The use of RIPng

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

On 6/2/2010 9:45 AM, Sam Wilson wrote:
>
> On 2 Jun 2010, at 17:20, George Bonser wrote:
>
>> ... It isn't the rolling out of v6
>> per se that is the problem. It is the lack of support tools (DNS
>> management is one example) and vendor oddities that are adding
>> additional barriers to networks who see the writing on the wall but have
>> internal operational or financial barriers. This isn't going to change
>> until people globally think of v6 as the standard and not some
>> "optional" requirement.
>
> We were recently invited by a supplier to provide input on a particular
> IPv6 feature that was missing from a new product, to justify why they
> should implement it. My text ended this way:
>
> "... As network operators we would expect to provide the same
> standard of service for IPv6 as for IPv4. For that we simply
> expect parity of features between v4 and v6. Since you already
> offer [feature X for IPv4] on these platforms, and have done
> since the [previous generation] first appeared, why *wouldn't*
> you do [feature X] for IPv6?"
>

That's a shame that you sent that.  A real shame.  You lost the
opportunity to educate your supplier.

Any vendor making and selling gear operates under a product
feature principle.

This is that all features can be sorted by the number
of customers who -require- them.  On top of the list are the
features considered most critical to the most number of
people, on the bottom the least critical.  There is a price tag
associated with each feature.

The lower down the list you go, the chance a feature will be
implemented is inversely proportional to it's price.

Right now IPv6 is lower down on that feature list.  The vendors
know that as time passes it will become more important and
so there is some weight to the idea of deploying IPv6 early,
but what this means economically is your able to defer some of
the cost of the IPv6 features into the future.

When your supplier called you he called you about a feature that
is low down on the feature list and apparently has a high price tag
to implement.  They know that not including it is going to lose
some customers, they are trying to find out how many customers
they would lose, to estimate the cost to them of not implementing it
at this time.

This is an arbitrary process relying on guessing, mainly.

If you had taken the time to "sell" the vendor on the
importance of this feature that would have weighed a lot
more strongly than what you said, because your supplier might
have been convinced that this feature would be critical to a
lot of OTHER potential customers even if those customers didn't
indicate so.

But your response indicated that you were just operating off a
checklist, and thus the feature is only of importance to you.

This means if no other customers say they want it, your
vendor will probably not implement it since they will assume
that it's not going to be that important to most other customers.

This supplier isn't asking for a quid-pro-quo, if you
"sell" them on adding this feature it's not obligating you to
buy anything.  All you are doing by a response of this
nature is REDUCING the pool of potential devices you can
choose from in the future.

Ted