IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

In response to the article How Feds are dropping the ball on IPv6 over at Network World, Rich Fisk writes:

Quoted from http://blogs.globalcrossing.com/ipv6-eternal-wait-pt2#comment-928
I just attended the Network World Live Road show here in DC and the chairman of ARIN seemed to have an opposing view to the [statement] that you made in NW.

1. Somewhere in 2010 the IP address space will run out as emerging markets grow.

2. His organization is telling ISP to make plans for IPv6 as there will be a day soon where ARIN will not be handing out more IPv4 space.

3. After #2 happens (no pun intended) there will be the beginnings of two Internets. One IPv4 and one IPv6. While all sites will be reachable with IPv4 clients at first there will come a time where there will be IPv6 only sites.

Yes, we know that IPv4 address will run very low some day, but the sky has been falling for 12, maybe 13 years now.  People are tired of hearing it, in large part because you can still get IPv4 address space today.  Even if an organization starts to run low on addresses they can resort to NAT and RFC1918 (private address space, e.g. 10.x.x.x).  

The way I see it, getting denied for a new IPv4 address and being given an IPv6 address block may be the only catalyst for IPv6 deployment in the LAN.  Early IPv6 deployments in the LAN that are forced due to unavailability of IPv4 addresses only will employ a NAT with external IPv4 addresses (or address), but they will function more or less identically as the use of RFC1918 space would.  IT Network Managers will have decide if they go with an IPv6 implementation over the more familiar private address space.  They will have to use a NAT, because they are going to get stuck in this situation long before the Internetv6 is here.

As of today, finding popular sites that have deployed v6 to their web sites is extremely rare.  I did a little experiment with top of mind web sites.  As one would hope, ipv6.org resovles to an IPv6 address.  From there, I had a little more trouble.  By the way,"traceroute6: Non-recoverable failure in name resolution" means that no AAAA record was found, or in laymans terms, the site is NOT IPv6 ready.  The results are below.

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.ipv6.org
traceroute6 to shake.stacken.kth.se (2001:6b0:1:ea:202:a5ff:fecd:13a6) from 2001:450:1:1001::1e, 64 hops max, 12 byte packets
 1  2001:450:1:1001::1d  39.711 ms  39.317 ms  40.010 ms
 2  sl-bb1v6-rly-t-96.sprintv6.net  113.674 ms  113.480 ms  113.673 ms
 3  sl-bb1v6-nyc-t-1000.sprintv6.net  126.309 ms  126.216 ms  126.633 ms
 4  sl-bb1v6-sto-t-102.sprintv6.net  218.384 ms  215.206 ms  214.051 ms
 5  2001:7f8:d:fb::24  342.243 ms  342.473 ms  342.180 ms
 6  se-tug.nordu.net  343.023 ms  341.761 ms  341.059 ms
 7  c2sth-so-6-0-0.sunet.se  342.812 ms  343.377 ms  344.655 ms
 8  2001:6b0:dead:beef:2::2c6  342.023 ms  342.605 ms  341.990 ms
 9  2001:6b0:1:1200::1  342.148 ms  342.206 ms  343.006 ms
10  clubroom-gw.stacken.kth.se  342.221 ms  342.900 ms  342.158 ms
11  igloo.stacken.kth.se  342.637 ms  344.114 ms  343.147 ms

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.google.com
traceroute6: Non-recoverable failure in name resolution

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.yahoo.com
traceroute6: Non-recoverable failure in name resolution

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.ask.com
traceroute6: hostname nor servname provided, or not known

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.msn.com
traceroute6: Non-recoverable failure in name resolution

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.globalcrossing.com
traceroute6: hostname nor servname provided, or not known

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.verio.net
traceroute6: hostname nor servname provided, or not known

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.sprint.net
traceroute6: hostname nor servname provided, or not known

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.att.net
traceroute6: hostname nor servname provided, or not known

dsiegel@terra:~ >traceroute6 www.sprintv6.net
traceroute6 to www.sprintv6.net (2001:440:1239:4::2) from 2001:450:1:1001::1e, 64 hops max, 12 byte packets
1 2001:450:1:1001::1d 40.637 ms 41.133 ms 41.545 ms
2 sl-bb1v6-rly-t-96.sprintv6.net 113.473 ms 113.064 ms 112.476 ms
3 sl-bb1v6-nyc-t-1000.sprintv6.net 125.839 ms 125.544 ms 126.679 ms
4 sl-s1v6-nyc-t-1004.sprintv6.net 127.108 ms 132.845 ms 128.818 ms
5 www.sprintv6.net 127.799 ms 127.502 ms 127.634 ms



Good going Sprint!  You win a prize! Granted, it's not their main corporate web site and it does little more than check if you are v6 enabled and give you some helpful v6 related links, so it's not a true datapoint for an ordinary site.

In reality, I think that there will be a gap between #2 and #3, or when we run out of IPv4 addresses to assign and when all web sites and other servers have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.  Enterprises will deploy NAT to maintain connectivity to the Internetv4 rather than contact every web site admin to request they enable for IPv6, and the Federal networks will satisfy the mandate by being able to run IPv6 rather than take the giant step of actually turning off IPv4.  That, my friends, is the path of least resistance.