IPv6 Transition to Cost US $75 Billion? 462
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.'"
$25-$75 billion (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2)
The vendors may know what the big guys have (how many IPV4-only routers and switches have been sold to company X, for example), but you still have to know how that's going to be used. You could go native IPV6 on all public facing hardware, and IPV4 on internal only (perhaps on disconnected networks), so even if you know how much hardware exists for IPV4, that doesn't tell you how much has t
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:5, Insightful)
Custom Software Upgrades are Expensive (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:5, Funny)
3Com hubs now IPv6 compatible !
Upgrade now !
Don't be left behind with your old crappy IPv4 hubs, our new hubs are ready for the Internet of the future !
Upgrade now for $99.95 !
(hum)
Yes, well, it would work with a lot of users)
Re: cost of IPv6 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:4, Insightful)
So why bother making an estimate?
Either say nothing, or make a statement based on well-understood and well-researched facts.
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:5, Funny)
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:4, Funny)
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:5, Insightful)
But even higher internet adoption in Europe and Japan doesn't hinder their moves, most strange.
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I think there's a little confusion on that (Score:3, Insightful)
Also the US has an additonal pro
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:3, Insightful)
It's stupid, but sadly, we are a stupid people, bound by our stupidity to make stupid decisions.
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:5, Funny)
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the current estimate on the war in Iraq is $350 billion. But hey, what's $135 billion dollars between friends.
The estimated daily cost in late 2004 was $177M per day. Take a few months off of the war, and you have the cost of migration.
There are many better ways to spend that cash though. Think schools, healthcare, infrastructure, and job training.
what is going on over there?!? (Score:3, Funny)
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 teleco
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:2)
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:2)
I also wonder if it is the population density that affects things as well. Remember, thats one of the reasons we're not all on 12mbit connections for $10/month. Its because we're all so damn spread out. But in places like China, you have to change far fewer main lines to get everybody (not that I claim to know what I'm talking about here, but it sounds right in theory at least).
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:5, Funny)
Ahh, the old slashdot EULA.
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I think you're right about the pre-existing infrastructure being a problem. Another problem you can face is that building something new ticks off the general population.
Shanghai's maglev to Pudong Airport wasn't a walk in the park. The biggest thing is that they had
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:4, Funny)
Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:3, Funny)
Wrong angle (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wrong angle (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, Charlie, but this administration couldn't give two bits for anything in silicon. It's all about petroleum, otherwise Michael Dell would be Secretary of Commerce.
Whatever you think you believe about this crop of economic vandals being pro-business you can just forget it, like any small business which has been infinitely more screwed by the oil price maniupulation than any jump in mini
Re:Wrong angle (Score:2)
Re:Wrong angle (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Wrong angle (Score:2)
I'm not saying that converting to IPv6 is a bad thing. I'm merely saying that we have to consider if it's worth the money. If you want to go about creating jobs that do worthless things, why not
Even more wrong (Score:2)
That's right - people will buy anything! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wrong angle (Score:4, Insightful)
If it takes $75B worth of resources, that is materials, production capacity, risk and labour, to switch to IPv6, that is $75B worth of resources that cannot be spent on other productive uses. It is not the case that suddenly $75B worth of income and infrastructure is going to appear out of thin air. No, resources must be diverted from other uses. This is what is know as opportunity cost.
This is the same issue that stupid newsmen were spouting off on after the New Orleans disaster. An entire city was wiped out yet they went on about how good it would be for the economy. WTF? An entire city worth of wealth was erased and this is somehow a good thing? Ya, some people will benefit, such as construction workers and sawmills. However, this is more than offset by the losses to just about everyone else. It will be offset to the tune of about 1 large city.
Think about it. If you could create wealth in this way you could simply bash your way to Billions with a baseball bat. Wealth comes from two sources. First, from taking existing wealth and converting it into more valuable wealth (production). Second, from re-arranging existing wealth from less valuable uses to more valuable uses (trade).
