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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.'"
$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.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
They should have focused on how it will *GROW* the economy by creating $75 Billion in new jobs and infrastructure.
A mini-tech boom! Cisco will profit an anyone who makes switches which allow your old IPv4 stuff to communicate will make a fortune.
i'm applying for a patent on decaffeinated, low-fat, sodium free, left-handed wholly organic ipv6 veeblefetzers, axolotls and potrzebies
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That's nothing.
With all the money we've saved from taxes well be able to... ohh wait, nevermind.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
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.
Since this changeover is going to require something new, does anyone have a list or know of a place that talks about exactly what needs to be done to switch over to IPv6? Like routing tables, software upgrades/changes, hardware upgrades, network changeovers and what else?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Is it really worth it?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Twenty-five to Seventy-five Billion! That's maddness! Why ... we'd have to cancel the war in Iraq for a month or two to pay for that!
K
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.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
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.
Who did that estimate? The BSA?
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
Haliburton's new IPv6 division.
The Department of Commerce does not have a very good track record of forecasting market trends. I think this report is especially callous as investors might heed this "warning" and invest in IPv6 companies prematurely.
_No one_ knows IPv6's cost. The market will see a few early adopters, then a steadily growing medium-sized business buy-in, followed by a boom of users or a bust due to newer technologies.
For a government agency to print these assumptions makes me think they either needed some media spotlight or the researchers wanted their stocks to go up.
how much of that is money that would have been spent anyway? Upgrading routers and stuff when it's time came around to be replaced - it may take some time, but if all the new equipment bought is IPv6 compatable then it will only actually take the flick of a switch to make the transition - it just may take more time until the complete transition is possible.
Agreed; alot of people make that mistake.
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
Do we really have to throw this much money into the volcano?
not to make the transition?
That's a lot of bucks, but studies like these are easy to take in isolation instead of looking at the big picture.
The U.S. economy is what? About 12 Trillion dollars a year? In 1999 the internet economy was closing in on 150 Billion, by now it has to be through the roof.
Poor software? It costs over 200 Billion a year (sorry no link). You have to put these numbers in perspective. When you are dealing with 300 million folks or so, and the world's largest free market, any kind of estimate for anything is going to be big. The common cold costs over $30 Billion a year.
Just keep it all in perspective. The internet economy will blow right through this obstacle if it gets in the way of sales
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Just phase out IPv4. Have all new equipment/software include IPv6 by default. Time for "Best of Bash.org":
Some cool info: Tibeten monks, after twenty years or so of practise in the Himalaya, control their brain stem - they can control their heart beat, blood pressure etc.
After thirty years they can connect to the internet purely by meditation, setting TCP stacks in their neurons and stuff.
Right now I am chatting with a monk who is sitting naked in an ice storm on his towel, his only possesion.
He's using ipv6.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
To me, it mostly comes down to efficiencies. The reason we measure things in the first place is so we can perform mathematical operations on the resulting numbers. Metric units are easier and more efficient for the mathematical operations, and therefore confer some competitive advantage on the people using them. It might be a large or small advantage, but it's always there.
IPv4 has some design limitations. IPv6 will address many of those problems, and the networks (and countries) that use that system will have competitive advantage.
What I find amusing is that many of the same people fighting against IPv6 on grounds of cost are the same people who want to argue the damage of Hurricane Katrina wasn't so bad. After all, it will give us the "opportunity" to invest billions of dollars in rebuilding things. Hey, why don't we destroy a major city every year? Look at all the "opportunities" we'd have. However, moving to IPv6 is NOT to be equated with random destruction, but is rather a rational form of evolution.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
You suck... like.. alot.
Your rite - their is many loosers that have pour grammer.
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.
From the fine article,
"The government is supposed to be on a relatively rapid path toward IPv6 migration since the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) mandated (PDF file) this past August that the federal government move to IPv6 by June 2008."
But yes, there is an annual IT budget that is impacted by this.
IPv6 isn't going to happen, because it doesn't need to happen. I can get to all the web sites I need. So can you. My coffee pot isn't on the internet, and if it needed to be, I'd use NAT, or invent some new multiplexor protocol that sits on IPv4. Don't you people realize this???
I love the guy up their who said IPv6 will *create* $75billion in the economy. How the hell will it do that?
I'll issue my usual challenge to the IPv6-fans: If you love IPv6 so much, cut yourself off from IPv4 completely. Don't use an IPv4 address. Don't access IPv4 sites. That's what has to happen for IPv6 to be a reality. If you're running IPv6 on top of or alongside IPv4, you haven't "switched over" yet. You're just goofing around with some nonstandard network protocol. Might as well use fidonet.
Go ahead, I'm waiting......
...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 :-)
I mean, if they really think it can be done for that, I'd be willing to pony up the $25 myself.
