(no email)
Date: Wed Oct 03 2007 - 09:25:57 EDT
> It's a very different circumstance that we have today with
> NAT and it only gets worse as utilization increases.
Does it really get worse?
Or do the ISPs with the eyeballs point at their 6to4, Teredo, ALG
installations and happy customers with IPv6 access lines? And do the
ISPs with the content point at their native IPv6 servers, and 6to4
relays and ALG installations? And do the people making the purchasing
decisions cut short the NAT over NAT party before it has barely begun?
Let's face it, this is not a technical problem. IPv4 is running out
soon. IPv6 does not suffer from this "brick wall" problem and makes
future network design/deployment easier to do without contortions. The
economic imperative is for companies to go with whatever is simpler in
the long run because that is how they recover costs. Spend some capital
to build something, rake in recurring fees for a few years, and either
profit from it or lose. The capital cost is less important than the
operating cost because operating cost eats into margins. Simpler is
better when it comes to operating costs. It is true that telcos have, in
the past, been able to warp the market economics and get away with very
high recurring fees that could cover the high operating costs of complex
infrastructure. But does anyone believe this will happen again within
the lifetimes of those people who wielded their purchasing power and
pushed recurring fees down, down, down?
Fact is, that IPv6 is more of a known quantity than IPv4 super NAT with
ever longer prefixes and scraping the barrel for reusable IP addresses.
And IPv6 is a more constraint-free environment to play in than the IPv4
endgame. If everybody had to play with the same constraints it would be
different. But the fact is that some companies have already made the
decision to shift their activity to IPv6 along with rising market demand
for IPv6. They are hoping to get some of *YOUR* choice customers when
contract renewal time comes around because those choice customers are
beginning to fear that your company will go bankrupt in 2010/2011 when
the demand for IPv6 goes through the roof.
Of course it is better for everybody if there are only a few such
shortsighted companies because the shift to IPv6 will be enough work
without an exponential increase in customers fleeing from other
providers. And even an IPv6 network needs peers so it is in everyone's
interests that most of us get IPv6 up and running very soon now.
--Michael Dillon
|
|
|