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

Fri Oct 28 23:32:46 UTC 2016

> On Oct 28, 2016, at 5:34 AM, Honest Ornella GANKPA <honest1989 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> The study in the LACNIC presentation had 2 questions
> 
> Where are we across the globe with IPv6 adoption?
>  - Is IPv6 deployed uniformly?
>  - Is there a rich country/poor country divide?
> 
> What can IPv6 adoption numbers tell us about IPv6 as a replacement for IPv4? - How to best measure IPv6 adoption? Penetration or usage? How do they differ? 
> - Are we there yet? (As in, can we retire IPv4?)

By my count, that is actually 5 questions.

However, by my reading, not one of them is “Will IPv4 depletion accelerate IPv6 adoption?”.

> The study concludes that IPv6 is not a viable replacement for IPv4, that there is some positive news (6 countries in the world have 20+% penetration and bandwidth) and that IPv4 will be relevant for a very long time.

Yes, but it uses a very narrow and poorly constructed definition for the term “viable replacement” based on existing deployment without regard to rate of adoption or future state. As such, the conclusion is flawed by the erroneous assumptions put into it from the beginning.

> It also correlates higher GDP with IPv6 uptake. There is no data which shows that IPv4 depletion accelerates IPv6 deployment. In fact there is actually evidence that the more resources (financial, human resources, infrastructures etc..) you have, the more likely one organisation / country has high penetration of IPv6. And even in those cases, most of these countries with high GDP have limited IPv6 penetration. Canada for example, a top 50 country of GDP per Capita has only 9,5% penetration (usage 5.5%) rate however ARIN has been in softlanding since 2007. Should we conclude that they were lazy or that depletion alone cannot be the only motivation for IPv6 deployment?

Sure… Think of it this way…

In the US, if you have vast financial resources, you are more likely to buy a new car just before your existing car starts to require expensive repairs and you will sell your existing car to someone who will pay a relatively good price for it because it is still in relatively good condition.

On the other hand, someone with the same vehicle who has very limited financial resources will continue to put as little money as possible into keeping the vehicle barely running for as long as possible. For several years, they will put thousands of dollars into the vehicle far in excess of the cost of a new vehicle over time, but in a way that allows them to spend as little as possible at each step along the way.

The same mechanisms drive early adoption of IPv6… You have the resources to do it and as a result you are in a better position to plan ahead and make a financial decision which will be cheaper in the long run, but requires greater investment up front.

> African ISPs have less means and resources than those in these countries. However we do have the advantage of remaining IPv4 ressources and in my opinion, we should use them carefully and wisely. Those resources allows us a breating room to plan for capacity building and v6 deployment. It might be slow but eventually we will get there. IPv4 depletion has not accelerated IPv4 deployment in richer countries, I do not believe accelerating depletion will accelerate it either in Africa.

Neither Andrew, nor I are arguing against careful and wise USE of IPv4 resources. What we are arguing against is the deprivation of use of addresses by people who need them now so that the lifetime of IPv4 can be artificially extended and there will still be a free pool for some undefined future use which may or may not ever materialize.

Imagine if I built an 8-lane freeway between two cities and then kept 3 of the 4 lanes in each direction closed in case someone invented a new wider vehicle requiring wider lanes. The single lane in each direction becomes very congested and everyone wants to ease the traffic by opening the other lanes, but there is a small group that continues to argue that the additional lanes should be preserved in case some future vehicle development requires wider lanes.

> IPv6 is inevitable and I believe we all agree on that. But how our continent and internet players go about it is also crucial and it will be good if we find a solution that will benefit us all

The only solution that will benefit everyone is to deploy IPv6 as quickly as possible across the board. Any solution other than this simply extends the period of pain which we are already in. The period of pain began with the introduction of NAT into IPv4. It will continue until we can retire IPv4 from the internet backbone.

IPv4 will remain relevant in islands for a long time to come. IPv4’s days being relevant as the lingua franca of the internet are limited. The more limited, the less expensive it will be for all of us. The question is how long and to what extent those who have adopted IPv6 will continue to tolerate and absorb the costs imposed by those who have not. Given that Amazon has now made IPv6 available on Route53 and on AWS and Microsoft has now added IPv6 to Azure, I suspect you will soon see some acceleration in content available over IPv6.

Cable companies in the US are already doing the math looking at the Per User Per Year revenues vs. the Per User Per Year costs of maintaining IPv4 and considering at what point they can accept the loss of IPv4-dependent subscribers as a lower cost than continuing to support IPv4. I’ll give you a hint… There are definitely versions of this calculation out there which say that point is less than 5 years from now.

Owen

> 
> Honest Ornella GANKPA
> 
> 
> 
> 2016-10-28 9:01 GMT+01:00 Andrew Alston <Andrew.Alston at liquidtelecom.com <mailto:Andrew.Alston at liquidtelecom.com>>:
> Ø  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.
> 
>  
> 
> I 100% agree… and this is why I asked if it could be explained to me how the correlation between v4 depletion and v6 depletion was drawn from a presentation that refers entirely to GDP correlation on v6 deployment, because I honestly don’t understand that correlation.
> 
>  
> 
> Sadly, I’ve heard deafening silence since then, and it seems that question is going unanswered.  As someone from academia, Omo I am sure you agree with me that any conclusions drawn from a dataset need to be explained by the individual drawing the concerns in order for any weight to be applied to them?
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks
> 
>  
> 
> Andrew
> 
> 
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