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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.'"
The FA makes no mention of WHY it will cost that much. I don't know anything about IP6, but $75b makes it seem like they plan on rewiring the whole government. The article cites that "one speaker" estimated the cost between $25-$75b. Is the speaker trying to just jack up the price? Perhaps someone can explain what is involved so we can decide if the prices quoted are reasonable.
I don't know, I mean, where I work (and we have a metric ton of network hardware) transitioning to IP6, at least as far as dealing with the rest of the world, would be pretty easy.
As far as the internal network goes it'd be a nightmare, but in that case, why switch internally at all? No real need to at this point, we could do the translation without too much trouble. Let the internal stay IP4 until all the software/hardware becomes ip6 compatible, THEN switch.
Numbers like this are always pulled out of thin air. Sure it'd be a pain in the ass if we had to up and switch today, but it wouldn't be that bad to switch in 5 years or so if we mandated compatibility today.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The original report was by Juniper and presented to a group working on upgrading the U.S. government and military networks to be dual-stacked for both v4 and v6. Since Juniper sells very expensive equipment, they want to lessen the sticker shock for all their government buyers.
There are a lot (two words) of places to look for IPv6 dual stacking.
Start with the big IPv6 hardware equipment vendors, like Cisco, Juniper, and Foundry. Look at the (relatively) free implementations that exist today, like BSDs, OpenBGPd, Mac OS-X, some linux distributions, Windoze with a patch (and soon to be included by default in Vista). That will give you some background in what to do, but since you asked such a wide open question there isn't really any one place to point you. Its almost as if you asked "I need to set up the internet, is there someplace I can learn everything about it?"
Try subscribing to some IPv6 mailing lists, or at least browsing their archives. Lots to learn there, some technical, much political. Most of the political is from clueless noobs who have just barely caught on how to configure their home NAT router, and are terrified they will now have to spend another decade learning something slightly new. The real engineers consider the migration to a dual-stacked internet as just another excercise they have to do as with every new technology.
I will admit, there is a learning curve. I have over 20 years of IPv4 experience, and it still took me a while to pick up some of the subtleties of v6. BGP peerings takes some extra work, but then again, it took years to learn all I know about v4 BGP peerings.
I would love to see some of the major internet sites start serving up content via IPv6. Slashdot, which, unfortunately, no longer seems to have anyone technically competent running it, would be a huge boost to IPv6 if they started serving up AAAA records in DNS. Add extra karma during the first few months of early adopters who can connect with IPv6, and there would be a rush of competent geeks setting up IPv6 tunnels to their home networks and pressuring their upstream ISPs to support it natively.
There is a huge amount of work to be done before the internet can be dual stacked. Apache2 supports IPv6 addresses, but PHP, MySQL, Perl and a host of other apps/languages/scripts choke or die when presented with IPv6. The IETF working group moved IPv6 from draft to standard recently, and now we just have to wait until it works its way into more and more new devices. I'm waiting on Cisco to include IPv6 standard in all versions of IOS, just like IPv4 is now.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
OS and software updates are easy; people updates operating systems and other software all the time.
Infrastructure updates are hard. Routers last a long time. Cisco's dependence on CEF (Cisco Express Forwarding, aka Customer Enragement Feature) and hardware forwarding means that routers that can forward tons of IPv4 traffic can't handle a little IPv6 traffic (for example, the widely used 7500 series). Telling the boss that you need to spend $300,000 to replace one router (that oh by the way works just fine except for a feature nobody is asking for) doesn't go over well, especially when you have more than one router.
One of the widest used dialup concentrators is the Ascend/Lucent MAX and MAX TNT series. I believe UUNet used to use these for example (I don't know what they use now but I haven't heard of them changing); a lot of "national" ISPs resold UUNet dialup ports. TNTs have no IPv6 support at all even in the latest software updates (again, IIRC it is a hardware limitation). A lot of people still use dialup, especially when on the road; it is shrinking, so it is extra hard to spend big $$ replacing hardware that is operating just fine, but it isn't going to go away any time soon.
I work for a relatively small ISP, but we'd have to spend millions of dollars to support IPv6 across our network. AFAIK no customers are asking for IPv6; one friend asked informally if we had any plans and I said no and he went on to other questions.
This is ONLY true if blocks of address space are not dolled out in IPv4 fashion. The problem is that in the government and commercial world multi-homing to several ISP's for redundancy is the norm in IPv4. In an IPv6 envrionment there STILL is not a workable solution to having just about everybody subnetted.
/32's to MANY organizations because they'll want to connect to more than one ISP. Unless somebody comes up with a reasonable way for an organization with a /48 to be connected to two different ISP's (like my agency is under v4) for reduncancy.
I predict (and serveral people involved in IPv6 deployment on Internet2) that we'll end up giving
The cost estimate we (Army CERDEC IPv6 Team) have done for the Army IPv6 transition leads us to believe essential $0 acqusitions costs if all IPv6 transition is done within regular tech refresh cycles. If we're buying IT gear anyway, IPv6 comes as regular product improvements over the next 3-5 years. The money DoD is spending at this point is aimed at getting MORE CAPABLE networks and at operations costs to train admins to run two IP stacks (v4 and v6) until we can phase out v4. By more capable, we are referring to new IPv6-only services like network mobility (NEMO) and multihoming (SHIM6).
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery