Content via IPv4/IPv6 (was: Re: ARIN IP6 policy for those with legacy IP4 Space)

[John Curran <jcurran () istaff org>]

On Apr 7, 2010, at 5:49 PM, David Conrad wrote:
> On Apr 7, 2010, at 10:52 AM, William Pitcock wrote:
> > And when there are no eyeballs to look at your IPv4 content because your average comcast user is on IPv6?
>
> The chances of this actually occurring in our lifetime are so small as to be meaningless.  There are (according to 
> published reports) between 1 and 2 billion people reachable on IPv4.  No rational commercial Internet organization is 
> going to block themselves off from that customer base.  Folks like Comcast will probably add IPv6 support _in 
> addition to_ IPv4.  Eventually, they may even add a surcharge to encourage people to migrate off IPv4, but I'd 
> imagine that's way down the line.  By way of analogy, how long did pulse dialing continue to be supported in the 
> phone system after DTMF was introduced?

David -
  Your assessment matches mine, with one important difference:  

  While I'm certain that almost any new broadband user from any
  provider will be able to reach IPv4-only sites (required in order 
  to meet consumer expectations of "This is Internet service"),
  the ability to provide scalable high-performance, low-latency, 
  low-jitter path to IPv4 resources is questionable.  If you are
  a hosting/content provider, and you decide to only source the 
  content via IPv4 connectivity going forward, the assumption 
  you're making is that each and every ISP out is in charge of
  the quality of your service, even when the ISPs are internally
  doing engineering gymnastics with types of NAT to provide the
  connectivity.  

/John