Philip D'Ath wrote:
I disagree. The driver wont be by customers at all - they don't care abut transit, only the applications that use the transit.
Of course it will be driven by customers. The carriers you cited (ANC, UUNET, Sprint, AT&T, Global Gateway, TCL) are primarily wholesale service providers. Their customers are ISPs, who are driven in turn by their subscribers. If the subscriber is saying "omg, my BitTorrentv6 doesn't work", the ISP probably isn't going to care. If the subscriber is saying, "I can no longer get to (ASB|ANZ|AmEx|whatever)", the ISP will care. As Sprint stated: the customers aren't prepared to pay for v6, and the carriers aren't prepared to invest in it, the enterprises don't run it, and the vendors don't support it thrillingly well yet.
Lets say in two years time the cost to get new IPv4 address space rises to US$10k per /24 per month. Is the service provider going to want to pay this, or migrate to free IPv6 space?
Then the cost of service rises to cover that, because at that time the majority of services are still going to be v4 based. The ISP may encourage v6 adoption, but if subscribers pay... hey, why not. and v6 isn't free. Presumably, given that APNIC/ARIN/RIPE etc are governed ultimately by their own 'customers', if the cost rises to $10k per month then it's the service provider's own fault!
The cost of not migrating is going to be huge. Service providers need to make sure they are deploying kit now that is IPv6 capable, and making implementation decisions that will assist with the IPv6 migration.
The cost of migrating is also huge. I do agree with your latter points, though. However, I'm reasonably convinced at this stage that the exhaustion, or near exhaustion of IPv4 space will lead to: 1) As predicted, a short term rush on space; 2) A response of much more restrictive policies; 3) A longer term response of investigating existing allocations and assignments to see what are in use. Certainly I can cite examples of ISPs in NZ and abroad which are assigning subnets much larger than they should be, or could be engineering to support smaller more efficient utilisation; and can also cite examples of large multinational corporates burning multiple public /16s internally instead of using RFC1918 space or more efficient addressing. 4) A significant amount of R&D in NAPT technologies, and technologies in NAPT traversal. COnsidering most applications these days happily work without a public IP address, is there really a huge demand for everything to be uniquely addressed? Certainly my home networks don't need it.
Potentially the issue of multihoming and mobile IPv6 is going to be very taxing on current equipment.
Multihoming is a disaster under v6. -- i still say ipv4 and atm for ever. yeah.