[ppml] NANOG IPv4 Exhaustion BoF

michael.dillon at bt.com wrote:

> The fact is that nobody needs to be dependent on new IPv4
> addresses after the runout date. There is plenty of time for
> companies to make their businesses work with a mix of IPv6 and
> IPv4. There have been some very public demonstrations of this
> mixture at the last ARIN and NANOG meetings. There will be 
> another demo at the upcoming IETF meeting. So far, if you
> examine the results of these demonstrations, there are no 
> serious problems that could not be fixed within a two year
> timeframe. And we do have two years, probably more, to fix
> these issues.

I hope you're right, but I'm not willing to bet the industry on it.

I for one haven't even seen *plans* for supporting line-rate translation 
at the scale required (10Gbps+).

> Once it is demonstrably possible to run a fully mixed IPv4
> and IPv6 network, the need for transfers disappears. Note
> that I am not referring here to dual-stack networks. When
> I say MIXED I mean that you have some endpoints that are
> IPv4 and some endpoints that are IPV6 and that they can
> both communicate with each other over infrastructure that
> has at least one pure IPv6 section in it.

I agree with your conditional statement, but I don't believe that such 
mixed networking will be possible across-the-board before IPv4 free pool 
exhaustion.  If I'm wrong, great: we've just wasted some time planning 
for a disaster that didn't occur.  But if you're wrong, and we don't 
have a plan B, then we'll have a big problem on our hands.

-Scott