On Apr 11, 2010, at 11:34 AM, David Conrad wrote: > On Apr 11, 2010, at 8:09 AM, Owen DeLong wrote: >>> Part fo the reason folks aren't rushing to the V6 bandwagon is it's not >>> needed. Stop doing the chicken little dance folks. V6 is nice and gives >>> us tons of more addresses but I can tell you V4 is more than two years form >>> "dying" just by seeing all the arm flailing going around. >> IPv4 will not die in 2 years. > > I'd wager it won't be dead in 20 years. Of course, a lot depends on what is > meant by "dying". > Yep.
Assuming IPv6 catches on in the post-runout crisis (and I think it will), I suspect that IPv4 will be largely deprecated on the wide-spread internet within about 5-10 years of IPv6 practical ubiquity. I suspect it will ALWAYS be used in some niches somewhere. >> Growth in IPv4 accessible hosts will stop or become significantly more >> expensive or both in about 2.5 years (+/- 6 months). > > Growth stopping is extremely unlikely. Growth becoming significantly more > expensive is guaranteed. Address utilization efficiency will increase as > people see the value in public IPv4 addresses. ISPs interested in continuing > to grow will do what it takes to obtain IPv4 addresses and folks with > allocated-but-unused addresses will be happy to oblige (particularly when > they accept that they only need a couple of public IP addresses for their > entire network). At some point, it may be that the cost of obtaining IPv4 > will outstrip the cost of migrating to IPv6. If we're lucky. > Eventually, utilization efficiency will get close to 100% and growth will, therefore stop. Note, I was specific about IPv4 accessible hosts, as in hosts which you can send a TCP SYN packet to, not merely hosts which can originate connections. Multi-layer NAT may help increase the number of IPv4-non-accessible hosts, but, it can do little to help increase accessible host count. Owen
