[ppml] "Who's afraid of IPv4 address depletion? Apparently no one."

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:ppml-bounces at arin.net]On Behalf Of
>John Curran
>Sent: Saturday, February 09, 2008 3:35 PM
>To: bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com
>Cc: Public Policy Mailing List
>Subject: Re: [ppml] "Who's afraid of IPv4 address depletion? Apparently
>no one."
>
>
>At 10:56 PM +0000 2/9/08, bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com wrote:
>>
>>	i think a safe presumption is that this may be a
>>	predominant structure as long as there are "arrogant
>>	twits" who maintain the fiction that only IPv4 transport
>>	is needed to get to their content/eyeballs.  e.g. if
>>	facebook never supports IPv6 transport, this will be common.
>>	Facebook will never see IPv6 demand and claim "all is well"
>>	with IPv4 and the IPv6 hype is just that.
>
>Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, MSN, Youtube, .... the list goes on and on.
>I wouldn't expect any of them to see measurable demand for IPv6
>until there's a sizable IPv6-only user community.
>

This is the classic chicken-and-egg program or catch-22 as you would
have it.  And it's an argument easily sidestepped.

Yahoo and Facebook don't configure the IPv4 and IPv6 stacks of our
customers, so what they have to say about IPv6 deployment is of
no consequence.

What -I- as the ISP say to my customers is the only thing of any real
consequence.

When we have a business customer connect to us, 9/10's of the time
we are doing the configuration on their routers, and 1/2 of the time
we are specing to them what -new- router to buy.  I've had customers
with perfectly good Cisco devices leftover from their prior ISP tell
me they still want to buy a new router, even though I tell them we
could reconfigure their old device.  That's beside the point, though.

If an end-user comes to me and says they want to connect to us via
DSL or Dialup or whatever, I'll direct them to the how-to's on our
website as to how to configure their system.  When the time is ready
for IPv6 those how-to's will be re-written to enable all the IPv6 stuff
on their system.  The end users will blindly follow whatever I or
my tech support group tells them to do, and if that means enable IPv6
they will do it.  As they don't really understand how IPv4 works, the
fact that they don't understand how IPv6 works is of no consequence -
none of them are in the position to question my instructions in the first
place.

For my corporate customers, if I start telling them they have to get
new routers to support IPv6, most of them will simply say no problem
and do it.  Maybe not immediately but eventually.  These are customers
that are paying me to tell them what they need to do to connect to the
Internet, so if I tell them they need to be IPv6 compliant to their
firewall (at least) they will do it.

I think people are really making this IPv4 <-> IPv6 transition sound
far more difficult than it really needs to be.  Customers come in 2
categories, informed or ignorant.  The vast number are ignorant and
they are happy to stay that way - they no more want to know how to
configure a router than they want to know how to change the sparkplugs
in their car engine.  The informed customer, on the other hand,
merely needs to be told the cons of remaining IPv4 and left alone to
their own devices.

The sum fact of it is that the vast majority of customers are just going
to do what their ISP tells them to do.  If all the ISP's start telling
customers to switch over to IPv6, the very small minority of informed
customers who want to fight against it based on whatever cost/benefit
they come up with, are going to find themselves outnumbered.

Much like the network admins who argued against 10BaseT claiming it was
no faster than 10Base2, they will be snowed over by the herd.

Ted