On 18 Oct 2007, at 13:11, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
On 18-okt-2007, at 12:49, Joao Damas wrote:
I believe vendors will go where-ever their users show them the money. Create the demand, the offer will show up.
Same thing for the ISPs.
Nope. If ISPs want to continue getting new customers and there are no new IPv4 addresses available then either trade them with some other party who has them, or they use IPv6. The last option might be more expensive at first but it will go down in price, whereas the cost of the first option is only likely to increase. This will create demand from the ISPs for IPv6 enabled products, though perhaps more in the area of application level gateways than in others. Customers won't care if their ISP gives them v6 or v4 as long as they get the service.
And the content networks. All three of those are in the end paid by the end-user. But the end-user has no idea what IPv6 is and is certainly not going to spend extra money to get it.
There is plenty of work to do elsewhere too, but the CPE issue is quickly becoming a significant hurdle. The reason for that is that those tend to run IPv4 NAT which makes easy IPv6 tunneling hard. We really need those boxes to support IPv6 in the near future.
However, in order for that to work there must be a clear provisioning model between ISPs and end-users. A good way to do this with IPv6 is with DHCPv6 prefix delegation, but until pretty much everyone agrees it's hard to build a CPE that will do something reasonable with IPv6 out of the box.