Biggest mistake for IPv6: It's not backwards compatible, developers admit

[Pierfrancesco Caci]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 15:17, Jeroen Massar <jeroen at unfix.org> wrote:

> The internet is this big thing with a lot of people. Not everybody will
> be able to eat the full cake when it comes to routing and then also
> being able to keep it able to route to everybody.

I'm sure I don't know a lot of things about mobility, or datacenter
connectivity issues and so on.
What I know is that in a backbone provider network, you'll have lots
of external constraints. Availability of transmission capacity, cost
of interconnection with other operators, endless delays in the
delivery of hardware and so on. Traffic engineering is a day to day
task. In addition to that, if given the possibility, customers will
always try to deaggregate to the smallest block possible for a variety
of reasons, of which the one that bothers me most is "so others won't
be able to hijack my block". So anything we do to allow for TE will
likely give way to the wild deaggregations that we see in the v4
table. I understand the desire to avoid this.  The goals exposed in
rfc3582 seem to me all valid and current, and maybe the point made
about the meshed interconnection is even more evident that in 2003,
with lots and lots of providers and even enterprises who do their own
peering at IXPs.
To all these operators, probably v6 PI seems like a reasonable way to
maintain the status quo in term of market, independence, knowledge of
their own personnel, possibility to continue to do what they do
without having to overhaul their net completely.

-- 
 Pierfrancesco Caci, ik5pvx