Re: [v6ops] Operational Consensus on deployment

["Fred Baker (fred)" <[e-mail]>]

On Aug 26, 2014, at 5:07 PM, Owen DeLong <[e-mail]> wrote:

> The incentive for customers to upgrade will start to happen when ISPs start sending out notices to the following effect:
> 
> ————————
> 
> Due to the aging nature of the IPv4 protocol and the increased costs of continuing to support customers on this protocol,
> we will have to start adding an IPv4 surcharge to your bill if you wish to continue IPv4 service.
> 
> We recognize that today, many customers will consider IPv4 still an essential service. Unfortunately, several content providers,
> such as Amazon, Twitter, Bing, Wordpress, etc. still haven’t joined the modern internet by upgrading to IPv6.
> 
> However, we do not feel that it is fair to penalize customers who no longer need IPv4 by asking them to share the costs of
> continuing to support this aging protocol, so, for those customers that do, we will begin adding $5/month to your bill effective
> <date>
> 
> ————————
> 
> (Or something like it)
> 
> I believe this will happen sooner than many people think.

Speaking for myself, I would agree. Note that in this email I am wearing neither a corporate nor an IETF hat (always at least theoretically true on IETF lists, but I want to emphasize it). I am a random fly on the wall.

That said, there are a couple of steps companies need to take before they do this. If consumers don’t have a way to avoid the $5 charge, it’s simply a price increase, and will be reported and commented on as such.

Part of this is content, and therefore enterprise. I would expect that ISPs will find themselves needing to apply price differential based on IPv4-only vs dual stack access to their enterprise customers’ public sites. In essence, consumer-accessible sites need to be IPv6-capable for https/http2 and SMTP, and possibly a few other protocols. Proof of connectivity is probably that an IPv6-only endpoint can access the name of the company using the included protocols, and not just on the day the contract is signed but periodically through its lifetime. The means to achieve that could be as simple as signing up with a CDN or cloud provider, but I would expect the ISP to want it to use either dual stack connectivity on the access link to the enterprise, or CDN/cloud that is embedded with the ISP. It has to solve a problem for the ISP.

Both that and residential broadband will need an IPv6-capable upstream. Speaking for myself, AFAIK my residential provider doesn’t offer IPv6 to me. Last time I asked them, they quoted me $1000/month. I have IPv6 service via VPN to my employer. We have a few companies that are starting down that road. We need more.

And as the biggest single issue in residential IPv6 deployment is the CPE router, I suspect the ISP will need to facilitate some program in which a known-working IPv6 CPE gets into the home. That could be a managed service, a coupon at a department store, or whatever. But you will have a real headache if you tell people that they will be charged more if they don’t have IPv6 capabilities, they agree to let you put an IPv6 address on their modem, but then their CPE doesn’t actually use it. Explaining to them “but I don’t see IPv6 packets coming out of your house” will be a real sink. The ISP will need to make it Really Easy for them to have IPv6 packets coming out of their house without them having to grok the implications.