[ppml] Summary of Trial Balloons for Dealing with IPv4AddressCountdown

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: David Williamson [mailto:dlw+arin at tellme.com]
>Sent: Monday, April 02, 2007 7:58 AM
>To: Ted Mittelstaedt
>Cc: ppml at arin.net
>Subject: Re: [ppml] Summary of Trial Balloons for Dealing with
>IPv4AddressCountdown
>
>
>Assuming there's a decent 6-to-4 infrastructure in place, why would
>anyone ever want to leave v4?

If you look at the history of technical change, once improvements have
been adopted by the majority, it is almost frightening how quickly the
rest of the world follows along.

Sure, there's going to be pockets of IPv4 for many years.  Just like there
are pockets of 10Base2 ethernet installations still in existence today.
But, you have to look at the numbers, at least in the United States.
Here's some recent ones:

http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Internet_Impact.pdf

By the time the major ISPs in the country - the cable companies, (Comcast,
etc.)
and the phone companies (SBC, Cingular, etc) decide to switch their
subscribers over to IPv6 we probably will have 80% penetration into
home Internet connectivity.  When you have a couple hundred million
adults who are running applications and software in their homes that
is IPv6 then the corporations won't stand a chance.

I have seen this dozens of times on the corporate arena.  Consider for
example the adoption of Microsoft Office 2003.  For a 100 employee your
looking easily at $40K in licensing fees not to mention all the hardware
your going to have to upgrade to run it.  When that package came out
lots of companies fought like mad to delay the rollout.  I know of several
150-200 person companies for example that had the licensing for it but
still fought against deploying it simply because of all the money
it would require to be spent on hardware upgrades.  But time and time again
they lost that battle because users would go out and buy the latest thing
from the store and load it on their home systems then clamor for it
on their business systems.

Your quite wrong if you think businesses these days are technology drivers.
For the most part they are not.  It is the home users that their spending
dwarfs businesses on new technology, and are usually dragging the businesses
along.

Consider how many brick and mortar businesses resisted online sales, yet it
happened anyway.  Amazon was selling books online long before any of the
brick and mortar booksellers.

The large corporations with lots of IPv4 deployed internally do not have the
control over what apps are fielded on the Internet.  It is the home users
that
have that control, and if the national ISPs in the US decide the home users
are
going to be changed over to IPv6, then once that happens, the home users
will make
everyone else switchover.

Remember, for businesses it's all about ROI.  Home users don't care about
ROI and will happily take a financial loss by throwing away last years
technology that works fine and getting the newest and latest if they think
it's sexier.

Ted