[arin-discuss] Good Stewardship by example, I'd like to RETURN a /20

[VAUGHN THURMAN - SWIFT SYSTEMS INC]

Lee,

The letter got our attention.  It's why I am speaking up, getting involved, and why our staff is hustling to return all the space we can to our upstreams so we can justify one more v4 allocation ASAP, and why we have our IPv6 research in progress as well.

Now I am a technical type leader, and may not be a good sample... but trust me, it shook us to the core.  We had been watching from a distance before that, but not so closely.  We are in a fairly good area to address this.  We have fiber to one of the ISP hotels where IPv6 is running, but a lot of the small operators I know well do not have that luxury and are in a mild panic, some of them were considering buying gear they can't afford because sales people had shown them the ARIN letter as evidence that the world is ending for them unless they buy new routers and so forth.  Now truthfully, while I don't advocate forklift upgrades in a panic, our initial research has not been pretty about the performance of IPv6 on equipment that was originally designed for IPv4.

Anyway... the letter... In my opinion it's having an effect.

Best regards,
~Vaughn

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Radel [mailto:jradel at vantage.com] 
Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2009 10:14 PM
To: VAUGHN THURMAN - SWIFT SYSTEMS INC
Cc: arin-discuss at arin.net
Subject: Re: [arin-discuss] Good Stewardship by example, I'd like to RETURN a /20



VAUGHN THURMAN - SWIFT SYSTEMS INC wrote:
> Lee Wrote:
>
>   
>> ...If you don't, then please answer the question: "How much (effort=time=)
>> money should ARIN spend on reclamation?"...
>>     
>
> Well... as much as can be reasonably allocated to the effort starting on Monday.  1 year of additional time might make the difference between survival and/or implosion for service providers trapped under other providers that are not making proper progress.  I don't want to see some of us (even if I am in "the club") make it through at the expense of others who are asking for help - that is reasonable, possible, and equitable.
>
>
>   
Yes, I'm a cynic, but....  When I hear things like this I wonder, I 
truly wonder what evidence there is that should enough addresses be 
recovered to put run-out off for another year, that an awful lot of 
management teams won't immediately refocus their efforts on projects 
with pay offs in the next quarter or two and shift their entire ipv6 
efforts out by a year or so?  Obviously, not everyone will do that, and 
overall we will be closer to being able to deal with run-out, but all 
evidence I've seen over the years of listening to this discussion go 
'round and 'round, is that a year's grace does not equal a year's effort 
or progress in implementing a long-term solution.
> A nice certified letter went out a month or two ago (3?), that alerted the community to the seriousness of the issue at hand.  The result (well done by the way ARIN) is increased participation and awareness.  So now that we have critical mass building, do we have enough time for a smooth transition?
>
>   
You mean the one my CEO faxed to my VP (and otherwise ignored) who sent 
it to me and a couple of other technical people (and otherwise ignored) 
after I'd given my VP a heads up that the CEO would be getting it?  Do 
we really have any hard data, or even squishy data, on how many 
corporate officers said, "Oh, my, I never knew that; we'll do something 
about it!"   Does ARIN staff have any sense for how many contacts 
they've had as a result of the letter, and possibly even how many of 
those might be characterized as productive?  I apologize if that 
information has been published and I've missed it.

While I think the letter was a good thing, don't underestimate the 
number of corporate officers who still don't comprehend and/or care what 
impact this will have on them in the next couple of years.  It'll take a 
couple more letters and a couple of WSJ front-page articles about 
company, or at least major initiative, failures due to inability to get 
v4 addresses, before everyone gets that this is something that they have 
to pay attention to.

-- 

Jon Radel
Senior Director of Engineering
Vantage Communications
p: 267-756-1014
f: 202-742-5661
e: jradel at vantage.com

"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in
numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it,
when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and
unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have
scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the state of science, whatever the matter may be." ~Lord Kelvin