATed IPv4, and a lot for static IPv4.
The fundamental point here is that as long as people are willing to pay for
something, somebody will always offer it, but if it becomes too expensive, the
market will develop alternatives, maybe even destroying the original market.
Consider another important Internet commodity, transit, aka global BGP
reachability. Once upon a time there were the big 6-7-8 American backbones who
were transit free; they exchanged enough routing information between them for
each one to have complete, global reachability, without paying each other
anything (although that may be a bit murky in some cases). Under the radar
came one much smaller European backbone, AS286/EUnet, and managed to slip into
the nest without anybody noticing; being transit free was the ultimate
superpower status, and the existing networks guarded themselves very carefully.
Maybe I'm being too modest here, it was I who did it, but only by virtue of
AS286 being the gateway to commercial Europe (I'm expecting Keith to ban me
from the forum any time now); Nick was very much part of all of that too.
Who cares about BGP transit today? These days transit is like electric power,
it isn't something you put on the bill. Hence, I'm wondering if it isn't so
that the notion of connectivity (rooted in IP address space) will be redefined
to the extent that the craving for address space will become a legacy
consideration, much like BGP transit has.
Should've kept my trap shut.-)
Best,
-- Per
On Tuesday, 26 May 2020, 14:39:12 BST, Paul Bone <paul@pmb.technology>
wrote:
I completely agree that the end user will generally have very little or no
knowledge of how their connectivity is done underneath - as long as Whatsapp
and Facebook work, then most are happy!
But I do think the case for hanging onto IPv4 is potentially very damaging to
the ISP industry, and I will probably be repeating myself from recent weeks.
ISP A, for example, started up 2-3 years ago and received their /22 from RIPE
but now, through growth they need more to service new customers. They now have
to pay a lot of money (in relative terms) to obtain more IPv4 addresses. To pay
for these IP addresses, ISP A needs to either increase service prices or charge
a significant amount for each IPv4 address.
ISP B is just starting out and has to pay RIPE fees and get on a waiting list
for a /24. All the while being unable to provide IPv4 services.
Whereas large ISPs C, D and E, with their stock pile of IPv4 addresses don't
really care as it does not affect them, and can continue to charge the same for
the service and competition is then affected. (Assumption made here)
All industries need to encourage startups and small businesses but hanging onto
IPv4 would massively affect our industries ability to do that - which is
already happening.
The service providers could all work together to sort this mess, but
unfortunately there is always more at play so maybe we do need legislation to
force it to happen in a phased and controlled manner.
And I completely accept that others will have a different view to myself!
Paul
On Tue, 26 May 2020 at 14:18, Per Bilse <perbi...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
I think it's a case of the notion of connectivity being changed faster than
many other things. How connectivity is achieved is ultimately not important to
most people, and which addressing scheme is used is a detail hardly anybody
even knows about.
When I first got involved, I didn't have IP connectivity at all; I had UUCP
email and news ("We used to !, but now we @"). Then I got FTP via email, a new
world. Then I got IP, globally routed IP, on my pizza box (later to be a shoe
box), yet another new world; you could use 'talk' (a command line,
curses-windowed chat) across the Internet if you knew the other guy's IP
address, how cool is that? Then I got WWW/HTTP (and DNS), yet again a new
world. Each world introduced a new addressing scheme, another way to specify
where you want to go. (There was also a parallel universe where things were
called X.something, but nobody went there.)
Then I got NAT'ed IP; not a new world, but a big change in connectivity
semantics, yet with little change in usefulness. Now ... well, how many
regular punters know what they've got?
If you look at how connectivity is shaped in people's daily lives, most of them
don't know they have an IP address. Most don't even use a general purpose web
browser (with DNS), they use an "app", whose means of connecting to a fixed
server is entirely hidden. It probably uses DNS, which resolves to IP, which
maps to MAC, which maybe rides on whatever PPP or ATM or something else uses,
but none of that is important. No personal connectivity device needs an
'ifconfig' icon in order to work, and IPv4 vs IPv6 isn't important either; it
isn't the addressing scheme people buy into, and that goes for the UKNOF
audience too. When did anybody last care about MAC addresses? What if the
ubiquitous 48bit MAC was replaced by something completely different? As long
as IPvN packets can be forwarded, it doesn't matter to anybody here.
So, assuming the role of party pooper, I think there's a good case for IPv4
being here forever. Whether connectivity is provided via IPv4 or IPv6 or
something else is a detail, and I don't think you can compare to Y2K or 2038;
both of those come with a degree of certainty that a policy decision will never
have. I fully understand the frustration expressed by many people, but I think
it's something that just comes with the job.
Best,
-- Per
On Tuesday, 26 May 2020, 01:11:25 BST, Paul Mansfield
<paul+uk...@mansfield.co.uk> wrote:
So is it actually feasible to announce *any* date when IPv6 will be
the only connectivity offered to the end user? The thing is that
without target dates and deadlines, things will drag on indefinitely.
I'll admit I wanted to deliberately put up a challenging statement,
but not to troll, really. I genuinely want an answer to "is there a
possible date?".
Looking back at Y2K, would all that effort have been put in to kill
off old services and tidy up all the cr*p if there hadn't been a fixed
deadline? As to the Jan 19 2038 problem, how many of us hope to be
retired by then, or will we be dragged out of retirement?!
Ok, yes, there's a hell of a lot of legacy equipment in place which
could still be there in five years, so perhaps five years isn't near
enough for ipv4 use to have fallen into almost disuse. Do "we" still
want to be fighting with dual-stack networks, CGNAT, scrabbling to buy
ever more expensive IPv4 addresses etc indefinitely? Will 2038 also
mark a point where legacy systems have to be retired because of their
use of 32 bit math for dates and thus also retire non-ipv6 compliant
systems? Eighteen years seems a long way away?
--
Paul BoneNetwork Consultant
PMB Technology
