--On Thursday, March 30, 2006 19:30 +1200 Andrew McGregor
<andrew(_at_)indranet(_dot_)co(_dot_)nz> wrote:
Your ISP charges you 9 times as much for IPv4 addresses as
they do for bandwidth? I'd recommend switching ISPs. All
the ones I've seen charge a
small premium for additional IP space, but it's never more
than about a 50% premium.
Not if you don't live in the US. There are no options here
that are at all cheap. Usually you get a flat "we don't do
that". And they don't do v6 either.
If it makes you feel better (it probably won't), in much of the
US, the story from the ISPs goes like this:
* We don't do that on our residential service, if you
want _any_ IPv4 addresses assigned to you, you need to
buy the commercial service.
* The commercial service costs around ten times as much
as the residential one for similar bandwidth _less_
service (often no free email, free web hosting, "user
protection" software tools, etc.)
* If you want more than one address on the commercial
service, you will pay some small incremental charge for
it. But the real incremental charge starts at address
number 1 and is tied up with the "type of service" shift.
However, we need to keep something else in mind, which
Iljitsch's note hints at. If I'm an ISP trying to sell a
low-end service to low-end customers at a low (but still
profitable) price, I need to cut customer support costs to the
absolute minimum. If someone calls up for help with a
configuration problem, that may be six month's of profits from
that customer eaten up in the cost of answering the call. To
that sort of ISP, NATs, and ISP-supplied routers that support
NATs, have a _huge_ advantage, which is that all supported
customer LANs are identical -- same design, same exact internal
addresses, etc. That is very important from a support
standpoint -- length of calls, skill levels required, ability to
construct clear FAQs and avoid calls entirely, and so on.
For the community, there are elements of "you get what you pay
for" in this. And, for the ISPs, unless we figure out ways to
provide the same level of support convenience with public
addresses, we will certainly see NATs with IPv6 as well as IPv4.
john
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