David Conrad wrote:
As the cost of IPv4 goes up, there will be increasing incentives to make more efficient use of the address space.
Technically speaking , so true. Today, it is not neccesary to deploy IPv6 at all.
People will consolidate their address holdings, putting their allocated-but-unused IPv4 address onto the market. Since this is increasing the supply of usable IPv4 addresses, this will tend to drive the price down.
Not at all. Unless NICs reduce supply to a demand, enforcing the deployment of "more efficient use of the address space", LIRs will keep consuming the same amount of addresses, because, there is no economical drive for them to do otherwise and big economical drive to do so. That is, "more efficient use of the address space" may cost more and because "more efficient use of the address space" may be deployed after IPv4 addresses are exhausted, which means the LIRs can sell part of its address space, now not necessary for them, at very high price.
And you don't believe the anticipation of IPv6 deployment would have a depressive effect on an IPv4 market?
There would have been an effect, if most people had believed that IPv6 transition would have been completed long before IPv4 address exhaustion. Masataka Ohta