

Thoughts and a crazy prediction on ipv6 - zdw
http://www.semicomplete.com/blog/geekery/thoughts-and-a-crazy-prediction-on-ipv6.html

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pilif
While the article sounds really crazy, I can really see something like this
happening, even though possibly over a longer time frame.

For one, the time where ICANN can't hand out any more address blocks isn't the
same time as when providers will be unable to hand out addresses. Many
providers keep large unused pools and will just continue to sell addresses
from those.

Once these get scarce, public IP's for dialup customers are the first thing to
go. Then follow public IP's for smaller server customers (you can in theory do
reverse nat based on the Host:-header. Of course this _really_ breaks SSL, but
we don't need that anyways - see firesheep).

Whatever happens, we won't see IPv6 adaptation.

Scarcity of IP addresses is extremely beneficial to the current players who
already have their addresses as it

a) puts an end to unloved services as P2P, VoIP and some kinds of streaming or
at least makes it incredibly hard (once you put your customers behind NATs)

and

b) gets rid of competition (by not handing them out IP addresses)

The glorious time where everybody with a bit of time and skill could design
and implement a working product are going to be over as you'll just not get
the address you need while the existing big services have stockpiled their
addresses.

They will become the gatekeepers. If they like your service, they buy you and
provide the needed addresses.

If not, you are screwed.

Or you get one of those IPv6 addresses which will be unreachable for a
majority of internet users because it's totally not in the interest of ISPs to
provide V6 connectivity.

I'm telling you. This isn't going to end well. It'll take longer than what's
predicted, but it'll end up badly.

Please - give me arguments why I'm wrong and why we'll have large scale IPv6
deployments in the near future.

~~~
jerf
IPv6 gets adopted when the ever-dropping cost line meets the ever-rising cost
line of IPv4, and not sooner. (And IPv4's cost line has only really twitched
upwards; unfortunately due to the nature of this sort of rigid supply/growing
demand situation with market forces being suppressed by the supplier ignoring
them you tend to only see the price spike at the end of the supply. If we were
being really rational about this we'd be raising the price on IPv4 blocks
already.) Once that happens it becomes difficult to predict exactly what
happens next, because as people marginally transition to IPv6, that causes the
cost of IPv6 to further drop as people iron the problems out (making it
easier), but the costs of IPv4 drop too as IPs become more available again. I
suspect IPv6 will win if for no other reason than momentum, though; the
perceived costs of not transitioning will become higher as it becomes the "in"
thing to do.

The hands have been wringing over the past decade as people have overestimated
the costs of IPv4 and underestimated the costs of IPv6, by quite a lot. But I
suspect this will not be the exception that breaks the simple principles of
economics.

Incidentally, some blame can be laid at the feet of those who designed IPv6
and took the opportunity to jam every wishlist item into it they could think
of (to a first approximation), thus raising the price of IPv6 through the roof
and causing the lines to fail to cross until quite late. Had IPv6 been an
incremental improvement over IPv4, with a larger address space, the costs
would have been much less (though still large and easy to underestimate) and
the cross-over would have come much sooner. Perhaps it would not have come
yet, but it would have been sooner and more graceful (since, after all, a
global price curve is only an approximation, what matters are all the local
ones).

A lesson for next time we need to redesign one of the Internet's core
protocols: KISS doesn't stop mattering just because the problem is big! (Quite
the opposite, really.)

~~~
dfox
Actually, most of these "wishlist items" are not relevant for the core IPv6
protocol (as in subset that needs to be understood by routers) and deal mainly
with end hosts. But what is relevant to cost of migration is exactly the
larger address space, most high-performance routers do almost everything in
custom hardware.

