On 7/05/2006 9:00 p.m., Joe Abley wrote:
Nobody should read my doom-saying and conclude that I dislike IPv6 for any particular reason. I think it's fun to play with; I just don't see a business reason for the average ISP or enterprise to worry about it, today.
The reason today for using a real IP address is (or should be) to see and be seen by the rest of the intraweb. If you don't need to be seen then RFC1914 will be fine, if you do, only IPv4 will cut it. Most (well me anyway) will probably not want their fridge (or car brakes) directly accessible by umpty million hackers.
"We will need this in 10 years, so we should start learning about it now" is an argument, I guess, but most ISPs of my acquaintance are more concerned with staying business for the next five years than they are with optimising their costs in ten.
Even when we 'run out' will those with IPv4 addresses shift to IPv6 because newbies can't get any more? Not likely unless there were some compelling reason - like ICANN started withdrawing IPv4 addresses. Even charging for them (Xtra charge $5pm for a static IP) doesn't stop demand. The thing that stops IPv6 is partly the need but mostly that there is no migration path. Now if there were some 'magic' IPv6 addresses that could be seen....... Bob