CircleID

I'm recommending to my consulting clients that they acquire at least 1 native IPV6 circuit, turn it up, get it up and running under all existing v4 monitoring and provisioning systems and keep it supported for training while we see how this is going to pan out. Without the killer app available via v6 only, or the exhaustion -AND- inability to get additional IPV4 space at a reasonable price, I don't see anyone in a hurry to adopt IPV6. This is not a bad thing. Markets should be the drivers of these technologies, not the technologists.

I agree with Martin on the need for companies to get up to speed on IPv6 now. Although there has been some analysis that suggests we have another 6 years before we run out of IPv4 addresses, this research is based on past trends. This means that if consumption increases, the lifetime of IPv4 could be quite a bit less than 6 years.

Also, the analysis that we have does not take into account what happens when we get into the IPv4 endgame. Once we get within 3 years of exhausting the IPv4 address space, the registries could change their policies to make it harder to acquire or to make IPv4 addresses much more expensive to acquire. The scarcity economics are much closer to us than complete exhaustion of the IPv4 space.

Therefore, as insurance against the upheaval caused by scarcity economics, all companies should begin to implement IPv6 in production on some small subset of their network to make sure that their people are up to speed. When the scarcity economics hits us, it will be impossible to buy IPv6 technical experience unless people start training up today. And the only way to do this is to implement it in your network labs and start running lower priority applications over it.

Of course, the more people that do this, the more likely it is for people to find the IPv6 sweet spot that makes it a viable strategic choice.

Note, when I say consulting clients, I intend to mean enterprises typically amongst the fortune 1000.

There is currently no reason for small to medium size business to spend the money. If they foresee some requirement for their busines to be able to do ipv6, setup a cheap lab.