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

[Wettling, Fred]

Perspective from a very large global engineering company...  Over 95%
(thousands) of our computers around the world are running dual-stack
today at our offices and projects.  The current limitations to an
IPv6-only environment are things like legacy operating systems and
external sites and services that do not support IPv6 yet.  We'll be
running dual-stack for the next few years, with an increasing dependence
on available IPv6 transport for new capabilities such as P2P.  

Major implementation pains in the last three years of IPv6
implementation is lack of product features (i.e. no DHCPv6 support in
Windows XP or Windows Server 2003) and lack of native IPv6 services to
the premise from several major carriers.  These shortcomings have
delayed some of our planned activities or have workarounds we would have
preferred not to implement.

Fred Wettling

-----Original Message-----
From: ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:ppml-bounces at arin.net] On Behalf Of
John Curran
Sent: Saturday, February 09, 2008 3:20 PM
To: Joel Jaeggli
Cc: Public Policy Mailing List
Subject: Re: [ppml] "Who's afraid of IPv4 address depletion? Apparently
no one."

At 12:00 PM -0800 2/9/08, Joel Jaeggli wrote:
>John Curran wrote:
>
>Is it safe to presume that these are architectures proposed for new
customer connections?  It is hard to imagine an existing Internet
connected (via IPv4) site having any reason to evolve its internal
network into an IPv6 island intentionally in the near future...
>
>Actually if you recover the v4 address currently consumed by your
infrastructure you can continue to provide them to your customers which
may by a substantial incentive to produce a network which is
subtantially ipv6 only.

Interesting; this presumes that that one's willing to depart from 'ships
in the night' IPv4/IPv6 backbone approach, and "transparently" alter the
transport of your existing production
IPv4 customer traffic...

I'm not saying it won't happen (as depletion will eventually force some
very hard decisions) but it's not the traditional risk-adverse approach
used by the carriers, who loathe to do anything that could result in
even a small percentage of their business customers
complaining/switching/leaving.

Of course, it's opportunities like that which nimble/brave firms use to
gain advantage (and not dissimilar to the recent switch that some
carriers did with production POTS trunks to VoIP for cost
advantages...), and if there's sufficient IPv4 address space to be to
recovered, it could be one possible route which allows
IPv4 growth while also making progress on transition.