[Community-Discuss] IPv4 depletion in AFRINIC will speed up IPv6 adoption - myth or fact?

[Owen DeLong]

There are a number of flaws in your question, Omo.

I neither support nor oppose IPv4 obsolescence. I state it as a fact. It is my considered opinion that when a protocol no longer fully serves the community of users it is intended to serve and/or requires those users to adapt to limitations on their use of the network in order to meet the needs of the protocol, that protocol is, by definition, obsolete and no longer able to meet the full needs of the user community.

This is simply fact.

IPv4 is no longer able to deliver the full feature set of the internet to the entire user community. It does not have enough addresses to give a unique peer address to every device attached to the internet. 

If you can disprove this simple fact about IPv4, I welcome you to do so, but if not, then I again say that IPv4 is, by definition, obsolete.

There are lots of obsolete things still in widespread use. Some countries still use paper airline tickets.

I also don’t favor accelerated runout of IPv4 in the AfriNIC region or anywhere else.

What I do favor is allocating addresses to those with need now without protecting those late to the party at the expense of those present at the party.

I see no reason to deprive an organization which needs addresses now in order to satisfy some demand from some other organization which may or may not exist at some future time.

I will point out that if you work at it hard enough, you can slice and dice almost any raw statistic to support almost any fabrication you wish.

This is the art of American politics. Without this ability, Trump would not be able to call himself a success even though adjusted for inflation, his net worth is now less than half of what his father left him.

I will also point out that working for Akamai does not mean that I will automatically agree with every conclusion any random person draws from data supplied by Akamai.

Now for some more substantive and targeted criticisms:

If we look at his slide 23 (IPv6 penetration vs Bandwidth), we see clearly that in some countries, the eyeball penetration vastly exceeds content and vice versa. This is obvious from the “outliers” on his graph and yet he makes no mention of this possible explanation whatsoever.

I suspect that many (possibly all) of the countries on the far left side of that graph are countries not served by Netflix where the primary sources of internet content are not at all unlikely to be IPv4-only which places strong limitations on the ability of deployed IPv6-capable eye-balls to obtain their content overIPv6.

At the other end of the graph, it is likely representative of the reverse situation… IPv6 content available while a limited number of eye-balls have IPv6 capabilities at this time.

The talk speaks to the relationship of GDP and IPv6 deployment and says nothing about whether or not exhaustion will drive migration.

Owen

> On Oct 27, 2016, at 3:58 PM, Omo Oaiya <Omo.Oaiya at wacren.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 19 October 2016 at 10:20, Honest Ornella GANKPA <honest1989 at gmail.com <mailto:honest1989 at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
> This is the way to go because from recent research I read on the Internet which makes it clear that IPv4 depletion does not lead to IPv6 uptake.  In fact, I am surprised that Owen Delong continues to advise that this is the way because the data was from Akamai which I hear he works for.  Please see attached slide.  The presentation on the study was given at a recent LACNIC meeting - http://slides.lacnic.net/lacnic26/ <http://slides.lacnic.net/lacnic26/> - https://www.dropbox.com/s/zxmygx5djtj6cxl/4%20-%20IPv6-GDP.pptx?dl=0 <https://www.dropbox.com/s/zxmygx5djtj6cxl/4%20-%20IPv6-GDP.pptx?dl=0>
> Owen,
> 
> Honest has a point.  The author used the Akamai state of internet study as one of the data sources.  As a vocal proponent of accelerated IPv4 depletion in AFRINIC, what do you think of the opinions expressed in the study?   
> 
> It certainly doesn't support obsolescence of IPv4 as you promote.  Btw, so we can compare, do you have any data that supports your view?
> 
> Like others,  I would like to see widespread v6 adoption but we do need to be careful to explain the stats we provide especially for those who advocate to other stakeholders.
> 
> -Omo
> 
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