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

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Scott Beuker [mailto:Scott.Beuker at sjrb.ca] 
> Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 9:33 AM
> To: Ted Mittelstaedt
> Cc: ARIN PPML
> Subject: RE: [arin-ppml] Ted's Comment on 2009-2
> 
> > I'm under no illusions that qwest.net is the slightest bit 
> concerned 
> > about losing DSL customers to us. ;-)
> 
> Almost all big orgs are concerned about losing customers to 
> anyone else, big or small, because customer retention is what 
> makes them a successful and therefore large company. Any 
> company not concerned about losing customers to their 
> competition will pay the price eventually. Don't kid yourself 
> into thinking big companies are foolish and naive.
> 

I never said they were.  Since we provision DSL over Qwest phone lines,
Qwest is in the position of being able to -significantly- undercut us
on price, which they do all the time.  I know Qwest has already done the
analysis and they don't want to have anything to do with the type of
customers
we serve.  But they have absolutely set things up so that they hoover up
the cherry customers.

> > Keep in mind that it's NOT the small orgs who were at the 
> ARIN meeting 
> > who are the ones I'm concerned about.  THEY are among the ones who
> will
> > be
> > up
> > and willing and ready for IPv6.  It's the ones who are completely 
> > oblivious to what's going on right now - many of these may not even 
> > have their own portable numbers yet.
> 
> ARIN have a lot of work on the go to spread the word about 
> IPv6 to the industry. It's not the responsibility of the 
> larger networks to bear the burden for organizations who 
> aren't paying attention to the industry. Not to mention that 
> such organizations are not limited to small (< /20 using) 
> anyway, and a /9 set aside is extremely excessive for such a 
> purpose. Creating an unfair market that favors new entrants 
> above existing participants is setting ARIN up for a lawsuit.
> 
> To be honest, it's hard to see these arguments as anything 
> other than an excuse for small orgs supporting this policy to 
> reserve IP space for themselves, until such purposes are 
> reflected in the policy proposal.
> 
> If this is your actual intention in supporting this policy, 
> then put it in writing and develop a policy that reserves 
> this space for companies that haven't received IP space from 
> ARIN since 2007. If that were written into the policy, I'd 
> find this argument much more credible. In my opinion, any 
> responsible ARIN community member should not support policy 
> proposals with major unintended consequences outside of the 
> consequences you support. That, to me, is a policy ripe to be 
> sent back to the author to be refined.
> 

As I said in the meeting comment I made, I thought this policy
needed tweaking.  However I support the philosophy of it.

> > 
> > I really fear that if we do not have the dribs and drabs of 
> IPv4 that 
> > are left after runout available for these orgs, or if available but 
> > priced in the stratosphere, that some of them will be harmed.
> 
> Everyone will be harmed when exhaustion hits, there's no way 
> around that.
> The idea is that we're all in this together, and any attempts 
> to change that sabotage the chances of the community working 
> in unison to get IPv6 off the ground in time.
> 
> First of all, withholding IPv4 doesn't motivate companies to IPv6.
> At this point, you need to deploy IPv6 so that your customers 
> have access to new content and applications, regardless of 
> whether you have some IPv4 address space left. Windows 7 will 
> have functionality in it that will only work with IPv6; will 
> your customers be able to use it?
> Anyone who can't see that their need to deploy IPv6 has been 
> decoupled from their IPv4 supply needs to pay closer 
> attention to the industry.
> 
> Second of all, large ISPs do not drive IPv6 adoption. If you 
> recall, the saying is "If you build it, they will come", not 
> the other way around. A major reason our customers do not 
> have IPv6 today is because if we gave it to them they'd ask 
> "what is this useful for?" and we couldn't give them a good 
> answer. Did your less technical savvy friends and family buy 
> an HDTV before or after HD channels came to market? The 
> content providers, who give Joe and Mary Public a use for 
> this confusing new IPv6 thing, are oft recipients of /20 or 
> smaller. We need them in this game with us, and as concerned 
> about deploying IPv6 as they can be.
> 

This isn't about driving IPv6.  It's about blocking IPv6.  Right now
there's ISPs ready and willing to deploy IPv6 and they can't - because
they are single-homed and their upstream - a larger ISP - isn't ready
and isn't routing IPv6.  We see these complaints all of the time on
the mailing lists, so I don't buy the argument that we are all in this
together.  Some of us are ready, others aren't.  If it's an end-node
AS that isn't ready, I don't care.  If it's a transit AS that isn't
ready, I do care - espically when there's end-node AS's connected to it
that are chomping at the bit to get rolling.

Clearly, the transit AS's need to get IPv6 deployed first.  Since the
largest ISP's with the highest IP consumption rates are all in this club,
and since they can't use the small IPv4 blocks that will be available
after the larger IPv4 blocks are assigned anyway, it's a no-brainer to
tell the largest ISPs - who need to be routing IPv6 first - that they will
lose access to IPv4 block requests first, before small orgs do - as we
approach IPv4 runout.

Ted