Oh, wait.
That green slime had it coming.
As far as I can tell, the sum total cost for all of this uber-expensive upgrade would cost (in old English currency) about 2'/6, and would take the United States less time than it currently takes for Joe Average to reboot from a BSOD. For this reason, I would like to make the US Government and the various Internet providers a special deal. I will set up IPv6 for them, with full one-year warranty, for a mere $15 billion, paid in advance. If this sounds satisfactory, just mail me the keys to the server rooms and passwords for the servers and routers, and I'll get started.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Not to be dense, but does any manufacturer in the US still use english measurements? (Not consumer-facing products or places where legacy items are measured in english units.)
I believe car manufacturers switched to metric components years ago.
I'm sure aircraft manufacturers are also metric.
Consumer electronics? Considering that the last domestic manufacturer closed years ago I think it's a safe bet that it's entirely metric now.
Other industries?
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
How about NOT building that "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska. That would save some money.
Marine Sergeant: Did I give you permission to b*tch, soldier?
Also, have you heard of: "::aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd"?
What previous version of IP are you talking about? You aren't seriously referring to Arpanet's NCP to IPv4 transition in 1981-1982 are you? Arpanet had roughly 200 hosts back then!
Uh, what previous versions of IP? The Wikipedia article on the Internet Protocol says "Versions 0 through 3 were either reserved or unused". And even if there were versions before IPv4, the deployment would have been what? a dozen machines? We're talking multi-user mainframes and mini-computers at universities, not home PC's. Nothing like the hundreds of millions of hosts using IPv4. Why would the designers of IPv1 through IPv4 have made the addresses a superset of the previous version, when so few hosts actually exsisted? Why go to that trouble when it wasn't really a problem?
Just an FYI, but I know someone who used "alot" in their masters' thesis at Belmont U. It's kind of ironic, really, because she always put forth a front of being a very literate individual. She advised a high-school student that "alot" was indeed a legitimate word and when that student's teacher marked the "word" out and corrected the mistake, said student was quite unhappy. She defended herself for her mistake, as well, by using her thesis as an example. Just struck me as funny when I read the parent's post.
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
Hmmn. $25-75 billion? We could completely storm-proof New Orleans for less than that.
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.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Link to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
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.
But there are hard problems and easy problems
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'd guess that it'd cost you a couple billion dollars getting the really big peers using IPv6 between each other and just tunneling IPv4 traffic around. By the time you get the players to the table and you get Cisco, Juniper and the big consulting firms all into it and the couple really big ISPs to show up at the table you've already blown a few million. By the time the pissing contests are all done, I could see that "project" costing a couple billion, easy. It's going to be a money grab any way you cut it.
When you step back and look, you can migrate it down, start at some top level peers and push it down. ISPs can roll it out, smaller ones would have it easier but it's doable. A couple of big schools could switch over to IPv6, there is enough support between Linux, Windows and MacOSX that all the students could show up one year and it could be an ipv6 network. You start looking at businesses and that's when it starts to look like a mess. Every layer 3 device in the business will have to be evaluated, many replaced, many might not even be really audited as it is. It looks like y2k all over again. I don't even think most IT guys have IPv6 on their mind when they buy stuff.
I'd wager, you could get all the top level peers to IPv6 and that would cost $5B or there about. Maybe you could get the 10 biggest ISPs to switch, that'd probably cost another $20B, I'm just swagging $2B a pop for the big 10, probably lot's of infrastructure upgrades to make it happen. So that's $25B. Start looking at corporate networks, who knows? I'd imagine it would cost a pretty penny just to get them peering IPv6 and using IPv4 internally; of course by this point there might be some really good reasons to use IPv6 across the board because you'll be losing access to things from IPv4.
You take another step back, I setup IPv6 at home for my own good, not super easy. All my network jock buddies are IPv4 savvy and while they know specs and such, none seem to have a lot of IPv6 known-how for real. I think there is a pretty big void there. On the up tick, I think this is going to happen, it's just a matter of when, I also think that if we play our cards right we might be able to clean up a lot of the bullshit that is out there right now.
But upgrading custom software is a much different scale of project than simply upgrading boxes and reconfiguring some web servers. There's a huge amount of mission-critical big nasty badly-documented stuff out there running on mainframes, PCs, and Unix boxes of various sorts that knows about IPv4 and might or might not know about DNS and DHCP. Finding all of it isn't quite the same level of effort as finding Y2K bugs, but it's still a huge hard-to-estimate job.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Huh? RFC 4038 says this:
This seems to imply that IPv6 does contain the address space of IPv4.
Of course, for it to be useful, eventually people will have to start using other addresses that are not part of IPv4. But no protocol design can get around that problem.
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
I hope that $75 billion includes fiber to the curb in every house in America.
