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This is more complex than that...This is more complex than that...Posted Feb 1, 2011 16:04 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: IPv6 *is* like AMD by Cato Parent article: LCA: IP address exhaustion and the end of the open net
I don't see why IPv4 blocks having a large cash value makes IPv6 less likely to happen - surely if the direct cost of using IPv4 address space rises considerably, that creates a strong economic drive to find a cheaper solution? Not right away. Think SMS. The global average price of SMS is 3 cents. It's much higher then you need to actually send it, so SMS are generating substantial profits for operators yet it makes no sense for the companies to try to replace SMS with anything: to do that you must spend billions of dollars and to justify such cost you need to send hundreds of billion of SMS per months - and nobody sends this much. Situation with IPv4 addresses is the same: to replace it with something (IPv6 or anything else) you must spend billions of dollars (perhaps tens of billion of dollars) and it's just stupid when price of one IPv4 address is low enough (typical price for IPv4 address today is between $2 and $5). The bigger costs of staying with IPv4 for content providers are considerable - SEO (search engine optimisation) and the increased use of SSL tends to require a unique IP address for each domain, yet server side NAT or Apache virtual hosting breaks that. The same problem: people who feel the pain and people who can do something are different people. We need some kind of peacemeal plan or it'll not work.
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This is more complex than that... Posted Feb 1, 2011 18:35 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Actually SMS is being replaced to some degree by mobile-based instant messaging, including push notifications, which provides some new features and are much lower cost. Many of the 4G LTE networks don't yet support SMS despite being from the same mobile operators.
Expensive IPv4 blocks mean that the price of hosting a website on IPv6 is cheaper, or getting IPv6 access via broadband, so ultimately this will have an effect. A similar example: the price difference between Windows and Linux web hosting is one reason why Windows only has about 20% of the market there, which illustrates this can happen despite switching costs. The price difference per month is only a few dollars for Windows vs. Linux but it does have a market impact, and totals to a big impact on Microsoft's potential revenues.
Going IPv6 on a webhost is not that expensive initially - they must ensure the OS is configured OK on the servers they start with, and provide a 6to4 tunnel to someone like Hurricane Electric. That's all endpoint configuration and can be the end of phase 1 - only once they get customers on IPv6 do they need to look to a native IPv6 end to end with an IPv6 upstream, which can be phase 2 once they have IPv6-driven revenues. Much easier to make the business case.
Ultimately the customers of webhosts will decide - if they get more problems with IPv4 due to NAT, they will ask their webhosts for IPv6, and some of them will switch to hosts that do provide IPv6.
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