[arin-discuss] ipv6 technology supplier phone bank?

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> > How do you align those costs?
> > If IPv6 requires a new home gateway but IPv4 only requires 
> part of a 
> > CGN, which is cheaper?  Who incurs the cost? [2]
> 
> If you look at the CGN deployment plans, they all require a 
> new home gateway anyway. 

With that kind of scenario, you just know that one of the big players
is holding their cards close to their chests, planning an IPv6 rollout
while paying lip service to carrier grade NAT. They know that if they
can lure their competitors into spending a lot of money on CGN,
then when those companies are forced into IPv6 anyway, with even more
costs and disruption, there will be some nice M&A prospects at
bargain prices.

> > If IPv6 doesn't require a new home gateway, but only gets 
> you to 50% 
> > of the Internet, which is cheaper? 

Crazy question. Anyone deploying IPv6 to the home user is going
to make sure that those IPv6 customers will get access to all of
the Internet. Flashable home gateways, especially those based on
Linux, can be easily upgraded to support IPv6, so not all
home gateways will need to be replaced.

> CGN will break just about everything but simple html and pop, 
> and can't begin to scale in the face of the AJAX fad. 

Then perhaps we need to think of web content providers as "suppliers"
and start contacting them too, to find out when they plan to support
IPv6 access to their content services. One AJAX app which is known 
to create problems even with traditional NAT is Google Maps, but 
fortunately for the IPv6 folks, Google supports IPv6 already, and is
willing to peer widely on IPv6.

> > What happens to competition if users can't switch providers and 
> > receive a comparable IPv4 service?

They can still switch providers and receive a comparable IPv6
service. Competition will not disappear.

> CPE 
> vendors run on very thin margins, so they are not even going 
> to start thinking about IPv6 until they get very clear 
> indications from the ISPs as to what is needed. 

They should at least think about it. If they are not running on
a platform which currently supports IPv6, then perhaps they 
should switch platforms before they need the IPv6 support. Those
vendors whose home gateways run on Linux, have discovered that 
it is not a lot of work to add IPv6 support. This in itself
may create the appearance of problem because these vendors know
that they don't have to do anything until the first orders come
in for IPv6 because they can have it ready in a couple of months.

>So far the 
> few messages I am aware of are; not coherent; nothing more 
> than an acronym; have not clear timeframes or orders ... YMMV

This is the reason for the IPv6 Sprint. To get people to firm
up their plans and their timeframes. To put it bluntly, if you know
that IPv4 will runout in November 2011 and you do not have a firm
plan to release a product supporting IPv6 before then, plus have
clear timeframes for the development work needed for this IPv6
version, then customers will look elsewhere. In addition, it is
necessary to take customer processes into account. If an ISP needs
to do three months of lab testing plus three months of field trials
before committing to a product, then you had better not plan on
releasing your product in November 2011. It had better be out in 
May 2011.

This applies to all kind of products; devices, software, web-sites
and so on. 

--Michael Dillon