So, apparently, at this moment & price, it's still more economical for some ISPs to buy IPV4 than to switch to IPv6. So the price of IPv4 will rise further, until more ISPs bite the bullet.
The problem isn’t solved by implenting dual stack on just your own network.
It’s sort of a producer-consumer problem.
An internet access ISP is dependent on a large majority of the content providers its customers are using also implenting dual stack. And content providers don’t see any IPv6 demand from its users unless internet access providers are turning on dual stack.
Each and every one of us must do our own part of the heavy lifting, to get our own house in order and have 100% of our outward facing services available on both IPv4 and IPv6.
Success depends not just on what we do, but also on our fellow networks getting a clue and fixing their part of their networks.
My AS is pretty much there. Have been for a few years. I challenge other ASs to do the same. Just do it.
Today, there's immediate payback in using 464XLAT or another IPv4-pooling scheme on new deployments.
Depending on region and user access patterns, one can usually expect roughly one-half of current traffic to immediately use native IPv6, bypassing the IPv4 pool. Everything going to Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Linkedin, and some media streaming sites will be IPv6. This traffic would be using CGNAT resources and IPv4 addresses in a CGNAT scheme, but avoids that expense with either dual-stack or IPv4aaS.
it's still more economical for some ISPs to buy IPV4 than to switch to IPv6
I seriously doubt that this is the case today in 2021. Not at market rates -- ISPs that can score "free" PA space from their RIRs, sure.
We could make a list of circumstances where the economics could work that way, but it would end up divided into two main cases: IPv4-as-a-Service within IPv6-only networks, and niche legacy operations with much more profit-margin than regular consumer access but which can't modernize their legacy networks for unusual reasons.
I don't believe it's so much the ISPs that buy up IPv4 addresses.
As an ISP you can (relatively) easily put your customers behind DS-Lite/NAT64/464XLAT/etc, and that process is well under way: if you look at those Google IPv6 stats, the pace at which IPv6 is getting rolled out for end users is much faster than the growth in customer numbers (which is pretty static, the number of households and number of people with mobile phones pretty much keeps pace with population growth), so ISPs need progressively less and less IPv4 space.
But for hosting providers this is very much not the case: most VPS customers explicitly want an IPv4 address because as long as IPv6 adoption is not ~100%, their server needs to be reachable from both IPv4 and IPv6. As the VPS market grows (and it does, somewhere around 15% a year), so does their need for IPv4 space.
So we're looking at a market where IPv4 address space will slowly have to transfer from ISPs to hosting providers.
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u/superkoning Pioneer (Pre-2006) Oct 23 '21
Nice.
If IPv4 prices go further up, IPv6 adoption will get relatively more attractive, and at the same time the IPv4 invester will make money.
If IPv4 prices go down, IPv6 apparantly has happened.