[arin-ppml] V6 address allocation policy

[Davis, Terry L]

I've been a big supporter of IPv6 for a decade now since I was in the FTTH business for awhile in 2000-2001.  Industry has spent an enormous amount in developing it both in network and in the end systems.  And I still feel it has huge potentials to allow us to improve the Internet.

But yet even with the globe rushing headlong toward the end of IPv4 space, probably within 24 months, v6 is still barely crawling forward in deployments. It's not going into greenfields, startups, etc.  It is still hard to find native v6 transport.  I don't know of a v6 network anywhere approaching even approaching 100,000 systems (I hope I'm wrong!) on the globe.

Yea I finally realized in doing my Master's paper a couple years back that we had really screwed up by not defining a native way to allow v4 to v6 communications.  As is, you basically have to open every v4 app and re-write it to utilize v6; none of the existing transition technologies cover all the v4 to v6 communications scenarios.  With this much installed v4, the cost of opening every existing app to change it to be dual-stacked is staggering.  

We can argue endlessly about the risks of opening v6 address allocation policy but in the end, if we cannot get the Internet developers to utilize it, all the investment of the IT and comm vendors will be lost.  One of the alternatives to IPv6 will win (geo routing, 5th octet, something-out-of-the-blue, etc) and all that investment in IPv6 and its potential enhancements to the Internet will be lost to us.

If I represented an IT or comm vendor right now, I'd be doing everything I could to get IPv6 used, including completely re-thinking or totally opening up the allocation policies and reducing the costs to near zero, just to protect my investments.

Take care
Terry

PS: Yes believe me I have heard all the arguments why we can't do that completely re-think allocations.  But I've come to believe that unless we can find a way move v6 implementations rapidly forward, innovation will take the Internet in a completely new direction.