IPv6 Ignorance

[Thorsten Dahm]

Hi Tim,

Am 9/17/12 5:12 PM, schrieb Tim Densmore:
> Add cost is an obvious one I see right off the bat, honestly.  As of
> this morning, not a single switch on our network is capable of RA guard,
> and the chances of me getting money, or even chasing money for new
> switches is basically 0%.  A huge amount of equipment on our network
> doesn't speak v6 at all, and forklifting that out for a 0 dollar
> generating project is also a non-starter.

I completely understand your situation. And I know that you can't do 
much about it. But maybe your management needs to understand that it is 
not only about the money you make at the moment, it is also about the 
money you are losing (or going to lose) in the future because you can't 
offer the same as your competitors.

Simple example: If I come to you as a small company and want from you 
connectivity and a /24 for my servers, office and so on. And you have to 
tell me that you don't have a /24 anymore and you also can't offer me 
IPv6. But the next company is offering me IPv6, maybe a special service 
contract to set up my router initally and such. You may can keep 
existing customers, but it will be hard to get new ones. And to keep the 
old ones, because they may ask for something else sooner or later as well.

I saw this already in the past, fortunately just from the outside and 
not as an employee of such an company itself, and it was also not about 
IPv6, but history repeats:

- $Company says "we don't need X"
- All of a sudden, X becomes necessary in the industry
- All your competitors have X already in their portfolio for a long time
- $Company starts losing customers, having a panic reaction, and starts 
spending an incredible amount of time to get X while losing a lot of 
revenue at the same time
- Getting X is of course not that easy, $Company runs into bugs, 
non-trained staff and such
- After a long time, $Company is ready to offer X, but all their clients 
are gone and don't necessarily want to come back
- $Company goes out of business

Again, I can understand your point. And you can argue that you don't 
need IPv6 in 2012 to run your business. But what's about 2020? 2025? 
2050? As long as your company has a long-term plan, like "we will switch 
to IPv6 between 2025 and 2028, before that IPv4 only is sufficient", 
that's good enough. If it works out that way or not is a bet, nobody 
knows, since we can't go to the future and check what happened. I just 
know that I wouldn't put too much of my money into this bet.

cheers,
Thorsten