5.3 Merge window, part 1
5.3 Merge window, part 1
Posted Jul 19, 2019 17:46 UTC (Fri) by jem (subscriber, #24231)In reply to: 5.3 Merge window, part 1 by mtaht
Parent article: 5.3 Merge window, part 1
> The prospect of what some engineers have called “IPv4 runout” was the main reason for developing IPv6 in the first place. From an economic point of view, however, resources never just “run out;” instead, as their supply diminishes they become increasingly expensive, and consumption patterns adapt to scarcity with greater conservation and new forms of substitution.
Here we have the tortoise and the hare again. Take the number of potentially available IPv4 addresses. Let's say half of them change owners to make better use of them. We still have half of the available addresses left. Now half of them can be sold, and we still have half left!
> The incentives provided by the secondary market have led to the identification of millions of unused or underutilized IPv4 numbers by brokers such as IPv4 Market Group and exchanges such as Addrex and Hilco Streambank.
Remember, the demand for (old) new IPv4 addresses is one /8 per month (16 million).
The report compares IPv6 and IPv4 purely from a cost perspective, but fails completely (or I didn't find it) to consider the scenario that supporting IPv6 is a must for an ISP, or they will lose their customers. Let's say some reasonably popular services start popping up as IPv6-only, because that makes more sense economically.
Posted Jul 19, 2019 18:11 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
Once the remaining IPv4-only hardware is phased out (within the next 3-5 years), the only barrier preventing IPv6 is simply organizational inertia.
Posted Jul 21, 2019 2:49 UTC (Sun)
by mtaht (subscriber, #11087)
[Link] (1 responses)
I've been tired of typing of late, I was thinking pulling together a videoconference to discuss these issues would be fun. Would that work for you?
We used to do a thing on the vuc show pretty regular.
Posted Jul 22, 2019 2:00 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
Posted Jul 23, 2019 13:04 UTC (Tue)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (3 responses)
That would require the cost of an IPv4 address to rise astronomically, and currently that's not how the economics of IPv4 work. Most customers I work with don't bother with IPv6 at all, when I'm in the position to set up infrastructure I usually just sneak it in since it's mostly a freebie. Then again, my personal servers currently don't have an IPv6 address assigned even though I have DS-Lite at home...
Posted Jul 23, 2019 15:49 UTC (Tue)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (2 responses)
There's a degree of geographic luck involved, too - most of the developed world has enough IPv4 that there's no short-term shortage (no need to put everyone behind CGNAT, for example). IPv6 is thus something you do because you want it, not because you need it - it's worth it for the big players (Google/YouTube, Netflix, Facebook) because it lets you bypass CGNAT on mobile and in countries with IPv4 shortage, which improves your performance metrics.
In contrast, in a reasonable number of less developed countries, you're stuck behind CGNAT for IPv4 whether you like it or not, and need IPv6 if you want to run a server other than an onion service, or you pay for AWS/GCE/other services in a country with enough IPv4. If you're lucky, your ISP is sane enough to run 464XLAT or dual-stack; if you're unlucky, you're IPv4-only and have no choice but pay for Western services.
Posted Jul 24, 2019 7:33 UTC (Wed)
by jem (subscriber, #24231)
[Link] (1 responses)
According to Wikipedia, "RIPE NCC, the regional Internet registry for Europe, was the second RIR to deplete its address pool on 14 September 2012", after APNIC. AFRINIC was the last. The situation in North America may be a bit better.
Posted Jul 24, 2019 8:20 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
It's not the RIR holdings of IPv4 that matter - the run out of a RIR simply means that new ISPs in a region cannot get started. Instead, it's the IPv4 holdings of each ISP in the region that matter, as compared to the size of their customer base; if (to choose an example that has deployed IPv6) Comcast in the USA has 50 million potential customers in its service area, and a total of 60 million IPv4 addresses across all its ASes, it can shuffle IPv4 around to get one IPv4 per customer, minimum, and thus no CGNAT.
In contrast, if an ISP in Botswana has 50,000 IPv4 addresses (half the total assigned to Botswana), it can't offer one IP address per user in its service area (it has to CGNAT 7:1 if it claims the whole of the current Internet market in Botswana, and worse if the Internet grows). Because the RIRs are out, said ISP can only grow by buying addresses from someone else when it needs them - so the incentive is there to CGNAT.
Plus, you then have user expectations to take into account; in the USA, people expect the experience they get from stateless routing by ISPs, and NAT under their control; this means that CGNAT is expensive, because it has to maintain state in such a way that a single device failure does not lose a user's NAT mappings. In other countries, CGNAT can be cheaper because it's all the local users have ever known, so it can be unreliable, and that's just the way the Internet is.
And IPv6 is a mutual thing for the big players and mobile operators - T-Mobile loses demand on its CGNAT (which they like), and the big operators get improvements on their latency metrics (which they like). Note that, for example, just-in-time sending of the next chunk of video involves smaller chunks if the latency from server to client is lower, and you can spend more time preparing a page for the same TTI if the latency is lower.
5.3 Merge window, part 1
This will not happen until IPv6 is firmly in place. More realisticly, CGNs are a growing pain for ISPs and users and 464XLAT is a way to make them somewhat less painful.
5.3 Merge window, part 1
5.3 Merge window, part 1
5.3 Merge window, part 1
5.3 Merge window, part 1
5.3 Merge window, part 1
There's a degree of geographic luck involved, too - most of the developed world has enough IPv4 that there's no short-term shortage (no need to put everyone behind CGNAT, for example).
[IPv6 is] worth it for the big players (Google/YouTube, Netflix, Facebook) because it lets you bypass CGNAT on mobile and in countries with IPv4 shortage, which improves your performance metrics.
Google (including YouTube) and Facebook are doing operators like T-Mobile a big favor, because they generate a large portion Internet traffic, which means packets between the handset and YouTube doesn't have to go through NAT64. It's all end-to-end with no address or protocol conversion, like the Internet was originally designed to work, only using IPv6 this time.
5.3 Merge window, part 1