I still like Milo's comment in the IETF: "IPV6 is like a nuclear weapon, you hope you will never have to use it, but it's nice to know it's there just in case" I have been watching this space for a LONG time, seven years odd, and spoken to numerous people about it. It seems to me we will see a significant partitioned v6 world first, gateways to the IPv4 will connect the historical to the new. I have seen strong suggestions from the mobile space where G3 phones will be generally VoIPv6, but significant amounts of mobile telephony will not directly connect to the big-I, and conversion gateways, GPRS gateway's etc, will hide the huge IPv6 partitions. Still some countries, obviously China, Japan, etc, see it as essential to their growth, so I suppose it will grow out of those new worlds, where the trasition from IPv4 will not be so great. The actual amount of address space available in v4 is largely irrelevant, with much of the allocated space running at <3% utilised, with no legal or realistic way of recovering the space, we can assume it will never get to the high levels of utilisation desired. Fortunately, the utilisation rules are getting tighter, and at the cost of increased prefixes in the global tables, we have seen significantly more rational address allocation. Just because there is enough address space in v4 for quite some time, a significant change in the types of devices and market could damage that overnight. Just an opinion, Arron Scott Cisco NZ -----Original Message----- From: owner-nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz [mailto:owner-nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz]On Behalf Of Chris Wedgwood Sent: Tuesday, 17 July 2001 12:58 AM To: Craig Whitmore Cc: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: IPv6...Fact or Fiction? On Mon, Jul 16, 2001 at 11:47:19PM +1200, Craig Whitmore wrote: When do people think we (the Internet) will run out of IPv4 addresses and people will be forced to move over and use IPv6? Or will people use the IPv4 addresses in a much more conservative way? They might run out... but that doesn't mean IPv6 will take over :) Do you think it will really take off in the near future? Its gaining momentum every day. I first connected to the 6bone in '96, there were about 30 or 40 sites then, now there are hundreds with probably thousands of hosts down-stream. Has there really been a standardized IPV6 Format yet? You mean like EUI64? By format what do you mean? Has anyone actually used it in a production enviornment? There are people selling IPv6 connectivity in .au somewhere I think, so I guess this counts. Should I "Apply" for some IPv6 addreeses now or will there be plenty of time to implement it? Right now, only 15% or so of the theoretical space has been mapped out, and the way it is allocated is fairly conservative. I wouldn't rush out just yet, unless you really need it. See rfc2928 (I think) for more details on this. IPv6 doesn't really solve many problems for most people yet, so its deplyment is rather limited. Microsoft are now on-board and that could help enourmously (upgrading bits in the middle is often easier than at the edge). Solaris, Linux and *BSD all have pretty reasonable IPv6 support. Patches exists for practically every other OS that counts. --cw --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog