Despite more than a decade of evangelism on behalf of ipv6, the internet community has not yet succeeded in moving the world to a new networking standard.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom technologies like NAT and secondary markets for ipv4 numbers have introduced major economic efficiencies that have extended the life of ipv4.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom along with the absence of backward compatibility, it’s not really correct to call the ipv4-ipv6 transition a migration; rather, it’s a standards competition.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom and we need to understand better the dynamics of that competition, and its implications for the future of the internet.

There is extensive economics literature on network migration that shows when strong network externalities are present, timing is everything.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom adoption decisions are path-dependent and converge on a common protocol. Decisions are not reversible as it creates a lot of inertia and lock-in.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom when ipv6 was first developed, there was really no motivation to adopt it, so ipv4 spread like wildfire during the early years. Widespread compatibility across the entire market raises the cost of switching to a new standard that is not compatible with the old one.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom the proposed dual stack migration model envisioned by ipv6 designers had two fatal problems:

Some people have said that there’s a last mover advantage because of these problems, but I’d say that’s too pessimistic.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom A last mover advantage would equilibrate on everyone remaining on ipv4, but fortunately for the transition, that’s not a correct view. As a factual matter, there are first movers and numerous early movers.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom on the other hand, those decisions seem to be independent, uncoordinated, and almost randomly distributed across autonomous system (AS) operators.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom the economics of network migration

IPv4 address space exhaustion is a constraint on an operator’s growth. The growth in the ipv4 internet requires the purchase of increasingly expensive ipv4 number allocations in the market, and ever more intensive sharing of globally routed ipv4 numbers.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom in contrast, ipv6 numbers are abundant and inexpensive and deployment opens the door to less constrained growth. IPv6 deployment does, however, incur significant initial and ongoing costs that are caused by the necessity of maintaining compatibility with ipv4.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom because of the need to maintain backwards compatibility, ipv6 deployment does not immediately eliminate an operator’s need for ipv4 addresses, nor does it eliminate the need to share those addresses.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom the key driver of the deployment game is an operator’s objective assessment of network growth to the business and relative cost of that growth plan that involves either an ipv6 deployment or one that does not.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom

The well-known APNIC ipv6 measurement system calculates, for each economy and autonomous system, a percentage of user populations that have the capability to use ipv6 or prefer ipv6 connections.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom in the aggregate view, the data does not really indicate that ipv6 is being ignored, but it also does not indicate that a technology is following a normal diffusion curve.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom in many respects, aggregation of all the world’s networks into one graph or trend line is pretty misleading. For instance, when you drill down to the regional level you see cases where more economically developed regions have higher adoption.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom in 2018, the americas had stood at about 29%. In africa at about 1%. There’s even variance between economically developed regions. For instance, for the same time period europe was at about 15% north america at 50%, asia at about 17%, and oceania at about 15%.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom to better understand adoption, we collected the average ipv6 capability measurements from APNIC from 215 economies across a similar 120 day period in 2015-2017, and we validated that data against akamai’s ipv6 measurement data.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom we found it to be strongly correlated.

We looked at 90-day smoothed averages, identifying economies with over 5% measured ipv6-capability in any one of three years of the study.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom this figure categorizes our observations by growth trends. The vast majority of economies (about 80%) had no appreciable deployment. That is, they remained at or below 5%.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom the next largest group were economies with increasing levels of ipv6 capability, about 12% of the countries located around the world. The next largest group, at about 8%, exhibited plateaus in deployment with ipv6 capability stopping at levels anywhere between nine and 60%.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom that group included numerous mature european economies as well as countries in other regions, e.G., australia, canada, vietnam, ecuador, and peru.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom the most accurate picture of ipv6 deployment comes from looking at adoption levels of individual ases operating in the same market in a disaggregated basis.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom ipv6 adoption and macrosocial variables

