[arin-ppml] Ted's Comment on 2009-2

[Steve Bertrand]

Stacy Hughes wrote:
> 
> Ted Mittelstaedt
> 12:25
> 
> comment - let's quit dancing around this small/large ISP issue, the
> heart of it is that flexibility aside, most smaller ISP's don't have as
> much money to put into capital improvements like new routers.  Because
> of this, most of them will want to delay purchase of new IPv6-compliant
> routing equipment as long as possible to take advantage of falling
> prices.  Frankly, a surprising number of small ISP's are almost
> certainly  buying used routers off -Ebay (SOMEONE is buying those 7200's
> that are all over Ebay) so the longer they can delay the move to IPv6
> the less cost it will be for them.

I totally disagree.

I've communicated with numerous small ISPs who are at the point where
they've got v6 deployed from core to edge, and are awaiting their larger
transit providers to provide native access.

Some (including myself) even have certain clients testing it.

Smaller organizations don't have nearly as much red tape to get through
to test and deploy new technologies, especially when testing can be done
on existing commodity hardware (Quagga on FreeBSD for example, or even
on existing very low-end gear eg: Cisco 2691's).

I find IPv6 to be less costly hardware-wise, as it takes far less memory
to hold a v6 table than a v4 table. I highly doubt that the size of the
v6 routing table will grow to an un-scalable size before the next round
of routers appear on eBay ;)

I don't think that we've got a single piece of gear that can't either
route or pass IPv6 traffic (other than our old PM3's).

Steve