Now, it very well may be that the $75B investment is worth the cost. In fact, I believe this to be the case. I bet that over the years the investment will pay for itself many times over. However, the $75B it is going to cost is most certainly a cost and infact not a credit.
Yee-Ha! (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:Yee-Ha! (Score:2)
Cisco Isn' t The Answer, It's The Question (Score:2)
That's nothing... (Score:5, Funny)
With all the money we've saved from taxes well be able to... ohh wait, nevermind.
Uh... (Score:5, Insightful)
June 2008 deadline (Score:3, Informative)
"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.
What's needed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's needed? (Score:2)
consider that some routers come with 1 and 2 gigs of ram already, using the crude-and-wholly-underestimated number of 4x as much (128 bits vs 32 bits), without even accounting for the exponential increase in the possible number of routes (last week route count was 177k)... you get the idea.
and hundred thousands of man-hours to implement and test it all
in all practicality, ipv6 is flawed as it is, due to policies (thanks IANA!). you're basicly
Re:What's needed? (Score:5, Informative)
Any ISP with 100k customers (or even one with an order of magnitude less) is going to be assigned a
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
BGP4+ Routing tables will also be correspondingly smaller, because they'll only contain a number of
I humbly submit that you do more research in future.
Re:What's needed? (Score:5, Interesting)
I predict (and serveral people involved in IPv6 deployment on Internet2) that we'll end up giving
Scalable addresssing for multihoming is just hard (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's needed? (Score:3, Interesting)
see http://www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html [arin.net] section ipv6 6.5.1.1
To qualify for an initial allocation of IPv6 address space, an organization must:
a) be an LIR; --- most ISP aren't
b) not be an end site; --- large hosting company ? i'm sure they'll appreciate having to renumber
c) plan to provide IPv6 connectivity to organizations to which it will assign
Re:What's needed? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:What's needed? (Score:3, Informative)
To enable ipv6 on a Windows XP machine goto run and type "ipv6 install" wait a few minutes and boom. If you got somthing like radvd running it will fetch the info it needs and assign the address.
Cause im running ipv6 on my WRT54Gs v4 [solosoft.org] running radvd and all my windows machines picked it up right away after typing that command. I think Windows 2000 needs a patch to get it to work but im sure by the time ipv6 becomes standard Windows 2000 will be unsupported.
Please don't be spitti
Re:What's needed? (Score:3, Interesting)
You had to custom modify a WRT54G with a working ipv6 stack and radvd, then sign up with a tunnel broker (precious few of these left now - most of the ones from a few years ago died), and manually edit scripts to connect to that tunnel broker.
Or you could have tried to go the 192.88.99.1 route, only to find that most ISPs don't route it any more.
Then you've got an ipv6 connection. woo. With a probable ~300ms first hop and nowhere to go because there is *zero* co
OK Larry, 'fess up. (Score:2)
The most important question... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The most important question... (Score:2)
Until then, its billions going down the drain, or millions if you switch away from cisco hardware.
Asian Homes will use up IPv4, cellphones would (Score:3, Interesting)
But there are hard problems and easy problems
Outrageous (Score:4, Funny)
K
Re:Outrageous (Score:2)
Then it'll cost next to squat.
Sounds like the amount that could be saved... (Score:5, Insightful)
If we eliminated most of the fraud, waste and abuse in the government [cato.org]. 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.
Re:Sounds like the amount that could be saved... (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like the amount that could be saved... (Score:2)
It would also be simpler to also have a co-ordinated infrastructure change where all the routers, switches and computers have the equal ability to run IPv6 on their equipment then on a "transition" week, everything would switch over. Maybe not even a transition week, but a transition weekend, where everything would transition over friday, saturday and sunday where "business hours" would not be effected too much.
