[AusNOG] My Predictions for the ISP Industry

[Mark Andrews]

In message <20120315000436.39820.qmail at f5-external.bushwire.net>, "Mark Delany"
 writes:
> On 14Mar12, Leo Vegoda allegedly wrote:
> 
> > > You need to explain why a business would voluntarily stop listening to
> > > IPv4 traffic and why ISPs would stop carrying it.
> > 
> 
> > I can't tell you the decade but I would have thought the decision
> > for a commercial organisation would be relatively simple. If it
> > costs more money to maintain an IPv4 service than is made by its
> > presence then commercial organisations would be motivated to remove
> > the IPv4 service. After all, they're in business to make profits.
> 
> True of course. Though if folk have to run dual stack for a number of
> years, would you expect the maintenance burden to be very high?
> 
> Quite possibly the opportunity cost of v4 addresses may become the
> dominant economic factor in the earlier years. But at some point that
> market will start to decline pretty rapidly.
> 
> 
> One cost that isn't talked about much is the transition for
> application s/w and databases. While there is plenty of evidence that
> stacks and routers are good at v6 support these days, I wonder about
> the state of network related applications written over the last 15
> years or so.
> 
> E.g, how much running code blithely copies gethostbyname() responses
> with an int32? Or assumes that the string representation in a database
> is <= 15 bytes?  Or uses a hand-written dotted quad config parser?
> 
> Sure it's bad programming, but there are a lot of bad programmers.
> 
> What worries me most about these is that if their service provider or
> IT dept. helpfully shields them behind 6to4s then they're going to get
> a nasty shock very late in the day when they finally come out of
> hiding.

Which is why many of us have been saying for years.  Turn IPv6 on and
test everything.
 
> Mark.
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-- 
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: marka at isc.org