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I actually think that what will really drive IPv6 adoption is if the price of IPv4 space continues its upward trajectory unabated. The price has about doubled a

by skuhn 5y ago

I actually think that what will really drive IPv6 adoption is if the price of IPv4 space continues its upward trajectory unabated. The price has about doubled at auction in the last year. How are those two things related? 1. There are a ton of owners sitting on inefficiently used IP space. Any company (not doing cloud hosting or network transit) that's holding a /8 is almost certainly using it very inefficiently, but an owner like Apple will never feel financial pressure to optimize or sell their /8. However, an owner like the university I went to (with a /16 network currently worth $3 million) will eventually face internal pressure to sell that network when the value rises to say $50 million. As another example, Yahoo is currently announcing subnets containing 4.3 million IPv4 addresses, which is worth $193.5mm at auction. If the price of IPv4 addresses increased by say 10x, their IPv4 space would probably comprise the bulk of the company's value. 2. Owners will need to adopt IPv6 in order to realize these financial gains. In order to sell a significant portion of their IPv4 space, an owner will have to compact their IPv4 usage into a much smaller space and migrate everything else to IPv6. This will be a huge undertaking for a lot of these places, but at some point it's worth it. By doing that, IPv6 adoption increases. There is the potential for a feedback loop to be created where demand for IPv4 drops and the prices decline and so fewer conversions are done, but I tend to believe that IPv4 pricing will remain inelastic. So basically the invisible hand of the market may guide us to IPv6, but I highly highly doubt we will have seen the last of IPv4 even decades from now.

zozbot234 5y ago
> There are a ton of owners sitting on inefficiently used IP space. This includes AWS, btw. You effectively get a public IPv4 with your instance, regardless of your actual needs. It actually increases your costs to get cloud instances that don't do that.
- skuhn 5y ago
  AWS has that inefficiency baked in to their design, but I'm guessing that they do efficiently deploy their IPv4 space. That is still a problem for sure, but I thinking of places doing things like giving a printer its own subnet just because they have no incentive to be efficient.
- gnrl 5y ago
  You only get a public IP if you host in a public subnet. Should you deploy to a private subnet you wouldn't get a public ip
john2010 5y ago
I know few universities that still use static ipv4 for computer pools. The admins claim easy for us to monitor for misuse.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  This is correct use of IP space. With a routeable IP on every computer, no one would be a second class (consume-only) user of the Internet.
  - manquer 5y ago
    No corporate IT would have firewall setup to allow every computer to be routable from the internet. So practically a globally addressable IP or not makes no impact on ability to be routable publicly
    - icedchai 5y ago
      In the 90’s, this set up (public IP everywhere) was very common. I remember working in a couple offices with no firewalls.
      - manquer 5y ago
        90s were a different time for the internet, even till right after dot com bubble being online was relatively safe, many companies would not even have had dedicated InfoSec teams, no audits and compliance processes were covering firewalls etc I maybe biased, I grew up in the 90's so I dont' really know how it was before, I do hear people reminisce about days before eternal September and bb groups and the good old 80's so perhaps it is always been a downward gradient as more and more people came online.
- pezezin 5y ago
  My company owns a /16 and everybody gets an static address for each device, so I currently "own" two global IPv4 addresses. But everything is firewalled to hell and we need to connect through a proxy, so what's the point?
ThatPlayer 5y ago
Another one I've heard is that CGNAT shared IPv4 addresses lead to higher hardware requirements to manage that CGNAT. So just by having IPv6 support and having more traffic go through native IPv6 saves ISPs hardware that would've been required to manage the CGNAT. Found the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75h4gm7t1oI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75h4gm7t1oI
goodpoint 5y ago
> what will really drive IPv6 adoption is if the price of IPv4 space continues its upward trajectory unabated ...or the opposite: large cloud providers own a lot of valuable IPv4 space. They might want to increase the value of their investment. Encouraging switching to pure-IPv6 connectivity would be a big loss for them.

by skuhn 5y ago

zozbot234 5y ago

> There are a ton of owners sitting on inefficiently used IP space. This includes AWS, btw. You effectively get a public IPv4 with your instance, regardless of your actual needs. It actually increases your costs to get cloud instances that don't do that.

skuhn 5y ago
AWS has that inefficiency baked in to their design, but I'm guessing that they do efficiently deploy their IPv4 space. That is still a problem for sure, but I thinking of places doing things like giving a printer its own subnet just because they have no incentive to be efficient.
gnrl 5y ago
You only get a public IP if you host in a public subnet. Should you deploy to a private subnet you wouldn't get a public ip

john2010 5y ago

I know few universities that still use static ipv4 for computer pools. The admins claim easy for us to monitor for misuse.

Symbiote 5y ago
This is correct use of IP space. With a routeable IP on every computer, no one would be a second class (consume-only) user of the Internet.
- manquer 5y ago
  No corporate IT would have firewall setup to allow every computer to be routable from the internet. So practically a globally addressable IP or not makes no impact on ability to be routable publicly
  - icedchai 5y ago
    In the 90’s, this set up (public IP everywhere) was very common. I remember working in a couple offices with no firewalls.
    - manquer 5y ago
      90s were a different time for the internet, even till right after dot com bubble being online was relatively safe, many companies would not even have had dedicated InfoSec teams, no audits and compliance processes were covering firewalls etc I maybe biased, I grew up in the 90's so I dont' really know how it was before, I do hear people reminisce about days before eternal September and bb groups and the good old 80's so perhaps it is always been a downward gradient as more and more people came online.
pezezin 5y ago
My company owns a /16 and everybody gets an static address for each device, so I currently "own" two global IPv4 addresses. But everything is firewalled to hell and we need to connect through a proxy, so what's the point?

ThatPlayer 5y ago

Another one I've heard is that CGNAT shared IPv4 addresses lead to higher hardware requirements to manage that CGNAT. So just by having IPv6 support and having more traffic go through native IPv6 saves ISPs hardware that would've been required to manage the CGNAT. Found the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75h4gm7t1oI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75h4gm7t1oI

goodpoint 5y ago

> what will really drive IPv6 adoption is if the price of IPv4 space continues its upward trajectory unabated ...or the opposite: large cloud providers own a lot of valuable IPv4 space. They might want to increase the value of their investment. Encouraging switching to pure-IPv6 connectivity would be a big loss for them.