[ipv6hackers] the end is near (or for IPv6: the beginning)

[Owen DeLong]

> Jim, I fully agree. Yet, unfortunately, as long as "with IPv6" does mean supporting IPv4+IPv6 together, we will get rather more complicated applications because these now need to support IPv4 with NAT *and* IPv6 without it.

In virtually every case, that is less complicated than supporting IPv4 and IPv6 both with NAT.

Applications which depend on NAT existing are inherently broken by definition. NAT is an OPTIONAL part of the internet and the sooner we can get rid of it in as many places as possible, the better.

> Up to now, whenever I see an IPv6 rollout planned in a NATed IPv4 environment, this usually means adding IPv6 with a stateful firewall to the existing IPv4 with NAT (which will be kept).

Sure, but soon we'll also start seeing greenfield deployments of IPv6 without IPv4 of any sort.

> We'll see how long this "standard solution" will persist in the future...

It will persist roughly as long as there is important (for whatever your local definition of important) content or users are still IPv4 only. Once that problem is solved, I expect IPv4 will get deprecated rather rapidly.

I think this process is going to get a pretty good burst of acceleration somewhere in the next 5-6 years when $RESIDENTIAL_ISP starts having to charge roughly twice their current pricing in order to cover the increasing costs of IPv4.

Owen