On Tue, 06 Nov 2001 09:37:45 EST, Hans Kruse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > The discrepancy in opinions below seems to me to point towards the > deployment path for IPv6. Corporate users and those with very large > address space needs (wireless handhelds) will deploy IPv6 and in effect > "pay" for the engineering cost of building IPv6 into operating systems and > network elements. Once the costs come down, home users, small businesses, > and their ISPs will follow.
Actually, the engineering cost of building IPv6 into operating systems is already essentially paid. The cost of building it into routers and the like is paid. The vendors are all (basically) IPv6-ready. What has NOT been paid is the deployment cost, which has several very distinct components. First is the cost of obtaining a release of your operating system that supports IPv6 (which can vary anywhere from free to low-cost to exhorbitant, depending on your vendor's business model, and whether you're already running an IPv6-capable version for other reasons). Second is the cost of installing that release - which can get complicated if this forces an upgrade of third-party software such as a database system. This has several components - additional licensing costs for new releases of add-on software, downtime costs, testing costs, and all the other little things like that. And add another 1% for each time you ask yourself "Will this upgrade unexpectedly hose something in a totally non-obvious way?". (Note - none of the money so far has anything to do with IPv6 directly) Third is the cost of actually configuring and enabling IPv6 - getting an AAAA record assigned, the DNS set up, testing, and getting the software to use an IPv6 connection. This is usually the cheap part once you get past the first two. Note that in the current state of the world, those first two are usually the big part of the expense, and THOSE costs are *NOT* going to come down anytime soon. That big database server on that big Sun E10K is not going to be doing stuff over IPv6 until you upgrade to Solaris 8, and drag Oracle along kicking and screaming. And let's be honest here - at the low end, if you're a Microsoft user, unless you're technically skilled enough to install the developer toolkit and roll your own, you're not doing IPv6 until you upgrade to Windows XP - which means you also get to buy a Norton upgrade, a this upgrade, a that upgrade. The cost is *NOT* in deploying IPv6. The cost is getting to a configuration that is *able* to run IPv6. Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech