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The Internet The Almighty Buck

IPv6 Transition to Cost US $75 Billion? 462

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the helping-the-national-debt dept.
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.'"
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IPv6 Transition to Cost US $75 Billion? More

IPv6 Transition to Cost US $75 Billion?

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  • $25-$75 billion (Score:5, Insightful)

    by biocute ( 936687 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:22PM (#14242995)
    $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.
    • It's hard, very hard, to know exactly what hardware every company has, and more importantly, how that hardware is used.

      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)

        by lgw ( 121541 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:33PM (#14243066) Journal
        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 (Score:5, Informative)

          by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:41PM (#14243725) Journal
          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 (Score:4, Insightful)

        by tyagiUK ( 625047 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:26PM (#14243375) Homepage
        "It's hard, very hard, to know exactly what hardware every company has, and more importantly, how that hardware is used."

        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, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:35PM (#14243083)
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Professor_UNIX ( 867045 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:49PM (#14243772)
        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.

      • First off, I'm not sure that there's more households on the net in Europe and Japan than the US. I'd want to see a reliable source on that. However all that aside, that's not the real problem, companies and major backbone infastructure is and in that the US is far ahead. Though the Internet has been growing globally at a fantastic rate, espically since 2000, it it is still heavily US based. There's a lot more large (and thus expensive) infastructure that needs to be upgraded.

        Also the US has an additonal pro

    • Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:5, Funny)

      by metternich ( 888601 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:38PM (#14243099)
      $50 Billion here, $50 Billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money...
    • More likely it would take 25 billion if we did it today, but by the time we actually get around to doing it the cost will be 75 billion.
    • 'I guess USA's high internet adoption and usage actually hinder its move."

      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)

        by mctk ( 840035 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:56PM (#14243528) Homepage
        (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.

      • Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:3, Interesting)

        by rm69990 ( 885744 )
        As a Canadian, this rule doesn't fit. We have more land mass than the US, 10% of the population, cheaper/faster internet, and it is more reliable. For instance, where I live, the slowest Cable/DSL I can get is 3 MB/s, and it has gone down maybe 4 or 5 times in 2 years. The company sent out a technician, as we were the only ones in my area experiencing the problems, and it was faulty wiring in the house causing the problem. Since that was fixed, it hasn't gone down once. For $80 a month, we get phone with un

    • Re:$25-$75 billion (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SatanicPuppy ( 611928 ) <Satanicpuppy.gmail@com> on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:26PM (#14243376) Journal
      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 (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Rimbo ( 139781 )
      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.

      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)

      by appleLaserWriter ( 91994 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:55PM (#14243802)
      I would like to take this opportunity to announce that I am willing to move the US to IPv6 for $24 billion.

  • Wrong angle (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:22PM (#14242996)
    They should have focused on how it will *GROW* the economy by creating $75 Billion in new jobs and infrastructure.

    • Re:Wrong angle (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ackthpt ( 218170 ) *
      They should have focused on how it will *GROW* the economy by creating $75 Billion in new jobs and infrastructure.

      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

    • Maybe they should also focus on how it will crowd out investment in other things, by costing money that could be used for other things. Merely creating jobs that do something useless and creating worthless infrastructure wouldn't be a good use of money; we actually have to consider the value that we get out of it.

      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
    • Wealth isn't created by spinning your wheels for no reason. It may well be that the transition is worth doing in the long run, but simply spending money for no reason isn't a net plus. It's why we don't tear down our houses and rebuild them every year.

    • That's right - people will buy anything! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NotQuiteReal ( 608241 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:57PM (#14243536) Journal
      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.

    • Re:Wrong angle (Score:4, Insightful)

      by IamLarryboy ( 176442 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:12PM (#14243604)
      Okay, I understand the desire to look for the bright side, but the economics in the parent are just plain wrong.

      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)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) *

    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

  • That's nothing... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Aqua OS X ( 458522 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:24PM (#14243009)
    That's nothing.

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

  • Uh... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:25PM (#14243018)
    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.

    • June 2008 deadline (Score:3, Informative)

      by jhines ( 82154 )
      From the fine article,

      "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)

    by Ironsides ( 739422 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:25PM (#14243022) Homepage Journal
    Since this changeover is going to require something new, does anyone have a list or know of a place that talks about exactly what needs to be done to switch over to IPv6? Like routing tables, software upgrades/changes, hardware upgrades, network changeovers and what else?
    • routers with beefier CPUs and ASICS, with load ands loads of ram.
      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)

        by Michael Hunt ( 585391 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:30PM (#14243404) Homepage
        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? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Danathar ( 267989 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:48PM (#14243771) Journal
          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.
          • I've been trying to think about the multihoming problem for maybe five years, and the answers don't seem to be getting any better (:-) IPv6's advocates made a big deal in the early days about how they were going to give us magical solutions for scalable addressing and routing, and we weren't going to have all the end users in another big swamp with all the anarchy of IPv4 address assignment and just longer addresses, but the main thing that seems to have been done about it is have ICANN price IPv6 space hi

        • Re:What's needed? (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Feyr ( 449684 )
          everytime there's a discussion about ipv6 i bring up this point, and i get people like you that didn't read the policy giving the exact same answer.

          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 /48s, by adver

    • Re:What's needed? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by anticypher ( 48312 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [rehpycitna]> on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:31PM (#14243412) Homepage
      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? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Solosoft ( 622322 )
        Windows with a patch ?

        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)

          by Tony Hoyle ( 11698 )
          You nicely stepped over the complexity there.

          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
  • Is it really worth it?
    • When you call IANA to ask for 5 more IP addresses to use for new servers, and get the answer of "ummm uhhh umm.. heheh.. uhhh." then you'll feel its REALLY WORTH IT.

      Until then, its billions going down the drain, or millions if you switch away from cisco hardware.
    • As Asians get broadband at home, they're going to start burning a lot of IPv4 addresses, and to the extent that they deploy cellphones as IPv4 instead of IPv6, they'll also burn up lots of addresses. China's the main fast-growing player right now, but India may gradually get its act together and catch up. Japan and Korea are already heavily wired and/or wirelessed (insert canonical old-people-in-Korea joke here).

      But there are hard problems and easy problems

      • Linux, BSD, MacOS, and newer Windows versions

  • Outrageous (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:26PM (#14243029)
    Twenty-five to Seventy-five Billion! That's maddness! Why ... we'd have to cancel the war in Iraq for a month or two to pay for that!

    K
    • Or more simply, use headless Linux boxes instead of rediculous cisco 3700 and 3800 routers.

      Then it'll cost next to squat.

  • Sounds like the amount that could be saved... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ShatteredDream ( 636520 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:28PM (#14243037) Homepage

    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.

    • Invest on the IRS. It is estimated that every dollar spent on more auditing will return four dollars. The IRS extrapolates from its audits that there are billions lost each year due to noncompliance but does not have the wherewithal to audit all the taxpayers it wants. Somehow, it is not politically feasible to fund the IRS.
    • Very true.
      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)

    by dotslashdot ( 694478 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:28PM (#14243041)
    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.
    • A very good question (IMHO) and I know "something" about IPv6. Now, of course, if that estimate is like many other I have seen in government/corporation contarcs, like $1 million modem programs, $2 million for simple SQL queries, and so on, it may even be a low estimate. I have real problems with companies billing millions of standard UDP/TCP/IP, encryption, compress, etc interfaces. But what do I know - I just write those as slow and as complicated as I'm told. IPv6 is not "rocket sciense" but a rather wel
    • This actually goes back to a research project at DARPA last year. They had two networks, and IPv6 network and IPv4, and a team of network admins to work on each one. Turns out the IPv6 team was slower, because of the length of IPv6 addresses. Apparently it took that much longer to write down an IPv6 address, or read it off to someone over a phone, or key into a Blackberry. People thinking they could remember an IPv6 address while walking across the room also introduced several errors into the configuration

  • Sounds Like BSA Estimate (Score:4, Funny)

    by faqmaster ( 172770 ) <jones.tm@NOSPAM.gmail.com> on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:30PM (#14243054) Homepage Journal
    Who did that estimate? The BSA?

  • And the contract goes to... (Score:5, Funny)

    by PetoskeyGuy ( 648788 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:34PM (#14243077)
    Haliburton's new IPv6 division.

  • The reliability of the source? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dada21 ( 163177 ) * <adam.dada@gmail.com> on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:34PM (#14243081) Homepage Journal
    The Department of Commerce does not have a very good track record of forecasting market trends. I think this report is especially callous as investors might heed this "warning" and invest in IPv6 companies prematurely.

    _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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    how much of that is money that would have been spent anyway? Upgrading routers and stuff when it's time came around to be replaced - it may take some time, but if all the new equipment bought is IPv6 compatable then it will only actually take the flick of a switch to make the transition - it just may take more time until the complete transition is possible.
    • A raising number of all types of Networking gear is fully ipv6 ready without anything special. I was actually surprised a bit at buying a very low end home router/gateway and finding it to have full ipv6 configration options. Thus in few years the big cost will be the actual configuration of things, not the hardware or software.

  • IPv6 is a mess (Score:3, Informative)

    by Marrow ( 195242 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:38PM (#14243105)
    http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html [cr.yp.to]

    Do we really have to throw this much money into the volcano?
  • this is entire estimate is meaningless. v6 was designed to
    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)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:45PM (#14243147)
    not to make the transition?

  • Holy Address Space, Batman! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DanielMarkham ( 765899 ) * on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:45PM (#14243148) Homepage

    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)

    by kadathseeker ( 937789 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:46PM (#14243153) Homepage
    Just phase out IPv4. Have all new equipment/software include IPv6 by default. Time for "Best of Bash.org":

    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)

    by shanen ( 462549 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @08:47PM (#14243164) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Not to be dense, but does any manufacturer in the US still use english measurements? (Not consumer-facing products or places where legacy items are measured in english units.)

      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?
    • Exactly the same kind of foolishness that keeps the US from going metric.

      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
    • ...damage of Hurricane Katrina wasn't so bad. After all, it will give us the "opportunity" to invest billions of dollars in rebuilding things.

      This is known as the "broken window fallacy" or Parable of the broken window [wikipedia.org].
  • Time to invest in Cisco.... stock price is low now... with $25-75B....

  • ... IPv6 doesn't embed the IPv4 address space and everybody has to buy a new IP and have all domains with TWO different IPs to make the transition possible?

    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.
    • Why would I want to have the IPv6 routing table permanently shackled to the mess that is the IPv4 routing table?

      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)

      by imroy ( 755 )
      Uh, what previous versions of IP? The Wikipedia article on the Internet Protocol [wikipedia.org] says "Versions 0 through 3 were either reserved or unused". And even if there were versions before IPv4, the deployment would have been what? a dozen machines? We're talking multi-user mainframes and mini-computers at universities, not home PC's. Nothing like the hundreds of millions of hosts using IPv4. Why would the designers of IPv1 through IPv4 have made the addresses a superset of the previous version, when so few hosts ac

    • ... IPv6 doesn't embed the IPv4 address space and everybody has to buy a new IP and have all domains with TWO different IPs to make the transition possible?

      Huh? RFC 4038 says this:

      IPv4 packets going to IPv6 applications on a dual-stack node reach their destination because their addresses are mapped by using IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses: the IPv6 address ::FFFF:x.y.z.w represents the IPv4 address x.y.z.w.

      This seems to imply that IPv6 does contain the address space of IPv4.

      Of course, for it to

  • What I most want is a decent howto on IPv6 transition. I know the basics, I know the theory of how it's suppose to work. But I'll be damned if I know how numbering works (I know there's some odd pre or suffix in the numbering, no?), I have no idea what theses AAAA records are, etc.

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:08PM (#14243277)
    IPv6 isn't going to happen, because it doesn't need to happen. I can get to all the web sites I need. So can you. My coffee pot isn't on the internet, and if it needed to be, I'd use NAT, or invent some new multiplexor protocol that sits on IPv4. Don't you people realize this???

    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......
  • And, sadly, all the old IPv4 gear can't simply be shipped to Third World countries for a big tax break -- well, it could, but it won't work if everyone else is switching to IPv4. Back to the haves and have-nots.

  • This is the commerce department estimate... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bored Huge Krill ( 687363 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:15PM (#14243310)
    ...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 :-)

  • Is that all? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Xaroth ( 67516 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:20PM (#14243341) Homepage
    I mean, if they really think it can be done for that, I'd be willing to pony up the $25 myself.

    Oh, wait.

  • Where's this cost coming from? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@ y a hoo.com> on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:23PM (#14243355) Homepage Journal
    • 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.

    • Re:Where's this cost coming from? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Burdell ( 228580 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @10:15PM (#14243619)
      OS and software updates are easy; people updates operating systems and other software all the time.

      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.

    • 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.

      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)

    by wheatwilliams ( 605974 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:53PM (#14243517) Homepage
    Hmmn. $25-75 billion? We could completely storm-proof New Orleans for less than that.

  • That's ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Phil Karn ( 14620 ) <karn.ka9q@net> on Monday December 12, 2005 @09:59PM (#14243547) Homepage
    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:That's ridiculous (Score:3, Interesting)

      by evilviper ( 135110 )
      And we don't have to wait for our ISPs, either. I've been using 6to4 (IPv6 tunneled over IPv4) for years.

      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)

    by netrangerrr ( 455862 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @11:13PM (#14243862) Homepage
    The cost estimate we (Army CERDEC IPv6 Team) have done for the Army IPv6 transition leads us to believe essential $0 acqusitions costs if all IPv6 transition is done within regular tech refresh cycles. If we're buying IT gear anyway, IPv6 comes as regular product improvements over the next 3-5 years. The money DoD is spending at this point is aimed at getting MORE CAPABLE networks and at operations costs to train admins to run two IP stacks (v4 and v6) until we can phase out v4. By more capable, we are referring to new IPv6-only services like network mobility (NEMO) and multihoming (SHIM6).

     

  • You know... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vertinox ( 846076 ) on Monday December 12, 2005 @11:18PM (#14243890)
    I hope that $75 billion includes fiber to the curb in every house in America.

    I love IPv6 and all, but lets do the fiber first and then deal with the protocol.

  • Cost (Score:3, Funny)

    by buss_error ( 142273 ) on Tuesday December 13, 2005 @01:13AM (#14244384) Homepage Journal
    IPv6 Transition to Cost US $75 Billion?

    Yeah, but only if you have four 6313's. If you have more than four, Cisco will want LOTS more money.

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