Consumers just say no to pay for IPv6 addresses
Stratecast has surveyed consumers to gauge their willingness to adopt new technology and has found that they are essentially technology-agnostic. That is, they are focused more on the services they can consume rather than the technology used to deliver those services. In fact, when we used their responses to bias a Monte Carlo simulation (a computerized mathematical technique that provides a range of possible outcomes and the probabilities that they will occur), we found that just under 90% of existing consumers would not pay to get IPv6 service if no new services were introduced to go with the access.
In practice, this means that in order to get consumers to pay for IPv6-based service, carriers need to think in terms of new services that would be available only through IPv6 addresses. At least so far, killer IPv6 applications have not emerged. And if the migration to IPv6 denies consumers access to services they already use, IPv6 is going to be very unpopular.
So, at least from a consumer perspective, there is currently no virtue in converting to IPv6, nor is there likely to be much demand for access. The most compelling reason for a consumer to move to IPv6 would be if that person's work required it. If enterprises decided to convert internal networks to IPv6 and then insisted that remote workers accessed those networks through IPv6-enabled connections, there would be a compelling reason for many consumers to request such connectivity. Currently, though, that doesn't seem to be happening.
Mike Jude is a program manager at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan in charge of the consumer communication services practice
This article originally appeared on SearchTelecom.com