Reply to post: Re: IPv4 Address Pool Has Been Expanded Significantly

Re: IPv4 Address Pool Has Been Expanded Significantly

I think the issue is a combination of pragmatism and cold, hard commercial reality.

So a couple of decades ago, it was pretty much decided that Internet v2 would be Internet v6. Then much effort over those decades thrashing out the details, and getting boxes to market that can be used. And starting the painful process of implementation and encouraging migration. Plus some issues like this one, which are commercial/regulatory rather than technical. ISPs have a choice whether to peer or transit, the protocol is agnostic.

That's the Internet for you. It mostly just works, and there's a lot of inertia. So it would be very hard to get the Internet community to change course away from IPv6. Especially given some speed-bumps. Way back, CG-NAT wasn't really recognised as as bigger issue as it's turned out because carrier grade solutions didn't really exist, or were stonkingly expensive and unreliable. That changed, they're in widespread use and work. Or work well enough to disincentivise carriers from changing. Especially as they can also act as convenient choke-points for regulatory activities. Or inconvenient chokepoints for users. They make establishing inbound connections harder. But that can be convenient for carriers who don't want you having an ability to use telephony services they're not billing you for.

But along the way, there have been thousands of IETF drafts. Most go nowhere. The ones that succeed tend to have the support of the large vendors, or networks. So way back in the early '90s, Cisco created a tag-switching mailing list that caught my eye. That proposed using switching tags rather than routing, so a cheaper networking solution that also promised non-IP support. There were also some drafts by Kompella and Martini for allowing L2 VPNs across 'IP' infrastructure & Kompella was a Juniper engineer. At the time, I was doing product development, and these looked interesting for being able to offer fixed link emulations across a common infrastructure and being ATM-like, could be robust enough to convince classical telco types to trust them. Eventually those morphed into MPLS services, we launched one of the first EoMPLS services and they're widely used today.

But only because the big vendors supported it, ie Cisco & Juniper.. And also because big carriers wanted the service, ie there was an incentive to offer it when large networks could/would potentially order thousands of switch/routers to replace their 'legacy' L2 switch infrastructure and consolidate everything into MPLS backbones. That duopoly's being challenged by the likes of Huawei now, but still an issue, ie RFPs (especially on the wholesale/infrastructure side) want to know & trust how solutions are delivered. An unknown or lesser known vendor's going to be a harder sell. So anything new has a hard time gaining acceptance.

That doesn't mean it's impossible. So it's not really necessary to get the IETF's seal of approval and an RFC. As EzIP's an overlay network, find some operators that will implement it. If it works and it's seen to fill an operational need, it'll get more interest and become easier to get standards-tracked. Problem is again it's arguably missed the boat. Due to it's history and the US-centric nature of the Internet, address depletion largely affected the newer RIRs, ie APNIC/AfriNIC, who unsuprisingly became early IPv6 adopters due to necessity.