[arin-discuss] ipv6 technology supplier phone bank?

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Paul Vixie wrote:
>> Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:56:15 -0400
>> From: alex phillips <highspeedlink at gmail.com>
> 
> (alex gave me permission to answer this private e-mail publically.)
> 
>> I must have missed the start of this thread but one of the issues we have
>> seen in movement towards IPv6 was not only support but moreover the lack
>> of profitable reasons to move to it.
> 
> agreed.  

I disagree with this.  The ISP business is filled with things that 
providers -have- to do but are not profitable, in fact, completely
the opposite.

Take e-mail, for example.  Back in 1995 you could actually charge and
get money from end-users for e-mail boxes.  Then hotmail came out with
it's freebie boxes and customers started demanding that you include
e-mail boxes at no extra charge with their service, as well as demanding
you include a webmail interface.

Then hotmail/google/etc came out with spam filtering that actually 
worked and now customers not only demand free mailboxes with their
dialup/dsl/cable/whatever service, they want them spamfiltered as well
as with a webinterface.

The history of offering Internet service for money has long been one
of hack, hack, hack at the bottom line - there's always someone around
the corner ready to undercut you with some new scam.  In fact the only
thing that stops it is when the guy around the corner outsmarts himself,
for example when Juno/Netzero were offering free dialup
accounts and discovered that they were being bled dry by customers who
never paid them a dime, never were enticed to upgrade, and ran
popup blocker software that blocked all the adverts that were paying
for the service.  I have to admit I laughed until milk came out my
nose when I saw that one come down.

Well I don't know about other ISPs but I can speak for my own and we
spend a bundle on mailserver hardware that runs lickity-split to keep
up with the demands of the latest spamblock software - but we don't get
jack from our customers for it.  We do it because if we didn't we 
wouldn't have no customers.

IPv6 is just the latest thing that ISPs are going to have to do that
is going to cost more money, and deliver nothing in exchange. Internet
service has changed over the last 15 years from being a specialty
industry that you could charge a nice fat margin on, to a commodity
industry that your margins are razor-thin on, and you only survive 
through volume.  A lot of people, like Alex, and like myself as well,
clearly remember the old days and what it used to be like, and while
it's fun to sit around electronically swapping stories about the
good old days when we could get $20 a month for a 28.8 kilobit
dialup connection, and run a modem bank on a T1 in your garage
that generated sales of $100K a year for essentially having a
huge amount of fun playing with networking toys, the sooner that we
all grow up and recognize that those days are gone, and that our
industry is all grown up now, the sooner we can get off our collective
butts, stop whining that some new regulations are going to cost us
money, and get the IPv6 deployment finished and behind us!

Anyone who wants to bitch and moan about the cost of IPv6 can go
take a trip and talk to the operators of your typical coal-fired 
electrical power plant about how their going to meet the new carbon cap 
regulations while still supplying power at the regulated rate that the 
local PUC's have set for them.  Every other business in every other
industry has to deal with expenses that they never asked for that
the community lays on them, now grow up and take it like a man!
(that's meant figuratively, ladies :-)


Ted