Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

What About IPv6? How Long Until Widespread Deployment?

Posted by Cliff on from the don't-hold-your-breath dept.

Christopher Blood asks: "Over at the register, they talk about the EU adopting IPv6. So what about the USA? When do we get it? IPv6 would solve some and DOS problems and we will need the extra address space. What's the holdup?" While IPv6 may be the cure for all of our IPv4 ills, upgrading the whole internet to the new technology isn't going to happen over night. What has been done to prepare for the jump, and what still needs to happen before it can become a reality?

1 of 398 comments (clear)

  1. Never? by Broccolist · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I'm going out on a limb here, but has anyone considered that IPv6 may never get widespread acceptance?

    From the point of view of any individual organization, there are no reasons to switch to IPv6 right now. First movers receive no benefits at all: in fact, it only makes communicating with the rest of the (currently IPv4) internet more difficult. Moreover, I imagine that many businesses large enough to have an impact already have a large IPv4 address block, and have a vested interest in discouraging others from making the switch:

    1. There is no reason for them to pay for new routers
    2. A crowded IPv4 internet might allow them to loan out some of their in-demand addresses for extra profit.

    The various hacks available for IPv4 do the job. I can easily imagine a scenario where Cisco doesn't push IPv6 routers hard enough in the future, and people invest more and more in NATs and so forth, making a global switch harder and harder as time goes on.

    The fundamental problem is that IPv6 doesn't provide any short-term killer benefits, and that's what's necessary for an evolution to take place. My prediction (though predicting acceptance of technologies is always risky, so I may well turn out to be wrong) is that we will still be using an IPv4 internet in a decade.