| Quote from: Mark |
| I'm keen to understand the thoughts of our business community and resellers. |
Hi Mark
I specialise at the small end of the SME market, although I occasionally carry out break fix and the odd consultancy job for larger businesses. SME customers are generally buying my services because they can not justify employing someone with my level of knowledge and experience (3rd line). My market is self selecting, in so far as customers must want or need to do something more sophisticated than web browsing and POP mail before they will pay the premium for my attention - I have no interest in customers looking for the cheapest possible price.
I am encouraged to see at least one person at PN is taking an interest in business customers, because they have been neglected for years in my opinion. In a nutshell, I get the impression that PN does not understand today's small business needs AT ALL. Unfortunately I presently regard PN as the best of a bad bunch. I am more than happy to assist with a view to improving services for small business customers but I have little patience when it comes to being humoured in exchange.
Anyhow IPV6. Most of my customers have never heard of it and are entirely disinterested in it! They have their own businesses to run, which tends to mean they don't have time for the continually changing hype and learning curves associated with IT. That would be why they engage me to advise them, to take an interest and to negotiate the tedium of the technical details. I very, very, very rarely get asked about specific technologies. So no, virtually no one has asked me about IPV6 specifically.
What I get asked for are solutions to business problems. Many of the solutions benefit from public IP address space. The need for IPV6 is not
essential though, as workarounds (NAT, MNAT, PAT, VPN) have been developed for IPV4 over the years. However, as you probably know there are no ratified standards, which can lead to device configuration and interoperability issues.
To summarise the issue, there is almost always a workaround but what is neglected (by IT people) is the additional cost of working around, which can be substantial.
For instance.
1. PN once turned down a RIPE application I made, on the grounds I could use port forwarding. Yes, I could use port forwarding but it would mean having to reprogram a dozen devices, retrain existing users and interfere with my internal remote support systems. As a result, the customer abandoned the project, blamed me and removed all their business. Total cost to the customer about £1K, total cost to me about £2K + loss of a £2K PA contract!
2. A customer has asked me to enable another of their workstations for remote desktop access. They are out of public IPs which means their existing subnet needs consolidating. So I was up early this morning reconfiguring private DNS and DHCP on their server. Later I will adjust the public DNS records, then I need to set up port forwarding on their router and write some instructions telling their existing remote users how to reconfigure MSTSC on their home computers. It will probably turn out that I have to suck up the cost as attempting to educate the customer to the need to do the work, would take far longer than doing the work itself.
Those are both reactive issues, where I am reacting directly to a customer request.
3. A proportion of the solutions I provide are based on speculative project sales. A customer with whom I have an established relationship will say something which provides an opportunity to suggest a technology solution that had not occurred to them. Often, whatever the benefits might be, the cost can not be justified immediately or in isolation. The idea may be resurrected the following April (maybe the April after that) when financial plans are being made for the year ahead. Increasingly these projects require public IP space and often it is these projects which justify moving from one ISP to another.
Such issues go away once IPV6 is rolled out.
I agree with MauriceC in so far as it is a chicken and egg. I could compare the IPV6 situation with the ADSL rollout. Upgrading from a dial-up account was a big investment for a lot of small businesses but once the investment was made, it opened a lot of doors few people even knew existed. Where IPV6 is concerned, there is no question of, if. It is going to happen. Should PN get on and offer it now, they become a market leading ISP. Should PN wait until the customer base is aware, they end up with the price conscious low hanging fruit, while the quality custom quietly moves to the ISPs who already offer it.