We next developed an economy-level dataset covering the 2015 to 2017 period looking at macro-social factors in ipv6 adoption.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom we found higher levels of ipv6-capability are correlated with greater country level GDP per capita, because ipv6 is costly. Network operators with greater wealth are more likely to spend money on it.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom we also found higher country-level-ipv6-capability rates were correlated with lower levels of concentration in wireless and broadband markets.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom this is not as straightforward to interpret, but it does seem intuitive. A market with more players increases the likelihood that one of the firms will make a random decision to deploy ipv6.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom

In a less concentrated market, it’s also more likely to permit new firms with no legacy infrastructure for whom the cost of ipv6 deployment is not much different than the cost of an ipv4 deployment, so supply of ipv4 numbers plays a great role in the ipv4/ipv6 standards competition.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom the prospect of what some engineers called “ipv4 runout” was one of the reasons for developing the ipv6 standard in the first place. From an economic point of view, however, those resources don’t just run out, instead, as the supply diminishes they become increasingly expensive and consumption patterns adapt to the scarcity with greater conservation and new forms of substitution.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom network operators have adapted to this tighter supply in two ways: one, by using NAT, and two, adaptations to the secondary market. Now, the incentives provided by the secondary market have led to the identification of millions of unused and underutilized ipv4 numbers by brokers and exchanges, and we see evidence of the adaptation in the ipv4 market data.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom market for ipv4 numbers

Reviewing the limited publicly available data that’s out there for pricing, we see the median price per address has doubled in four years from around eight dollars in 2014 to 17 dollars in 2018.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom we corroborated these price trends in interviews with address brokers. We speculate that the total addresses transferred per year corresponds to the steady rise of prices and possibly indicates that supplies of untapped ipv4 numbers blocks are no longer expanding.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom

So, who is buying these resources? The answer is cloud service providers (csps) who represent a rapidly growing market. Interviews revealed that cloud networks represent some of the largest networks ever connected to the internet in terms of the numbers of customers in interconnected hosts.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom enterprise use of them has grown tremendously over the last few years. CSPs are buying ipv4 numbers because enterprise networks are lagging behind in ipv6 deployment relative to the public provider networks.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom one interviewee said only about 5-7% of network traffic is ipv6 enabled, an assertion corroborated by national institute of standards and technology (NIST) industry ipv6 deployment estimates.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom enterprises are slower to upgrade applications, particularly if they have current revenue from them. This drives demand for ipv4 addresses amongst the cloud providers as each service that they’re providing to these customers may require a globally routed ipv4 address.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom

In conclusion, there’s good news and bad news in our findings for ipv6. The good news is that ipv6 is unlikely to be what’s called a “standards orphan.” for network operators that need to grow, particularly mobile networks where the software and hardware ecosystems are mostly converted, ipv6 deployment can make economic sense.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom it mitigates major constraints on growth and can provide a path outside of the complexities and costs of large-scale NAT. Our modeling of the dual-stack and translation shows that for fast growing networks, ipv6 deployment contains, but not immediately eliminates, the requirements for more of ipv4 number resources.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom the key variable is how quickly that traffic ratio shifts towards ipv6, and the rising price of ipv4 numbers provides additional stimulus to deploy.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom the bad news is that the need for deployers to maintain backwards compatibility with non-deployers eliminates many of the network efforts that would create pressure to convert to ipv6.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom additionally, many enterprise networks don’t need to grow that much and/or maybe are still lodged in slower moving hardware and software systems tied to ipv4.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom

Another issue that emerged from our modeling exercise was that once the ipv6-only traffic ratio among ipv6 deployers reaches a certain level, their ipv4 address requirements start to decline.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom in theory, these operators could release ipv4 addresses into the market and that would alleviate the shortages and facilitate continued low levels of growth for legacy ipv4 networks.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom given this complexity, the number of independent actors, and the different scenarios that they’re facing, it’s hard to posit scenarios that lead to global convergence on ipv6 in 20 years.Cognitive learning theory in the classroom it makes sense to consider the implications of what a mixed world means, including the architectural, economic, and policy implications.