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LCA: IP address exhaustion and the end of the open net

LCA: IP address exhaustion and the end of the open net

Posted Jan 26, 2011 15:44 UTC (Wed) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: LCA: IP address exhaustion and the end of the open net by fuhchee
Parent article: LCA: IP address exhaustion and the end of the open net

The problem is, I think, that the running out of IPs has no effect on current businesses. Everyone who already has a block doesn't care one way or the other.

Put another way, running out of IP addresses is going to increase the pressure, but *not* on the group that's holding out (the ISPs). Throw in a layer of NAT, voila! It will just increase pressure on those trying to start new services.


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Sorry, but no...

Posted Jan 27, 2011 0:30 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The problem is, I think, that the running out of IPs has no effect on current businesses. Everyone who already has a block doesn't care one way or the other.

This is pretty naive approach. Sure, today people don't care because they expect to keep them, but... why are they so sure? At first people will start buying unneeded addresses, then they will start hijaking them, then IPv4 addresses will have a real price (they already have in many cases - only some organizations which got them early in bulk can ignore these problems... for now), then eventully the pain will be large enough to force IPv4-to-IPv6 migration.

Final exhaustion of IPv4 address pool is the beginning of migration process, not the end!

LCA: IP address exhaustion and the end of the open net

Posted Jan 29, 2011 17:04 UTC (Sat) by jeleinweber (subscriber, #8326) [Link]

> running out of IPs has no effect on current businesses...

This was historically true, even in the US. The future is looking different. If they are accessed by mobile devices (4G rollouts are all dual-stack-lite, i.e. native v6, carrier NAT for the legacy v4 stuff), or have an asian supply chain, or a government contract - they are going to need v6 externally ASAP. Those who linger on legacy v4 are going to be dealing with a degrading access experience after late 2012, while the v6 folks will be getting improvements instead. So businesses need to work on v6. Given that there aren't many v6-only services yet, consumers should just sit on their hands for 6-18 months while their ISP's and the modem & wifi vendors get their act together.

The timeline I'm expecting is along the lines of IANA runs out of v4 in February, v4-exhaustion makes the front page of the mainstream press, and the CEO's all panic. Northern hemisphere RIR's run out by late fall, ISP's mostly run out in 2012. That makes 2013 the real year of the "IPocalypse", as new v4 will be non-existent but v6 won't be universally available world-wide until, say, 2015. The tipping point is when v6 is broadly available, and something shiny is v6-only; this could be the 2014 Christmas holiday shopping season, brought on by some nifty asian electronic toy that ten year olds want. Three years after the tipping point, say 2017, figure 99% of internet traffic is v6. And while there wasn't an economic incentive to deploy v6 prior to v4 exhaustion, the roughly 18:1 decrease in backbone router CPU load for v6-only gives a heck of an incentive to ditch v4, so figure the tier-1 ISP's will schedule a flag day for 3 years after that, and turn off v4-routing around 2020. After which the smidge of remaining v4 will have to be tunneled over v6 until the last v4 device is retired, around 2036. Of course, everyone who has predicted the future of v6 has been wrong, so take my views with a grain (or even a peck) of salt.

The analogies I'm currently favoring are that v4->v6 is like either the conversion from analog to digital TV, or to standard gauge railroad tracks. It's not like Y2K for consumers: there is no hard deadline and it will be visible in that they'll have to buy new routers and modems. It's a little like Y2K for programmers, in that they'll have to port to new API's and cope with longer addresses in different formats.

LCA: IP address exhaustion and the end of the open net

Posted Jan 29, 2011 21:56 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

that 'asian toy' would have to be locked into using an IPv6-only website. but there's no good reason to have such a site.

yes the freely allocated IP addresses will run out, but that's not nearly the same thing as saying that all those IP addresses are going to be in use.

there are a lot of companies that have public IP addresses that aren't using all of them (and some older companies who got involved early who are using all of them, but would be happy to restructure their networks to not use them if they could sell them off)

there are also a lot of options out there to reduce the number of IP addresses in use, each with a different set of trade-offs. These include NAT (allowing end-users who have signed contracts saying that they are not going to run servers anyway to share public addresses), SNI (allowing servers running SSL to share an IP address), etc. implementing those things will free up more addresses.

yes, the ISPs may want to get companies to change the IP addresses that they are using so that they can have less fragmentation in their router tables, but that's a simple cost-benefit equation for both sides, what incentives will the ISP give companies to change their addresses (for many companies this can is probably surprisingly low, a free month of service would probably be enough)

I don't think that you are going to start seeing IPv6 only resources (other than by the IPv6 advocates) appearing anytime soon, i would be surprised if they were as close as 2015, and I would not be surprised if they were out as long as 2020 or later.

right now, the only real value that Ipv6 gives is in a private network as you don't have to contend with the limited RFC private addresses (and this can include ISPs using NAT464 to connect customers to the Internet passing over IPv6 on their internal network) for the endpoints it's really no value

LCA: IP address exhaustion and the end of the open net

Posted Jan 29, 2011 22:41 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

by the way, in case it's not clear, I agree with you on one point, users will demand IPv6 when there are IPv6-only resources that they want to access.

the difference is that you think that there will be such resources, and I don't see any valid reason for such resources to exist.

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