[arin-ppml] DTV and IPv6

[Milton L Mueller]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ted Mittelstaedt [mailto:tedm at ipinc.net]
> > The DTV delay is a very bad sign for the v6 migration. It
> > indicates that politicians in the US are so fearful of the
> > possibility that people will be stranded when analog is shut
> > off that they are willing to maintain very costly "dual
> > stack" equivalents (broacasting on two channels) for another
> > 6 months (or more). It indicates that after 13 years of
> > planning for this transition no one has any confidence that
> > it will work when we actually pull the trigger.
> >
> 
> No that isn't what it means.

As far as I can tell, nothing in your detailed exposition of the DTV coupon program contradicts anything said above. Yes, the govt ran out of coupons and that coupon program had some poorly designed elements. Thus, as I said, they feared that when they pulled the trigger lots of people would not be ready. I am not exactly sure what your point is.

Why the coupon program was chosen is an interesting story we need not go into here, but the explanations are mostly political. And by the way this is not the first delay, there were others before the coupon program was even created. But we all appreciate your research into the DTV coupon program. 

By the way, this is not a HDTV transition it is a DTV transition. 

 
> The politicians did not want to be critized for sending millions
> of pounds of lead into the nation's landfills by basically
> telling everyone to go out and scrap their TV and buy a new TV.
> What this ignores is that those TV's are going to eventually fail
> and be scrapped out anyway.  That is why they focused on the
> converter box program.

Indeed, I think "the politicians" were pretty good judges in this case of what their constituents want to hear and want to be done. 

> The principle lesson we can take from this is that with the
> IPv6 switchover, the VERY BEST way to do it would be to simply
> tell everyone to scrap out their older IPv4-only gear.

Yah. Right. You tell 'em.