[arin-ppml] fair warning: less than 1000 days lefttoIPv4 exhaustion

[Dan.Thorson at seagate.com]

I apologize in advance, and perhaps I'm missing the entire point... but I
think it's all a bit absurd that many of the participants of this email
list think that we should all be migrating to IPv6 today, and that if we're
not already in-process then woe-be-to-me.  For an enterprise customer's
perspective things look a bit different.  Here's a response I received from
one of the most well known telecommunication providers in the USA (when
asked about providing IPv6 BGP peering across our Internet circuit)

"Commercial products are expected to become available starting in 2009.
For MIS in particular, Current plans are for IPv6 to be made available on a
limited basis on MIS in 1Q09 with general availability scheduled for 4Q09."

So: a huge ISP/telecom provider in the US is saying they'll provide IPv6 to
me in about 18 months.  A query to one of my other upstreams provided this:

"We are currently evaluating our IPv6 solution in our lab, but it is not
something that we offer today. We will be making a decision of general
availability at the beginning of Q3 2008."

So this smaller ISP (with reach in to a reasonable fraction of the US) will
THINK about availability in a few months.  That's not any kind of guarantee
that they actually WILL provide it.

So I please beg everybody's pardon when I say, speaking ONLY for me (and
not my company), that I do not have any sense of urgency re: an IPv6
conversion/rollout, since clearly my upstreams don't have any.

I suspect the biggest problem will be for the company which opens their
doors in 3 years, and tries to get IP space, and finds that they can only
get IPv6... and then discovers that only a fraction of the people on the
Internet can reach their www site.  THEN it's gonna hit the fan.

In ignorance, I provide my $0.02 worth.

danT

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Dan Thorson - CCIE 10754
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