This can be a mandated change for a specific weekend in the united states and the cost
What is the basis for the cost? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What is the basis for the cost? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What is the basis for the cost? (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds Like BSA Estimate (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sounds Like BSA Estimate (Score:3, Informative)
And the contract goes to... (Score:5, Funny)
The reliability of the source? (Score:3, Insightful)
_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.
but (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:but (Score:2)
IPv6 is a mess (Score:3, Informative)
Do we really have to throw this much money into the volcano?
Re:IPv6 is a mess (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit.
on the contrary, IPv6 will allow multiple people behind that firewall to have dcc transfers, and do ftp much more easily. no more ftp or irc modules required to nat shit around, no more H323 gateways and gatekeepers needed because person A in his 192.168.0.foo network can't connect directly to your 192.168.0.foo machine on your own network (duh, to his H323 client, this would
Re:IPv6 is a mess (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole point of a firewall is to drop packets that could be malicious. Just because all the computers on the network have their own public addresses doesn't mean you should pass along everything that gets sent to it.
[regarding long IPv6 addresses] now, can you explain where you see a human being remembering the address in q
tfa (Score:2)
be rolled out incrementally. no one beleives that all
the endpoints are going to be upgraded.
so if some of the major backbones start peering v6, thats
a good definition for switching, but i seriously doubt its
going to involve tens of billions of dollars.
the incremental cost of new larger customers being assigned
v6 blocks instead of v4, and having to push it to the endpoints
or put in nats? the dns servers (the only thing of any
substance that was mention
What's the cost (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy Address Space, Batman! (Score:4, Insightful)
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? [cia.gov] In 1999 the internet economy was closing in on 150 Billion, by now it has to be through the roof. [j-bradford-delong.net]
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. [wikipedia.org]
Just keep it all in perspective. The internet economy will blow right through this obstacle if it gets in the way of sales
My Blog [news2lose.com]
Umm... (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Does anyone actually use english measures anymore? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency (Score:2)
Cost has VERY little to do with the reasons US hasn't went metric. There are two reasons we aren't metric, first is familiarity. Everyone in the country has a good idea of how fast 30 mph is, but has little concept of what the corresponding speed in kph would be. Likewise, most people know approximately how much a gallon is, but only have the concept of a liter from a bottle of soda.
Second, and probably more important, is that
Re:Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency (Score:3, Informative)
This is known as the "broken window fallacy" or Parable of the broken window [wikipedia.org].
Time to invest... (Score:2)
And it's because... (Score:2)
This really is a shortsightedness of their protocol design. Until now all IP versions have contained the address space of the previous version. Until IPv6 came around.
Re:And it's because... (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Re:And it's because... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And it's because... (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? RFC 4038 says this:
This seems to imply that IPv6 does contain the address space of IPv4.
Of course, for it to
Transition guide is needed (Score:2)
And before someone says to just go read the RFCs, no, what needs to be made is a transition guide for those already familiar with IPv4. Myself, and most others, probably don't want to sit reading dry RFCs. Give me a lesson pac
75 billion? who cares, it isn't going to happen (Score:3, Insightful)
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......
Re:75 billion? who cares, it isn't going to happen (Score:3, Insightful)
No tax write-offs (Score:2)
This is the commerce department estimate... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that all? (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, wait.
Where's this cost coming from? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Where's this cost coming from? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Where's this cost coming from? (Score:3, Insightful)
You also need keys to all the offices where there are desktop machines that have static IP addresses. Or any desktop machine that can't be automatically remotely re
New Orleans (Score:3, Funny)
That's ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:That's ridiculous (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I'm sure 6to4 is going to work perfectly for everybody, particularly the US government. Who needs to buy new routers, when you can just tunnel everything? Woohoo!
Cost of transition (Score:3, Interesting)
You know... (Score:3, Interesting)
I love IPv6 and all, but lets do the fiber first and then deal with the protocol.
Cost (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, but only if you have four 6313's. If you have more than four, Cisco will want LOTS more money.
Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS (Score:2, Funny)
Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS (Score:3, Funny)
Your rite - their is many loosers that have pour grammer.
Re:A LOT is TWO WORDS (Score:2)