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"This is going to free up a ton of IPv4 addresses, reducing the need for AWS to purchase new ranges." Yup, this has been obvious for a while if you read the be
by jerf 3y ago
"This is going to free up a ton of IPv4 addresses, reducing the need for AWS to purchase new ranges."
Yup, this has been obvious for a while if you read the better economic analyses. Charging for IPv4 doesn't on its own remove it. It creates some sort of economic balance between the value and scarcity of the IPv4 address space.
When you're trying to fit the entire world of 7 billion people into 4 billion addresses, the space looks pretty scarce. But assuming a roughly power law distribution of services and their importance of being on IPv4, as you cut off the people with lower-end needs, like, "my cell phone needs to communicate on the internet so let's give it an IPv4 address", you extremely rapidly cut through orders of magnitude of the old uses.
That long tail of "Facebook is not willing to cut off even .01% of its user base so it has IPv4 addresses to serve on" may take a long time to get through, but we're well through getting huge swathes of the other users off of it.
What kills IPv4 is in the far future when the expense of maintaining it specially exceeds the benefits. Since maintaining it is rather cheap, this is going to take a while. But as IPv4 diminishes in importance, ironically, so does the value of entirely eliminating it. When it is 1% of the traffic, who will really be desperate to drop that to zero?
- bluGill 3y agoThing is if it is only 0.01% of users Facebook won't give up on they can just do a few ipv4 server/address. Now Facebook has severs around the world, but if it is only a few users they just need two servers - and that is only for redundancy. Now they have thousands (maybe even millions? I don't know) of servers and they may as well give all the external facing ones IPv4 addresses as most need that anyway and so the hassle of maintaining IPv6 only servers isn't worth it. And of course if you are in the 0.01% you will discover that while Facebook and google won't give up on you many other providers will as it just isn't worth the cost. By that time the cost won't be IPv4 addresses - they will be again free - it will be the cost of maintaining IPv4 on all the routers and servers. (the routers mean IPv4 will cost more, but it won't be for the address it will be for routing access)
- sva_ 3y ago> entire world of 7 billion people Should be more like 8bn now
- ninkendo 3y agoIt is, as of 15 November 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Eight_Billion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Eight_Billion
- marcus0x62 3y ago> When it is 1% of the traffic, who will really be desperate to drop that to zero? The service providers who have to maintain IPv4 and IPv6 configurations in their networks.
- zokier 3y agoI don't find it at all difficult to imagine that someone like Google or Apple would sunset ipv4 when it reaches single digit percentage. They know no ISP would risk losing connectivity to them. For example Apple has already been requiring that appstore apps work in ipv6 only networks since 2016. They can just keep tightening such rules until ipv4 dies. It's naive to think that maintaining ipv4 (/dualstack) networks is (and will remain) cheap at large global scale like Google.
- lucw 3y agoThat's exactly what might happen. Just like browsers made https mandatory.