I love IPv6 and all, but lets do the fiber first and then deal with the protocol.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
In all fairness, it seemed like a great party (with porn and online dating and Simpsons quotes and Natalie Portman naked and petrified), so you can't really blame the internet for accepting his invitation.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Yeah, but only if you have four 6313's. If you have more than four, Cisco will want LOTS more money.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
First off, I'm not sure that there's more households on the net in Europe and Japan than the US. I'd want to see a reliable source on that. However all that aside, that's not the real problem, companies and major backbone infastructure is and in that the US is far ahead. Though the Internet has been growing globally at a fantastic rate, espically since 2000, it it is still heavily US based. There's a lot more large (and thus expensive) infastructure that needs to be upgraded.
Also the US has an additonal problem in that a lot of the net here was developed before other countries started really taking off. That translates to old equipment, some of it has been replaced, of course, but an amazing amount of it still works fine and thus is still in place.
Well, when you are building new infastructure, it's not that hard a sell to pay whatever small amount extra to get IPv6. When you already spent $500million on a facility that still works fine, hard to get another $500million to upgrade it for a feature nobody is really asking for yet.
Actually, the current estimate on the war in Iraq is $350 billion.
Wait a minute! I thought this Iraq affair was part of the IPv6 migration plan. Cheaper gas, faster internet I was told.
Now that I've checked around on some websites, it looks like the current story is something about preventing torture and human rights abuses. Either that or implementing them abroad-- the photos and the text aren't matching up.
Anyway, the big obstacle seems to be these fundamentalist zTerm zealots kidnapping our telecom engineers and holding them hostage trying to block multimedia internet content and return us to tools like lynx and gopher.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
A few simple classes of automatically granted prefixes would do wonders along with a few simple routing rules. For example, to accomodate situations where NAT is used as a workaround to scarcity rather that for security, why not an address in the form of prefix, IPv4 address (of NAT device/firewall), arbitrary Ipv4 address. Addresses in that prefix could automatically be encapsulated into IPv4 to the firewall. The source address would make the right thing happen for the reply.
/80 range to play with. No provider support needed.
Doing things like that could create an incentive for the edges to upgrade even if their providers can't be bothered to do so. It would provide value even if individual workstations/PCs were upgraded (OS) for IPv6 support. Intermediate routers wouldn't even know the difference.
What you describe has been available for *ages*. It's called "IPv4 mapped IPv6 adresses", and it basicly boils down to the entire ipv4 range being a subrange of IPv6 (From the top of my head, the 3ffe:: is used for this). Still, it hasn't quite caught on.
FYI: The opposite is available too, in a way. It's called 6-to-4, and enables *everybody* with an IPv4 address to use IPv6. You even get an entire
It would provide value even if individual workstations/PCs were upgraded (OS) for IPv6 support.
The majority of the workstations/PCs doesn't even have to be upgraded. Windows XP natively supports IPv6 (it's merely disabled by default, but a simple 'ipv6 install' on a command line fixes that), Linux has been having support of it for the last few years, so unless you're running an ancient machine that would need updating for several other reasons, consider yourself IPv6 capable. MacOS X has been having IPv6 support since the early OSX days, IIRC. The list goes on and on.
Heck, even Internet Explorer and Firefox can use IPv6. What more client support do you need ?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Some of the original motivations for end-users getting their own address space have gone away - DHCP means the cost of readdressing computers has gone to nearly zero, especially for desktop machines, and DNS means that you really _can_ move a server, though you might need a week or two of overlap on the address space for everybody's caches to time out (and IPv6 might force you to do some kind of tunneling deal with your old ISP), and firewalls mean that you might not by exposing most of your IP devices to the outside world anyway, just your public servers.
But even that doesn't mean that routing becomes much simpler, because that's only useful if you can aggregate - for instance, you could get /48 of provider-assigned address space from ISP1, and advertise that space on your connection to ISP2, so the global routing tables still have two entries for you even though they're assigned somewhat more cleanly. And aggregation doesn't always work well for geographically dispersed end-user customers - it's one thing for a university to aggregate the addresses from a bunch of buildings that are all in the same city, but if you've got a retail store chain with a thousand stores, should they all be part of one /48 at headquarters and route their external traffic there through IPSEC tunnels, or should each branch get provider-assigned address space from whatever ISP is nearby and try to tie that mess together, or some hybrid of both? For performance reasons, especially with VOIP, you'd like to keep latency down, so it's better to keep traffic in the same half-continent or so if you can, but it's not clear that there's an obvious answer.
IPv6 was supposed to free us from the evils of NAT. But the easiest ways to do multihoming either get into the swamp scalability problems or else do some kind of NAT or tunnel things to let you advertise one set of address space from two ISPs. Maybe that's not such a huge problem?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks