Ok, here’s my stand on things. The beauty of having a blog and speaking publicly about things is that I can be proven right or wrong - only time will tell.

People have been clammering for 10 years about the end of the IPv4 address space and as of today even CNN has jumped on the bandwagon. My prediction about the IPv4 space is that it will take tens of years before anyone makes any real changes much less adopts IPv6 across the board.

Last week, Comcast has announced that they’re going to offer IPv6 routing across their network, but will require tunneling outside of their network still since the rest of the world is still not IPv6-compatible.

Facts:

There are still large organizations who own huge class-A chunks of the IPv4 address space. Some of these are military organizations. You can bet that the majority of these addresses are not in use today. So, there are plenty of IPv4 addresses out there, but nobody wants to let go of them. When IPv4 addresses become scarce, these addresses will be sold to the highest bidder instead of people adopting IPv6.

People are lazy. Not everyone, but the great majority of people are. Lazy people tend to take the easiest way out. The easiest way out is not to create something new, it’s to squeeze the last little bit of life out of something.

People will scrape together and consolidate their IPs if they run low.

People can port-forward ports to NAT’ed machines instead of needing a new IP for every new service. Wow! We have 64k ports on each IP address! Who needs more than one now?

VPNs take care of native access from site-to-site from private address to private address. One public IP on a single machine can link together millions of machines in a huge organization and can delay the need for IPv6 for a LONG time.

NAT

Large companies can work off a single IP. Just make each service a “directory” off their main domain, so http://google.com/search and http://google.com/docs, etc …

You may think that you need a public IP, but the odds are that you probably don’t have one now. You only need a public IP if you’re serving-up content. SERVING is the important word here. How many of you actually have a server (web,ftp,irc,…) in your home and allow other people to connect to it from around the internet. Very few, I’ll bet. Most people use their home internet connections for web surfing, email, pulling down multimedia content. All client-side operations, and GETTING of data. Not SERVING data.

The fact is that ISPs will just give you a private, NAT’ed address if they run low on IPv4 addresses and charge you more money if you really think that you need a public IP, but that hasn’t really happened yet.

If you look at all of the facts, and the fact that people are lazy and will use other means of operations if they run low on IP addresses, you’ll see that most pro-IPv6 people are just touting their new technology and want to put it into place, but the real fact is that there are people out there that still use Windows 95 and AOL and refuse to upgrade. IPv6 is one of those things that gets better the more people adopt it and those kinds of technologies always take a while to get into the mainstream. It’s going to take a LONG while to convert the number of people it’ll take to achieve critical mass to flip the rest of the internet over to IPv6. I may not even see it in my lifetime.

I may be wrong, but now that I’ve made my prediction, we’ll see how long it takes for IPv6 to take hold to the point where it’s commonplace and considered the standard. I know that I’m not itching to tunnel my packets over IPv6. I’ve got a personal VPN and I can reach anywhere that I need to directly without the use of IPv6, so I’m good-to-go.

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