[rpd] Migrating quickly to IPv6

[Owen DeLong]

> On Jun 8, 2018, at 02:11 , sm+afrinic at elandsys.com wrote:
> 
> Hi Owen,
> At 04:15 PM 07-06-2018, Owen DeLong wrote:
>> Now, that fraction of their user population is currently monotonically shrinking and eventually will reach a point where they will no longer choose to maintain those translation services. At that point, I believe they will truly consider IPv4 irrelevant.
>> 
>> This is not based on any internal or proprietary knowledge of FB (I have none) but on their own public statements.
> 
> I am not negatively impacted if FB decides to restrict access to FB.
> 
> There is currently 72.25% of 102/8 available [1].  At the end of 2017, 43.40% of Afrinic Resource Members had both IPv4 and IPv6.  Does that mean that half of the networks at my location have both IPv4 and IPv6?  Does it mean that half of the user base at my location can access FB over IPv4 and IPv6?

It only means that 43.4% of AfriNIC resource members have received an IPv6 allocation or assignment. It does not mean anything about the state of their IPv6 deployments.

Just as google measures (and publishes) their IPv6 traffic statistics, I assure you that FB, Netflix, and others also monitor and measure that. When they see the IPv4 traffic dwindle below a critical mass that justifies the expense of continuing to support those users, they will deprecate IPv4 from their networks and turn off support.

Whether or not you are negatively impacted personally is rather irrelevant in the global environment.

The point here is that the relevance of IPv4 is decreasing over time and when it drops below some threshold for each network in question, they will likely stop spending money to maintain it.

If you think that time is safely 15 years away for the first network that impact you when they drop it, then I guess you’re safe to keep doing the IPv4 thing for at least that long, if you’re right.

I’m of the opinion that almost every internet user will see at least one network they care about reach that point in something more like 5-10 years, possibly even less.

Owen