Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later

Clear enough? Yes, no matter when, you just have to pay! :-D ... Well, it's the title of Randy Bush's presentation at the last NANOG event. What is it all about? IPv6 of course, what else! Several times ago, Todd Underwood (formerly at Renesys) has written a nice blog entry about this, ehm, maybe not exactly the same but similar. It more or less can be interpreted as follows.


Es wird knapp, We don't have enough free "space" (i.e. addresses) anymore in this "world" (IPv4) so we need to move to a much better & bigger "world" (IPv6). Yes, we might think that we can create two or three parallel "worlds", but then our "lives" will much depend on the "gates" between these "worlds" - this solution is not preferable for the most "politicians" of the networking society.

So what's the problem? Let's move together to this better & bigger "world". Well, unfortunately this new "world" isn't that ready yet! Why? Simply because everybody wants to have a "perfect world" so that the future generation doesn't have to move again and again. But "perfect" is something that is developed "slowly", sometimes "very slowly" or maybe "very very slooooowwwwly". And don't forget here we are talking about (a few) millions of "things" that have to be "tuned" (configured) to the environment in this new "world". Moreover, die Zeit draengt! we don't have enough free space for our new "family" members in the upcoming months.

That's what I got from Todd's writing. Now, when you say, "ok, no problem, if the time comes I'll pay". This is answered by Randy in his talk:

"You Can Pay Less & Slowly Now or You Can Pay a Lot More & Steeply Later"

So, which one will you choose? :-D