Re: [v4tov6transition] i am not troubled (was Re: troubling survey)

Fred Baker <fred@cisco.com> Sat, 18 September 2010 17:46 UTC

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From: Fred Baker <fred@cisco.com>
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Subject: Re: [v4tov6transition] i am not troubled (was Re: troubling survey)
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On Sep 17, 2010, at 1:40 PM, <Jason.Weil@cox.com> <Jason.Weil@cox.com> wrote:

> Rural muni network provider. Currently serves 4500 subs. That number has grown from 3900 over the last five years. Their allocation from provider/ARIN will last them at least another 5. Benefit from upgrading today in their view=0. The only argument you can make here is that new apps/content will be served IPv6-only...someday. That is a hard position to stand behind to push adoption in the near-term.

No argument from his present viewpoint. He can sleep tonight, and tomorrow night too.

I have two thoughts for him. 

(1) while he is not alone in this viewpoint, his larger competitors are in the process of enabling IPv6 access, and at some point, as Cameron likes to point out, will no longer have a good reason to maintain the IPv4 network. We can have a long and fruitless discussion about how far out that is; given business pressures that force some level of IPv6 adoption, I would be *very* hesitant to presume that it recedes into the indefinite future. It will be bounded by software and hardware life cycles at the very farthest, which depending on your business model is a number somewhere between three and twenty years. Five years from now, in view of the already-spent lifetime of any deployed PC that doesn't support IPv6 out of the box and perhaps prefer it, is a very reasonable guess.

(2) So let's presume that he installs an IPv4/IPv6 translator somewhere between himself and his upstream, which means that the rest of the network can access him and he has limited ability to access the IPv6 side of the network. Five years from now, when he runs out of IPv4 addresses, will he have a running IPv6 network to keep his business running, or will he be like the operator I mentioned, who had a wake-up call and considered it very rude? 

If he has any view of continuity of business in the long term, planning for the event in the medium term is time well spent on his behalf - just like it was for the operators on this list five years ago. That's a "fear sale", if you will, and I'm sorry. But if five years from now his AM comes to me describing a customer with his pants around his ankles, I'm not going to be very sympathetic. It's his business, and his choice.

http://www.aesops-fables.org.uk/aesop-fable-the-ant-and-the-grasshopper.htm