J.H. Woodyatt says:

"It's time to start talking about what the Internet will be like in a future where we abandon all our efforts toward the IPv6 transition.  Because the transition isn't happening.  It's not going to happen.  We're going to be living on IPv4/NAT for the rest of our lives."

Now, I’m known among my friends as the pessimistic one.  Granted, there’s a lot to be pessimistic about – gas prices, global warming, high fructose corn syrup, robot uprisings… But Woodyatt talks about a future he believes will come to pass – one in which IPv6 is never implemented fully and which leaves us with IPv4. 

And while Woodyatt talks about the many problems that will arise when the IPv4 address space is exhausted (like the decreased performance you get from using a NAT on a NAT on a NAT, or the logistics of asking major multinationals to pay for something that they previously got for free,) he doesn’t really back up his main point that we are going to be living on IPv4 – merely asserts it.  The closest he gets is saying that “there is no cost for IPv4/NAT high enough to drive adoption of IPv6,” a paragraph below he asserts that nobody knows exactly how much it’s going to cost to buy IPv4 addresses on a free market. 

“Nobody knows.  It could be pennies a year.  It could be the better part of a hundred dollars a month.  Nobody knows.  Nobody freaking knows.”

There’s no question that IPv6 adoption has been slower than many would hope – possibly because unlike the Y2K problem, the IPv6 switchover doesn’t have a firm date set.  Personally, I think ICANN should go ahead and make an announcement that all of the root nameservers will be going IPv6-only on some fixed date.  (May I suggest March 29, 2011?  IPv4 can only handle 2^32 possible unique addresses – and March 29, 2011 is my 32^nd birthday.  Then again, the IPv4 Exhaustion Counter currently estimates “exhaustion day” as Jan 17, 2011.)

And one big driver for IPv6 – phones, toasters, cars, and other electronic/mechanical thingy-doo-dads needing their own IP addresses now seems more like science fiction than anything of practical importance.

But that hasn’t stopped governmental agencies, such as the European Union, from switching over to IPv6.  Sure, it may take longer in America, where government agencies only pay lip service to IPv6, but America is neither the world, nor is it a technological world leader. 

NAT may work for now – but they’re still adding complexity to design, deployment, and maintenance of networks, add an additional possible point of failure, and break P2P apps.  It may take a while – and it’s probably not going to happen overnight.  But those companies and organizations that don’t switch will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage that will require them to switch over eventually anyhow – at an increased cost.  IPv6 adoption will happen, and the “DOOOOOOM” scenario may provide a couple uncomfortable months – but eventually things will settle back down into a new normal.

And this is coming from a guy who refuses to put money into a 401k because he believes that it’s better invested in concrete, canned goods, anti-radiation pills and shotguns.