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.'"

$25-$75 billion

$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

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

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.

Re:$25-$75 billion

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

Re:$25-$75 billion

I don't know, I mean, where I work (and we have a metric ton of network hardware) transitioning to IP6, at least as far as dealing with the rest of the world, would be pretty easy.

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

Eventually though, all the IPv4-only equipment will reach the end of it's natural life, and be upgraded to IPv6-compatible equipment, and the IPv6 support won't cost anything extra. Unless you're upgrading early just to jump on IPv6, there rally no equipment cost at all. Sure, there's some manpower cost in learning how IPv6 works, but that's the nature of the industry. This reports looks like an excuse for someone to not adopt quickly.

Custom Software Upgrades are Expensive

Yes, lots of the equipment gets old and eventually needs replacing, but the government really does keep equipment around long after it'd be obsolete in the commercial world - after all, a desk grunt who's typing memos at 100wpm and sending a bit of email is only generating information at ~100 baud, and as long as you stay off the Upgrade-Microsoft-Office-Every-Year treadmill, the main reason not to be using a 386 PC is that too many web pages want newer memory-hogging browsers, and even upgrading to a 3GHz Pentium doesn't mean you need a bigger router for the office if he's not downloading a lot more material.

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

New new !
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:$25-$75 billion

7/10 people prefer to make estimates on things they know nothing about.

Re:$25-$75 billion

(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.

Wrong angle

They should have focused on how it will *GROW* the economy by creating $75 Billion in new jobs and infrastructure.

That's right - people will buy anything!

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.

That's nothing...

That's nothing.

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

Uh...

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...

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.

What is the basis for the cost?

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.

And the contract goes to...

Haliburton's new IPv6 division.

What's the cost

not to make the transition?

Cost vs investment vs opportunity vs efficiency

Exactly the same kind of foolishness that keeps the US from going metric. If you prefer to see it as an opportunity to invest in new metric tools or IPv6 hardware and software, then it looks like an opportunity. The people who fight against such changes want to harp on the total costs, and generally refuse to consider rational transition strategies.

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.

This is the commerce department estimate...

...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 :-)

Where's this cost coming from?

• Windows Updates: Free. Microsoft Research already provides a stack which is (therefore) already paid for.
  
• Linux Updates: Well, you want the USAGI patches if you want top-of-the-line IPv6 support, but either way it's free.
  
• *BSD Updates: The KAME stack is already in there.
  
• Cisco Updates: Any reasonably recent version of IOS or PIX will have IPv6 as standard. Therefore it's already paid for, therefore it is free. If you've already got a support contract, updating the firmware should also be free.
  
• E-Mail Updates: Most e-mail clients (and servers) should already support IPv6
  
• Web Updates: Apache is about the only server that matters and that already supports IPv6. I believe all the major clients do, too
  
• Multiplayer Games: Probably the one area that doesn't have IPv6 as standard, but it should be possible to provide IPv4-over-IPv6 tunnels for those
  

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.

That's ridiculous

That estimate is just ridiculous. IPv6 has been in Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Windows XP for at least several years. BIND has had support for AAAA records for some time. It's in Cisco router images. We just have to turn it on and use it!

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:What's needed?

The original report was by Juniper and presented to a group working on upgrading the U.S. government and military networks to be dual-stacked for both v4 and v6. Since Juniper sells very expensive equipment, they want to lessen the sticker shock for all their government buyers.

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?

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.

Re:What's needed?

This is ONLY true if blocks of address space are not dolled out in IPv4 fashion. The problem is that in the government and commercial world multi-homing to several ISP's for redundancy is the norm in IPv4. In an IPv6 envrionment there STILL is not a workable solution to having just about everybody subnetted.

I predict (and serveral people involved in IPv6 deployment on Internet2) that we'll end up giving /32's to MANY organizations because they'll want to connect to more than one ISP. Unless somebody comes up with a reasonable way for an organization with a /48 to be connected to two different ISP's (like my agency is under v4) for reduncancy.