At 12:40 PM 17/02/2007, Robert Gray wrote:
Kosuke Ito wrote:To define the gradual level of what extent we need to reduce should be the next step of issue, if we found that our current proposed approach does not provide enough time range for communities to shift into IPv6.Ito-san, At the heart of the matter, my concern with your proposed policy is that it does not deal with providing an orderly transition to a world where only IPv6 allocations are available.
It always struck me that IPv6 represents an incremental and quite conservative step in technology over IPv4, but without the conventional attributes of incremental piecemeal deployment that technology incrementalism usually achieves . The fact that IPv6 deployment is not incrementally deployable, is not backward compatible with IPv4, and is not a deployment that makes sense to undertake in isolation, makes the business case fro deployment really hard to phrase for many actors. The alternative, of more and more dense NAT deployment, simply transfers the cost of address scarcity to others and stays within some form of "comfort zone" of not changing all that much from where we are today. Its not that IPv6 is the "only" way forward here, but perhaps the more constructive question is what is the _preferred_ way forward, and can the environment be structured so as to make such a preferred path a 'natural' one for industry actors to follow?
The other question that I've been asking myself in this topic stream is how and why adoption of this form of policy regarding IPv4 unallocated pool exhaustion would assist us to transition out of the current address distribution regime without major negative forms of disruption to the Internet. Personally, I've not yet seen a clear and convincing case (for me at any rate) to answer this concern.
regards, Geoff