NANOG/ARIN Follow-Up

I said I would give updates on NANOG and ARIN if anything interesting happened, but I was so busy then, and when I returned to Chicago, that I just hadn't had time to write about it until now.  First of all, I have to say that both events were great, as was the Global Peering Forum event on Tuesday night.  I would encourage anyone in the field to go to these events to learn and to be able to converse and share ideas with people with common interests.

Now, at NANOG, much of the talk seemed to be on how to make things more complicated, thus I won't touch on those things here, but there are three things that I will cover.  First of all, I highly encourage everyone go through the How to Accurately Interpret Traceroute Results presentation.  Even if you're pretty familiar with traceroutes, it is a very in-depth presentation and I'm sure you'll learn something.  One of the other ideas mentioned that interested me, was the overall idea of expanding the current idea of an Internet Exchange, making it a full MPLS based metro network, allowing companies to get ports with the exchange for private interconnections over specific VLANs or as a public exchange, as most exchanges are currently configuraed.  Overall, the idea would be to make interconnectivity even easier, no matter wether or not the company you want to connect to is in the same building as you or not.  FInally, NANOG served as a great opportunity for us to meet with many of our existing peers and to talk to other networks that we are now working to peer with.  It is always nice being able to put faces to the people you're communicating with via email.

As for ARIN, it is quite evident that the IPv4 run-out is in fact a dire issue.  Sure, we might have IPs for about 2 years yet, but that really isn't that long, and many changes needed to implement IPv6, such as in software and harware platforms may take that long to implement.  We have been fully IPv6 capable for many months now, and encourage all customers to get IPv6 address space so that they are prepared for the change.  To help push people towards IPv6 we are no longer charging the one-time fee for IPv6 allocations.  As IPv4 space does run out, we will likely be forced to charge more for IPv4 resources, as there will be a point where we simply would not be able to get any more IPs, making them a scarce resource.  The best way to mitigate the need for those more IPv4 addresses is to be prepared with IPv6.  Yes, IPv6 is not in common use now, but when IPv4 runs out, the change will likely happen very quickly.  You'll want to be prepared in advance of the change, or you are in danger of losing significant business if you're not prepared to move over to IPv6 when everyone else is.  I am not trying to scare you.  I am telling you that you need to be prepared, and we provide you with all the resources you need to be prepared as far as network and hardware.

If anyone has any questions about any of the topics discussed above, just post a comment on this post an I'll be happy to answer your questions.