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.'"
IPv6 is a mess (Score:3, Informative)
Do we really have to throw this much money into the volcano?
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.
Re:What is the basis for the cost? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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.
How to pay for upgrades? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sounds Like BSA Estimate (Score:3, Informative)
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: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 spitting out shit
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.
Re: cost of IPv6 (Score:3, Informative)
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].