[LINK] World IPv6 Launch, 6th June 2012

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

> World IPv6 Launch, 6th June 2012
> 
>  http://www.worldipv6launch.org

 
Leading Internet prognosticator still pessimistic about IPv6

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan, (Network World), 13 June, 2012 13:06


Geoff Huston, an Australian researcher whose predictions about IPv4 
depletion dates have proven uncannily accurate over the years, is still 
not certain that IPv6 will get deployed in time to avert an addressing 
crisis across the Internet.

Despite the success of last week's World IPv6 Launch Day - in which 60 
access networks and 3,000 websites including Google, Facebook and Yahoo 
enabled support for IPv6 -- Huston says there hasn't been enough market 
momentum surrounding IPv6 to declare it a sure thing. 

While Huston concedes that the event caused a rise in IPv6 usage to about 
1% in the United States, he says the protocol needs to be at a 20% usage 
rate to ensure that it will succeed.

I chatted with Huston from Canberra, where he is chief scientist of APNIC 
and an adjunct research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Internet 
Architectures. Here are excerpts from our conversation:

Has World IPv6 Launch Day changed your pessimistic view of IPv6?

No. Last year, we actually saw in the three to four months leading up to 
World IPv6 Day [a 24-hour trial of IPv6 services], an exponential 
increase in IPv6 usage. When I look now at the same set of statistics -- 
the number of networks that announce IPv6 on their Autonomous System 
Numbers, the number of entries in the IPv6 inter-domain routing table -- 
that sharp rise that happened 13 months ago didn't appear last month. 
It's almost like the folk that were going to play in IPv6, started to 
play a year ago, and the threshold for everybody else is too high. That 
leads me to the relatively pessimistic view about the business issues 
around IPv6. The customers are not going to fund this with incremental 
payments. The industry -- particularly the last-mile access industry -- 
is having a tough time coming up with the amount of money required. I'd 
love to be optimistic about IPv6; I just can't see it in the data.

Are you pessimistic even in the United States, which had some of its 
largest ISPs including Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner participate in World 
IPv6 Launch Day?

Yes. We measure about 600,000 random people a day to see who is using 
IPv6 to access YouTube. The U.S. on average had about 0.6% of customers 
selecting IPv6. It jumped to 0.95% over the last two weeks. To say that 
IPv6 usage rising from 0.6% to 0.95% is a dramatic jump is [not true.] If 
we were talking about increasing from 1% to 20%, I'd say, "Let's break 
out the champagne." Once we get to that kind of number, there's an 
assured outcome. Maybe I'm a tough one. Maybe the glass is half-empty. 
But 0.95% is not brilliant. There's still an amazing amount of work that 
has to happen. One in 100 is not critical mass.

You have predicted a shortfall of 800 million IPv4 addresses developing 
between 2012 and 2014. What about allocated-but-unused IPv4 addresses? 
Could they solve this shortfall?

I look at the sales projections of Apple and folk in the Android area. 
They're forecasting this year along the lines of 300 million to 400 
million new mobile subscribers, and the same for next year, and the year 
after. Even if you were capable of taking the 1.84 billion unadvertised 
IPv4 addresses and reusing them, that would buy only three more years of 
life for IPv4. And we can't get them all because a lot of them are 
tightly tied up in networks. Yes, some IPv4 address space is being 
released into secondary markets. That market is inevitable, but it's a 
short-term palliative measure. It's not a cure. IPv4 can't cut it if what 
you want at the end is one network.

There's a growing market for allocated-but-unused IPv4 addresses in the 
U.S. primarily from bankruptcy sales. The IPv4 addresses are selling for 
anywhere from $8 to $13 per address. Is this price too high, too low, or 
just right in your opinion?

Inside a data center, an IPv4 address is worth a lot more than $10 each --
 orders of magnitude more. Once you get into a market where the highest 
bidder gets the good, I think the prices that you are quoting me are 
[going to go up]. They are too low. If we go down this path of IPv4, and 
we're able to keep the IPv4 secondary market open enough, I suspect the 
pricing is going to be much higher than $10. That's going to be painful 
for this industry. Are rising prices for IPv4 addresses going to propel 
us into IPv6? I really hope so, but it's hard to tell right now.

How is the U.S. doing in terms of IPv6 adoption compared to the rest of 
the world?

