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

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

On 10/10/2010 11:58 PM, Thomas Schäfer wrote:
> Am Montag 11 Oktober 2010 schrieb Ted Mittelstaedt:
>> Hi Roger,
>>
>>     What amazes me is that practically nobody has answered your question.
>
>
> "In an IPv6 future, how will you solve IPv4 connectivity?"
>
> The short answer  is: Not.
>
> In an IPv6-future we don't need a worldwide ipv4-connectivity.
>

We most definitely will need worldwide ipv4 connectivity
during the transition to IPv6.  The OP was asking what are you
going to do during that transition period, not what are you going
to do once the transition is completed.  He assumes that there
will be a period of time that ISP's will self-satisfy IPv4
requests, and that some will do a better job of that than others,
thus actual real IPv4 runout will occur earlier for some ISPs
than for others.  Since the assumption is end users will drag their
feet shifting, the ISP's who have more IPv4 "stored" in their network
will have a competitive advantage - and the ISP's that have less
"stored" will have to do something to counter that advantage - and
his question is, what?

That is an assumption I feel is correct.

Now, the key to understanding the answer is to understand that while
we have worldwide "ipv4-connectivity" we most definitely DO NOT have 
worldwide "Internet connectivity" right now.

When you have millions of end users with their networks behind NAT 
devices, and none of the hosts on their network reachable from the 
Internet, you are simply kidding yourself when you assume that the
Internet is touching all of those hosts.  It is not.  It is touching
nat devices that those hosts are using.

The shift to IPv6 will be evolutionary.  The number of privately
numbered IPv4 hosts on the Internet will continue to grow and the
number of publicly numbered IPv4 nodes will continue to shrink
as a percentage of total hosts on the Internet.  During this time
if we do the transition properly, those privately numbered hosts will
also have publicly numbered IPv6.  As time passes and more and more
people use applications that want direct host-to-host connectivity
(like skype) they will shift to IPv6, probably by not even realizing
it, and then one day ISP's like the one I work for will be able to
apply surcharges to IPv4 - even private IPv4 - which will be the
nail in the coffin of the worldwide IPv4 network.

Ted

> Regards,
> Thomas Schäfer