Re: Post-Exhaustion-phase "punishment" for early adopters

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Feb 4, 2011, at 10:47 AM, Heinrich Strauss wrote:

> Hi, NANOG.
>
> Something's just struck me: every IPv4 allocation over a certain threshold has a monetary cost (sometimes in the tens 
> of thousands of USD) and according to our RIR, the first equivalent IPv6 allocation is given as a freebie (to 
> encourage migration). (Disclaimer: I'm on the Dark Continent of Africa)
>
> So once the "early" adopters migrate their networks to IPv6, there is no business need to maintain the IPv4 
> allocation and that will be returned to the free pool, since Business would see it as an unnecessary cost.
>
> This would seem to counteract the forced move to IPv6, since, once the early adopters move their services exclusively 
> to IPv6 (or maintaining very small IPv4 blocks), there would be plenty of IPv4 space for the late adopters to request 
> (after the RIR quarantine period, etc). Naturally, 6to4 functionality must remain for a while to interoperability 
> reasons, so their resources would be available to the IPv6 world for time to come.
>
> Unless I'm misunderstanding the RIRs policy regarding IPv4 allocations; has it been stated by all RIRs that IPv4 
> blocks are unallocatable once the exhaustion phase kicks in? Or is there another mechanism to ensure that we don't 
> hand out the space being handed back once IPv6 is the norm? :)
>
> Regards,
> -H.

The big providers will not be deprecating their IPv4 addresses until there is no longer a significant IPv4 internet.

At that time, smaller providers could probably get them, but, they will need IPv6 in order to talk to most of the
world.

Owen