Where the U.S. has a cable infrastructure, it has a little more control 
over CPE and in that case it is actually possible to turn on IPv6 without 
the users doing anything. Cable providers are better off than DSL 
providers in terms of upgrading to IPv6. The other thing that's different 
for the U.S. is the move by Verizon with 4G LTE. They're reinventing most 
of their mobile services. Verizon understood that if they wanted a 
coherent mobile network, it had to be IPv6. They wrote it into all of 
their specs and said that all of their suppliers had to be IPv6. I 
haven't seen many countries where a carrier has taken such a bold move.

Is last-mile infrastructure the biggest challenge to IPv6 deployment?

Yes. This is one of the hardest problems that our industry faces. Over 
the last 10 years, we have made the last mile the subject of intense 
competitive pressure. Revenue per consumer per month is measured in 
pennies instead of dollars. The issue for them is twofold: One, they have 
to upgrade their internal equipment, but they are sitting on equipment 
that they don't want to replace.

The second problem is that the one thing most last-mile access providers 
absolutely dread is when the customer rings up the call center. It costs 
a huge amount of money to run a call center, upwards of $60 to have the 
phone answered. The last thing you want is to have more phone calls. When 
you introduce a second protocol on the wire, the Internet can appear to 
go very slow. Sometimes Web pages take 30 to 40 seconds to load. 
Sometimes in IPv6, you don't get there. So you might ring up the help 
desk number. Carriers dread more phone calls from the customer. So that's 
why the last-mile access providers want to wait until their competitors 
deploy IPv6. They don't want to be at the front of the pack.

You've said it isn't clear which path the Internet will take: IPv4 with 
carrier-grade NATs or IPv6. Do you still think that's true after World 
IPv6 Launch Day?

Yes. It's the service providers that hold the fate of the Internet in 
their hands. The more we prevaricate, the more they are forced to put in 
carrier-grade NATs that constrain the Internet and give them the ability 
to exploit that equipment and regain a revenue stream from the content. 
At that point, life gets pretty bleak. All of a sudden, content is no 
longer open and uniformly accessible. Content has to pay a tax to the 
carrier. The incumbent content providers will pay because they have to. 
They're rich enough anyways. But any new content is completely locked out 
of the network. How do we prevent that? The carriage industry needs to 
understand that they are utilities like water or sewage. It's an ugly 
job, but somebody has to do it. Yes, it spins a dollar, but it doesn't 
spin a million. Getting them to accept that is quite hard. To unlock the 
Internet, the carriers' aspirations have to be stomped on.

What policies could be enacted to make this happen?

Policymakers don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. They 
don't want to legislate the Internet where it creates hostility with 
investors. I think legislators really, really hope that those carriage 
folk get the message and go to IPv6 so they won't be forced to legislate. 
There are no clear answers here, which is why I say, in all the news 
about IPv6, there is still room for pessimism.

What advice would you offer a room full of U.S. CIOs about IPv4 depletion 
and IPv6 adoption?

IPv6 is in everybody's interest, including the enterprise. If I was an 
enterprise network manager, what I would do is make sure that any 
equipment I'm buying from here on through is protocol neutral. I would 
want equipment that is not just paying lip service to IPv6, but can 
demonstrate IPv6. I would be doing my security infrastructure and my 
firewalls with IPv6. I'd be doing that now. I'd be enabling my public 
services -- Web, email -- with IPv6. I'd be doing that now because if I 
wait I'm going to be in the middle of a rush, and the price is going to 
be 10 times higher for those who wait.

The age of the laptop is over. The enterprise infrastructure is going to 
be LTE devices, iPads and smartphones. Work is going to go with the 
employee; the employee isn't coming to work. The rational enterprise is 
going to see that [trend] and will be quietly building up capability in 
IPv6. Mobility is changing business in the same way that the fax, 
telephone and even the PC changed business. The next wave is just as 
dramatic and just as fun. IPv6 is going to be fundamental to that change.

What would it take for you to be optimistic about IPv6?

If we get to 20% usage in the U.S., this is all over. If China did it, 
watch out. Or if Germany did it, watch out. My metric is not number of 
routes, number of domain names, number of Autonomous System Numbers, not 
even traffic. I want to see it in users' day-to-day activities. If 20% of 
the users in America use IPv6, the future of IPv6 is assured.



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