Just browsing through your response one item immediately sticks out: is there a commitment from ETNO in here that their members would immediately return unused IPv4 space ?
ETNO can't make that kind of commitment. If RIPE wanted to ask its LIRs to make such a commitment, then that would be interesting. However, my comment is an attempt to clarify that the current framework for IP address block transfers does include returning blocks to RIPE for reallocation.
That'd be great - if IPv6 were to be deployed fully by all ETNO members in the next 2 years, which you think is easily achievable, we'd never run out of space.
I never said anything about full deployment of IPv6. All we need in order for IPv4 address blocks to be returned is for IPv6 deployment to be slightly more than normal network growth. If you assume that IPv4 deployment has been going on for about 10 years, then normal growth would not be more than one tenth of full deployment. Also note that even less IPv6 deployment than that, will be enough to reduce the consumption of IPv4 address blocks and thus, extend the lifetime of IPv4 well beyone 2 years. In fact, we may never run out of IPv4 addresses if IPv6 deployment happens fast enough. Since new product development status is generally considered highly confidential, we really don't know how much any companies have done to prepare for this so we really cannot reasonably estimate how long it will take. I'm not sure if anyone has paid the research companies like Gartner, Forrester, Ovum, etc to go around and check on the status of IPv6. It would be interesting to know if anyone has any fact-based estimates of how long it would take the IP network industry to deploy enough IPv6 service to cut their IPv4 consumption in half, and therefore push the end-date for IPv4 out in the future, 5 to 6 years from now.
I'm asking because it is exactly the opposite of what representatives of a lot of ETNO members have been telling me in private.
I'm not sure that most of the ETNO representatives would be in a position to know this within their companies. And if they did know, I expect most of them would not be allowed to say anything definite. And of course, if you ask the wrong questions, then any answers are worthless. I don't think that any major ISP in any country would be able (technically and commercially) to deploy IPv6 FULLY before 5 years from now. That's based on the history of IPv4 deployment and how long it took for various networking issues to be solved to the point where most people receive a fast and reliable Internet access service. Or IP-VPN service. Or private IP internetwork service. But we don't need full deployment in order to address the problem of IPv4 exhaustion. We just need enough deployment to slow down IPv4 consumption, and we need that deployment to be continuous with a slightly increasing rate so that it becomes business-as-usual for most IP network operators. There will be a period where vendors of routers, firewalls, access gateways, and software work through a long list of minor (and occasionally major issues) which block deployment in one way or another. That process is what will take about 5 years to get through at which point some network operators (not all of them) will be able to fully deply IPv6 to all of their PoPs and across all of their acess technologies. It doesn't help anything when people demand that network operators accomplish the impossible. This is a shared journey that requires cooperative work from a lot of organizations in order to make IPv6 fully usable. There is no doubt that we will all take that journey, but not everybody travels at the same speed. --Michael Dillon P.S. here's a quote from a message that I posted to ARIN's policy mailing list about a year ago. I expect that we will see 3-4 years of IPv6 deployment, followed by 10 years or so in which IPv4 usage steadily reduces and IPv6 steadily rises. Then in about 14-15 years we will begin a period of consolidation in which there is an effort to retire IPv4 on the public Internet and in corporate/enterprise networks. Give this another 10 years, which means that in about 25 years, IPv4 will be considered end-of-life. At that point, general purpose networking gear will cease to support IPv4, however it is possible that new IPv4 devices will continue to be built for special uses. Even today, it is not hard for an undergraduate student to build their own IPv4 router using off-the-shelf parts and open-source software. Even ASICs are available off-the-shelf in the form of FPGAs and one can expect that in 25 years this type of thing becomes even easier and cheaper. So IPv4 may linger on for a few generations hidden inside MP3 player headsets and heel computers (inside your running shoes) and concert posters.