[AusNOG] Prediction: Google et. al. may artificially penalise IPv4 clients

[Mark Foster]

On 2/05/2017 6:46 p.m., Mark Newton wrote:
> On May 2, 2017, at 10:27 AM, Ryan Tucker <rtucker09 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Speaking of things preventing ISPs in Australia from delivering IPv6, is there some technical reasson that no ISP seems to offer IPv6 on NBN HFC at the moment?
> Nope.
>
>

My view is that the problem hasn't been in the network stack (routing 
and switching) for many years.
I'm about 18 months beyond my last ISP role but my experience was that 
it was supporting back-end systems (CRM, provisioning, etc) that were 
chiefly the hold-up on deploying IPv6.
For example the CRM tools used in the last ISP role(s) I held had been 
significantly tweaked to allow IPv4 allocations to be provisioned 
directly from CRM, with tools to semi-automate the allocation of 
prefixes and then, on provisioning, automatically put in place the 
systems required to account for the traffic consumed (where IP address 
was the measurement metric for volume billing). It was difficult, if not 
impossible, to adjust the system to support IPv6 and as a result all 
IPv6 provisioning was done manually, and the only plans supported 
weren't volume-billed.

Hell I remember actively debating the default IPv6 prefix allocation for 
broadband customers with my engineers as we couldn't get a consensus on 
whether to allocate /48, /56, /64 or some other prefix size.  Same with 
linknet addressing.  At least that stuff is now becoming routine.... but 
i'm only talking about a couple of years ago.

To answer the rhetorical above, I wouldn't be surprised if it is a 
'technical' reason, but only when you wrap all the ancillary software 
systems into your thinking. Routing and switching packets is rarely if 
ever the challenge these days.

Penalties for those networks able to provide v4 only might wind up being 
the major incentive to finally enable IPv6 in all respects - if you need 
to sink many $'s into modifying your internal software systems (many of 
which are custom, some are legacy) then the way to make this happen is 
to wait through a refresh cycle (hah!) ... or... make it financially 
incentivised (make it too expensive not to).

Mark.