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

[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

[metternich]

$50 Billion here, $50 Billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money...

Re:$25-$75 billion

[mctk]

(not that I claim to know what I'm talking about here, but it sounds right in theory at least)

Ahh, the old slashdot EULA.

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.

That's nothing...

[Aqua OS X]

That's nothing.

With all the money we've saved from taxes well be able to... ohh wait, nevermind.

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 is the basis for the cost?

[dotslashdot]

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.

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 :-)

Re:What's needed?

[Michael Hunt]

You don't seem to know what you're talking about.

Any ISP with 100k customers (or even one with an order of magnitude less) is going to be assigned a /32 (or shorter) prefix, which is guaranteed to be globally portable.

The basic structure of an IPv6 address is:
0-31 Top-level network bits
32-47 16 bits for customer allocations (/48)
48-63 Customers' subnetworks
64-127 Local subnet addressing (EUI64)

If you've been allocated a /48 by your ISP, sure, you'll need to renumber every time you change ISPs. If you've been allocated a /32 or shorter prefix by a RIR, then you won't.

BGP4+ Routing tables will also be correspondingly smaller, because they'll only contain a number of /32 prefixes (a much smaller number than the current IPv4 soup, which includes prefixes as long as /24 for legacy reasons.)

I humbly submit that you do more research in future.

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.