[arin-discuss] ipv6 technology supplier phone bank?

[Tony Hain]

Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> 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. 

This is the short-sighted view of people that can't see past next quarter.
Unfortunately most people are in this space, and will run right up to the
end of the free pool before they acknowledge that they need a plan for the
following quarter. People that insist on having an extremely short term ROI
will never understand the concept of avoiding a boxed canyon. 

Tony


> 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
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