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

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net 
> [mailto:arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net] On Behalf Of 
> Dan.Thorson at seagate.com
> Sent: Monday, May 05, 2008 11:37 AM
> To: ppml at arin.net
> Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] fair warning: less than 1000days 
> lefttoIPv4 exhaustion
> 
> 
> 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."
> 

Remember the US government has a deadline of this year for IPv6
from it's vendors.  That is why your seeing this.

> 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.
> 

They probably won't.  A smaller ISP likely has no government
contracts.  Thus they will likely have no existing customers that
will demand IPv6.

> 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.
> 

But you see, you don't have any choice.  Since your upstreams
don't provide it YOU CAN'T provide it EVEN IF you had a sense of
urgency.  (unless you wanted to get involved with a tunnel
provider, yuck)

So why would you, being I'm assuming a somewhat logical person,
start jumping up and down and having a heart attack over something
that you cannot change?

> 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.
>

I think this is VERY UNLIKELY.

Any company that opens it's doors in 3 years is either going to be
small, in which case they get IP numbering from their ISP and
NOT from the RIRs - OR they are going to be a massively largely
funded venture capitalized firm that has clueful people involved
in the business plan who are going to know about this stuff and
know about the workarounds long before getting any rude awakenings.

The small fry if they need IPv4 they will just go shopping for a
different ISP if the one that they have can't provide it.

The large fry are going to do what the large fry always do - which
is spend money on a workaround (getting IPv4 from an ISP that has it)
or forcing the rest of the world to do things the way they want them
done. (ie: use IPv6)

I think the biggest problem will be the medium-sized ISPs who are
not big enough to have the money to force the rest of the world
to do things their way, yet are large enough that they have growing
and pressing needs for IPv4.  Those folks will have to get involved
in proxying IPv6<->IPv4 and such, and God help them if they can't get
their customers to go along with them.

But, it's not like ARIN didn't forcibly subscribe all those medium-sized
fry to this mailing list - and I recall a flood of unsubscribe requests
after that.  Well, if those people refuse to be educated and prefer to
stick their head in the sand on this, then piss on them.

Ted