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The problem will solve itself when the price of an ipv4 address becomes prohibitive. Either that, or telcos will see ipv4 addresses as a valuable source of rev
by 1053r 17y ago
The problem will solve itself when the price of an ipv4 address becomes prohibitive. Either that, or telcos will see ipv4 addresses as a valuable source of revenue and intentionally drag their feet. And then the internet will die.
- meroliph 17y agoICANN is likely to step in, should they attempt to make cash off of IPs.
- loup-vaillant 17y agoIt could be more pernicious than that: IPv4, because of the potential lack of addresses, is very good at centralizing the network. For instance, most ISPs don't offer it's customers a fixed IP address. It makes installing servers more difficult. Some ISPs even share IP addresses between customers. It makes installing servers impossible. The result is a more centralized network, where you more or less have to blog and mail through big companies' servers. The stakes are very high. A centralized network provides huge opportunities for analysis and targeted advertisement (read: spying and manipulation). IPv6, by providing an internet address to every device on this planet, is a threat to that model. However, clinging to that model is not directly making money from IP addresses, so the ICANN may not be able to do anything about telco dragging their feet.
- Daniel_Newby 17y agoAnd HTTP's "UPGRADE" method may become popular. People can update their app software a lot more easily than the OS and routers.
- guelo 17y agoYes, a crisis within the next 2-4 years is going to force the issue. This crisis will cause a major disruption to the way the internet works and will affect every industry. The sad thing is it didn't have to come to this, notice that this article refers to discussions from 2002, if the IPv6 transition had been managed correctly we would now be completing the transition instead of barely beginning it.
- rms 17y agoUnlikely, I think a crisis in 2-4 years will cause a painless transition to IPV6.
- loup-vaillant 17y agoOr it will cause massive adoption of large scale NAT, which will further centralize the internet. Because such centralization favour few, huge, powerful players, we may not see the transition at all. I just hope the current attitude of Cisco is proving me wrong.
- rms 17y agoIt would be interesting if the USA and China were to split on Internet Protocol at that point.
- ghshephard 17y agoI just wish Cisco would fully support IPv6. Their regression of the protocol on their routers, firewalls, leaves something to be desired. But, I guess regression requires users - chicken/egg thing.
- jerf 17y agoA coworker has been transitioning our stuff to IPv6. It has been an eye-opening experience. It's not just IPv4 with a bigger address, it's not even just IPv4 with a bigger address and some stuff, it's a new Internet. When you understand that, the sluggish rate of deployment goes from "What the hell?!" to "Yeah, of course this has taken time!" In fact I'm sort of coming around to the "what were they thinking?" point of view and beginning to think that IPv4.5 (IPv4 + bigger address packet and minimal changes to make that work) may yet have been a good idea. "Everybody" said "hey, we have to have a new protocol so let's like design it to be the awesome!" but it remains to be seen whether the problem of "running out of addresses" can actually carry the weight of all the other wishlist that has been encoded into IPv6. (I'd say "probably yes, but it was closer than it should have been".) Reminds me of some of the (X)HTML standards that basically failed for the same reason... "well, as long as we're rewriting the standard language of the web, let's go nuts and embed all kinds of stuff..." unto death, as it turned out in XHTML2.0s case.
- dfranke 17y agoDing ding ding! Right answer. The reason that IPv6 has seen minimal adoption so far is that the market has no reason to care about it yet. When will it start caring? 541 days from today, give or take. That's when IANA is projected to run out of IPv4 addresses. It is not the day that the internet goes up in a puff of smoke if we haven't finished deploying IPv6; it's the day that market pressure begins to accumulate and the day we find out what an IPv4 address is actually worth on the open market. When it becomes cheaper for large consumers of IP addresses to transition their networks to IPv6 than to continue paying for IPv4 addresses, that is when the "magic moment" will happen.
- dfranke 17y agoI must have written this before I had my coffee and now it's past the edit period. "Right answer" was only agreeing with the first sentence of the parent post. The rest I think is wrong for the reasons stated.