[arin-ppml] An article of interest to the community....

[Chris Engel]

> The extreme costs of IPv4 at the access provider level WILL drive access
> customers to IPv6. Even to the extent that access customers are able to
> maintain some level of IPv4 capability, it will be significantly degraded and
> they will begin to prefer sites and services that can deliver to them on native
> IPv6.

You are going to need to be more specific when you are talking about "significantly degraded" sites and services. What sort of degradation exactly are you talking about?  I'm willing to bet 95% plus of the existing users of our services are behind NAT on their end....and our server are behind NAT on our end. So you've already got NAT on both ends of the connection. In 10 plus years of offering these services now we've had ZERO complaints involving NAT and exactly ZERO support calls that involved NAT. What's likely to change about that? Why should someone running native 6 and translating to 4 be any different in that regard?  If the average user running a native IPv6 today can't translate and reach the majority of IPv4 sites without experiencing significant degradation of services then I really don't think I'm going to have to worry much about IPv6 tomorrow....because IPv6 will already be dead on arrival and will never reach tomorrow. If IPv6 is gaining in adoption today.....that tells me that the people using it aren't generally having problems using most IPv4 hosted services.... either that or there are way more masochists out there in the world then I would imagine.

In terms of what end users of our services actually care about, the choice of transport protocol used to reach our sites rates somewhere below what our lead programmer had for breakfast this morning.  I'm not saying that case will hold true for every content provider.....but I'm just not seeing how it is going to make much difference to most of them.



Christopher Engel