Market forces

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Nov 9, 2020, at 5:06 AM, Simon Hobson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Have you heard of the expression "don't shoot the messenger" ?
> People are telling you what they observe. Right or wrong, there **ARE** ISPs out there where "bottom line" is the only thing they care about, and customer experience come last on the list of priorities.

Simon, the thing you’re glossing over here, which I actually don’t hear anybody talking about, is that there has thus far been no market pressure that could punish ISPs that hand out /64s. What’s the bad outcome for the end user in practice? They can’t subnet their home network? Well, they don’t, do they? HNCP has a market penetration of 0% right now.

We can reasonably expect this to change in the next year or two. Several initiatives are underway at the moment that are likely to suffer from the absence of a narrower allocation: specifically CHIP and Thread, both of which rely on 802.15.4.6lowpan networks. It’s reasonable to expect that these technologies will start to be deployed in homes in significant numbers in the near future.

At present, when such technologies are deployed, they will be forced to rely on IPv4 for cloud service reachability for ISPs that don’t provide an allocation narrower than /64. Since these networks are v6-only, this will be done using NAT64. And this will work fine, except that the ISP is now stuck giving the customer an IPv4 address.

What is less scarce than an IPv4 address? Why, a /60 or a /56. These are 2^28 or 2^24 less scarce than IPv4 addresses, respectively.

So all this fuss about how to solve the problem of ISPs only giving out /64s is genuinely premature. Market forces will change their behavior. It’s just a matter of time.