Steve Crocker wrote:
There are hundreds of millions of IPv4 computers and perhaps millions of
individual IPv4 transport networks, large and small.
Here are some useful points along the way from pure IPv4 to pure IPv6.
A. Every new computer is able to talk IPv6
B. Every transport is able to talk IPv6, i.e. every network from tier 1
ISPs down through wifi hot spots and every internal corporate network
C. Every major service, e.g. Google, CNN, Amazon, is reachable via IPv6
D. Every new computer is not able to talk IPv4
E. A substantial number of transports are unable to talk IPv4
F. A substantial number of major services are not directly accessible
via IPv4 (but, of course, will be accessible via gateways)
We're basically at A. Give some thought to the dates you'd assign to B
through F. Feel free to disagree that these are significant steps along
the path, but if you do disagree, please propose other reasonable and
measurable mark points.
I think there's an additional step in there. I'll call it C.5.
C.5. Effectively all Internet resources are reachable via IPv6.
I didn't include the bitter end of this process, i.e. the complete
disappearances of IPv4. If we get through steps A through F, the rest
won't matter much.
I'd say that anything beyond my C.5 above won't matter much.
And once we reach C.5, the same incentives that pushed IPX, DECNET, etc.
out of the picture will also push IPv4 out of the picture at about the
same sort of rate.
Getting to C.5 is *hard*, clearly, but once there, I see IPv4 dieing off
very quickly, probably in single-digit years. But, like I said, it
doesn't really matter at that point, just like getting rid of IPX et all
really didn't matter to the health of the Internet, but it happened
rather quickly in any case.
--
Jeff McAdams
jeffm@xxxxxxxxx
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