IPv6 Transition to Cost US $75 Billion?

darthcamaro writes "There are alot of reasons why the US isn't moving as quickly as Japan and Europe in migrating to IPv6. One of those reasons is likely cost. An article on Internetnews.com cites an unreleased 'Dept. of Commerce report estimating it will take $25-$75 billion to pay for the transition.'"

Comments

$25-$75 billion

[biocute]

$50B difference is huge, this goes to show nobody knows what's going on.

I guess USA's high internet adoption and usage actually hinder its move.

This reminds me of China's ability to build its new Shanghai rail based on the magnetic levitation system, while other well-established rail-using nations like Singapore may find it difficult to switch. Talk about right place right time.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[lgw]

Eventually though, all the IPv4-only equipment will reach the end of it's natural life, and be upgraded to IPv6-compatible equipment, and the IPv6 support won't cost anything extra. Unless you're upgrading early just to jump on IPv6, there rally no equipment cost at all. Sure, there's some manpower cost in learning how IPv6 works, but that's the nature of the industry. This reports looks like an excuse for someone to not adopt quickly.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess USA's high internet adoption and usage actually hinder its move.

But even higher internet adoption in Europe and Japan doesn't hinder their moves, most strange.

Re:$25-$75 billion

[Professor_UNIX]

But even higher internet adoption in Europe and Japan doesn't hinder their moves, most strange.

Not really strange.. there's really no IPv4 address space crunch here in the USA. Most people have become accustomed to using NAT, but even if NAT hadn't taken off, the USA has a huge surplus of unused IPv4 address space compared to the allocations given to the rest of the world. Pull back some of the millions of addresses grandfathered to early adopting universities and government sites and you will have more than enough for the entire USA. Does GE really need 16 million addresses? Does the Army's Yuma Proving Grounds need 16 million addresses? How about HP? Do they need 16 million addresses? Force these kinds of groups to prove they are using that much address space, if not they should be forced to readdress their networks and give back all that unused classical A space so it can be subnetted into smaller CIDR blocks. Once you run out of that, start doing it with the old class B networks. Most companies can get by perfectly fine exposing only a handful of routable addresses on the Internet and NAT'ing the rest.

Wrong angle

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have focused on how it will *GROW* the economy by creating $75 Billion in new jobs and infrastructure.

Uh...

[Anonymous Coward]

How much money would be spent on upgrading routers and internet infrastructure anyway? I can claim that over the next 10 years internet infrastructure will cost over $100B, regardless of whether or not it's IPv6 compatable or not.

Sounds like the amount that could be saved...

[ShatteredDream]

If we eliminated most of the fraud, waste and abuse in the government. With the Department of Education not being able to account for a majority of its budget, the Defense Department losing over $12B of tax dollars in Iraq and all of the pork that goes through Congress, I can't help but think that if the Congress didn't have the power to spend money on "internal improvements," we'd not be in this problem today.

The governments in this country waste so damn much of our GDP on pure bullshit that if we actually had fiscal responsibility, this would be non-issue. We have a GDP of $11T, does anyone actually think that if the costs associated with compliance, regulation, tax payments, etc. were much easier that corporate America would be bitching about this transition? It'd be just a drop in the bucket.

What's the cost

[QuietLagoon]

not to make the transition?

This is the commerce department estimate...

[Bored Huge Krill]

...and therefore assumes that it will be carried out under a no-bid contract awarded to Halliburton, who will bill Cat-5 cables at $10,000 each. Sounds a fair estimate to me :-)

That's right - people will buy anything!

[NotQuiteReal]

Even if they don't need it - like lots of devices that will have their own IPv6 address, even if there is no reason to! (The proverbial Internet aware toaster will be a big seller!)

We must move to IPv6, because the Internet just doesn't seem to be working right (or at least I tell myself that, because I wouldn't want to fix it if it weren't broken). I look forward to a time that each of my Happy Meal toys will be able to be connected to the Internet, yes we need IPv6 Now!

Bah! As others have pointed out, there will not be much cost, if it rolls out more slowly. As you update hardware, get stuff that can do both IPv4 and IPv6 next time... eventually a critical mass will be reached and the switchover will happen.

That's ridiculous

[Phil Karn]

That estimate is just ridiculous. IPv6 has been in Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Windows XP for at least several years. BIND has had support for AAAA records for some time. It's in Cisco router images. We just have to turn it on and use it!

And we don't have to wait for our ISPs, either. I've been using 6to4 (IPv6 tunneled over IPv4) for years. It's especially useful on home networks where multiple servers have to share a single IPv4 address on a cable or DSL modem.

6to4 works very well. A 6to4 tunnel coexists nicely with an IPv4 NAT on my home router. The computers on my home network can run conventional clients through the NAT just as they always have, while servers running on those computers can be contacted directly from the outside using IPv6.

While not every Internet application yet speaks IPv6, the important ones already do. SSH is the most important, but popular SMTP, IMAP and HTTP implementations do as well.

I cannot believe the handsprings users are expected to perform on retail commodity routers with kludges like "port forwarding" when 6to4 tunneling is both simpler and far more general and powerful.