In an IPv6 future, how will you solve IPv4 connectivity?

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Hi Roger,

   What amazes me is that practically nobody has answered your question. 
  Every answer so far has been of the "well, you can do this to fix 
that" but they aren't saying what THEY are doing.  Your question wasn't 
what could I do, but what were YOU planning on doing.

   Since practically nobody said "this is what we are going to do" I can 
only conclude that there's a lot of ostriches with heads in the sand and
that none of the respondents have done any actual IP planning for
the future.

   Anyway, this is what -we- are going to do.

   First of all we will be strongly advertising that we have native
IPv6 connectivity to our users, particularly during runout, as
it is likely that there will be news articles and such on this and
we will take advantage of that.

   When we get near the end of our assignable IPv4 we are going to
start offering the following end user products:

1) Public IPv4 only

2) dual stack public IPv4/IPv6

3) Private (natted) IPv4 only

4) Dual stack public IPv6 / private (natted) IPv4


#1 will be 5% higher than rack rate.  #2 will be 4% higher
than rack rate. #3 1%-2% higher than rack rate  #4 will be
rack rate.

We will then start moving customers into those buckets in small
groups.  Very likely the first thing to go out will be a flyer
advertising that we are having to increase prices but we have a
new program that will allow them to get out of the price raise.

Depending on how this plays out and how customers react we will be 
adjusting those percentages.

Ultimately as time continues to pass we will be CLOSELY observing what
the competition is doing.  When we see the competition start to charge
premiums for public IPv4 then we will start jacking up our percentages
and trying to force more and more people out of the public IPv4.  This
is the part that worries me, because it is hard to know how much IPv4
that everyone has in reserve and what their burn rate is.

I really see very little point in fielding a proxy server that will
allow a IPv6-only customer to surf the IPv4 Internet - if they can
do IPv6 then they can dual-stack.  I may do this though if we have
early adopters that demand IPv6 only.

I also see little point in fielding a proxy that allows IPv4-only to
surf the IPv6 Internet.  Fielding a proxy like this costs us money
and it's a given that the major content providers will be dual stacked
for many years yet.

Ted


On 10/10/2010 7:05 AM, Roger Wiklund wrote:
> Let's say for arguments sake that the prophecy is true, and in late
> 2011/2012 a new user can only get an IPv6 address.
>
> Have you guys concidered/tested how you will solve these users
> connectivity to the IPv4 Internet?
>
> I guess NAT-PT is out of the picture,
> NAT64?
> DS-Lite?
>
> Also, as these new users are IPv6 only, how can IPv4 hosts communicate
> with them? 4to6 NAT?
>
> Thanks for your comments,
>
> /Roger