Most important part of this cost-wise are FIB lookups, with FIB being
typically implemented as specialized content addressable memory chip, which
due to it's nature is pretty expensive (it is one of things that you cannot
reasonably implement in programmable logic) to redesign for larger address
space (and impossible to upgrade without throwing out whole router). On the
other hand, header decoding are usually implemented in some programmable logic
or directly in software so, that can be field-upgraded with relative ease. So
in the "Carrier grade" and "L3 switch" categories you get things that are new
and capable of IPv6, things that simply cannot be upgraded and devices that
can be upgraded to do IPv6 routing in software (at great performance overhead)

~~~
jerf
Routers aren't the only cost source. I've seen some coworkers work on moving
IPv4 end-user appliance products to IPv6, and just the act of managing IPv6
addresses on such appliances, to say nothing of interacting with the other
IPv6 issues that may not be part of the "core protocol" but you better support
if you're going to claim IPv6 compliance, was a surprising amount of work.

I thought I knew what IPv6 was, but man was I ever wrong. It's significantly
more complicated than IPv4. Which I don't necessarily even mean as a
criticism, some of the bits of complication are actually fixing problems with
IPv4, while I'd say other things are just wishlist items. But regardless of
how right or wrong it is, it is definitely more complicated.

As expensive as routers can be at the high end, broadly speaking, router costs
in dealing with the core protocol do not seem to me to be what is holding back
adoption. The costs are dominated by all of the _other_ things that need to
speak IPv6 before you can transition at all, _let alone_ entirely eliminate
IPv4. Maybe I'm wrong, though, it's hard to tell.

~~~
dfox
I focused on costs to organizations deploying IPv6, not costs to
manufacturers/developers (which may or may not be reflected in increased
equipment prices).

And as for all the other things that need to speak IPv6, I was actually
surprised that for more than year any random new piece of network attached
anything that I have seen supported IPv6 out of the box and just worked.

------
smutticus
ICANN is already preparing for secondary markets to appear where people can
auction off unused IP space. It's inevitable and they know this. Eventually
everyone will migrate to IPv6 simply because the addresses will be free.

There will never be a day when you cannot get a new IPv4 address. But there
will come a day when you don't feel like paying for one.

~~~
rbranson
They aren't QUITE free. ARIN charges yearly fee of $1,250 for a /40 of IPv6
space. Of course, that's theoretically 309 SEPTILLION addresses (2^88), as
much as organization will currently need. $1,250 for up to a /20 of IPv4s,
which is a paltry 4,096 addresses.

------
kree10
"Week 8: Cloud proviers, thanks to CFO-profit-center drives, now start
charging for public IP addresses."

I don't think cloud providers will stop giving out public addresses 'for
free'. I think their default will be public ipv6, and charge a premium if you
want ipv4. Or maybe they'll frame it as a "discount" if you want to use ipv6
only.

------
iwr
Not everyone needs public-facing IP addresses. It's also possible to write
network/web applications that work through NAT, or that don't need routable
clients.

Considering the transition to IPv6 will take at least a decade, do your apps
need clients with public routable IPs?

------
runjake
We already have IPv6 deployed on our ~10,000 node network. It was pretty
simple to set up (after learning the basics of IPv6), and since the latest
versions of Windows and Mac OS X default to IPv6 over v4, most of our internal
traffic is v6 (most of our servers are Windows, and they reg AAAA recs in
DNS).

DHCPv6 is still a bit of a mess (at least on the Cisco end), though.

I'm sure there will be many operational issues, but I get this feeling the
fear is a lot like it was for Y2K.

------
lawfulfalafel
I have always been under the impression that the limited nature of ipv4 is
very detrimental for creating infrastructure in poor parts of the world. This
might actually make large corporations (and more so governments) interested in
preventing competitors from rising in foreign lands.

You can afford fiber and all of the hardware to get an isp working? Great. Too
bad you still have to pay your tithing for the artificial scarcity of
addressing.

~~~
wmf
_I have always been under the impression that the limited nature of ipv4 is
very detrimental for creating infrastructure in poor parts of the world._

It's not. IPv4 is approximately free today; it's the smallest part of the cost
of running Internet infrastructure.

 _This might actually make large corporations (and more so governments)
interested in preventing competitors from rising in foreign lands._

Yeah, the only thing stopping Africa from kicking the US's butt in technology
is a lack of IP addresses...

~~~
lawfulfalafel
Well, I was talking out of my ass then. I was under the impression that places
that had a large set of ip's (such as a few universities and corporations)
would make a bundle leasing those to other people when there was more
contention for addresses.

~~~
wmf
That _will_ happen _after_ the free IPv4 addresses run out in the future,
which is why ISPs in developing regions should get as many addresses as they
can now while they're free and prepare to adopt IPv6 if it turns out to be
cheaper than buying IPv4 addresses.

------
InclinedPlane
Alternate future history: IPv4 forces most ISPs to put ordinary household
subscribers behind NAT rather than give them internet addressable IPs. A few
things stop working for some people, some folks grumble, the spread of
internet worms slows down considerably.

