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The Next Net
Qa32 wrote to give a heads up on a BBC article discussing the IETF's plans for the future, including information on VoIP, IPv6, and security concerns. From the article: "Given the net was designed for the whole community, it has done well to reach millions. If you want to reach the whole population, you have to make sure it can scale up."
Try it yourselve with dig or nslookup - try looking up AAAA records for any of the sites you visit, and see how many would be accessible via IPv6.
For example, try
www.eFax.com are spammers
I can't remember which is greater, the number of available IPv6 addresses or the estimated total number of atoms in the universe, but either way you can rest assured that there will be more than enough IPv6 addresses to handle any foreseeable addressing needs we're going to have any time soon, even if everyone winds up with dozens of personal IP-assigned devices.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"you keep patents out of the standards... Microsoft have been trying to stick one in for the basic premises of IPv6... and surprise, surprise... they were also involved in the standards committee..."
Nothing new. Macromedia (of Flash fame) was on the SVG committee. We all can see how that took off.
No it's not.
The DNS system is fucked. If you know the IP of the web sites you want to visit, you can still access them.
In reference to the parent, there's a few more than 50 IPv6 addresses per square foot. More like 655,570,793,348,866,943,898,599 addresses per square meter. And, that's a bunch, people. That's like...bigger than a hundred!
But, I look forward to IPv6 coming into force because PAT (Port Address Translation, which is what you're referring to) breaks the Internet. Breaks it. I'm forced to funnel all communication from outside in through a single IP address. This has created the need for UPnP and other horrors. With IPv6, you can have as many external real Internet IPv6 addresses as you have internal ones. Then, we can use real NAT with a simple firewall at the edge of our network, and every single machine on your network will have a direct and different IP.
Tired of port translation? Tired of having to jump through hoops? Want that 'Skype-in' to work on multiple internal computers? Start bothering your ISP to begin moving towards IPv6!
Number of addresses:
IPv4 : 4 × 10^9
IPv6 : 3.4 × 10^38
That means about 4.3 x 10^20 addresses per sqr inch on Earth's surface. So, yes, it will be enough, even for whatever embedding plans people might have.
the real problem are single companies having 50,000+ publicly accessable ip addresses which in reality no company actually needs, internal NAT is supposed to stop any need for a workstation in someones office having a public IP
INANA needs to stop dishing out massive blocks of IP addresses to people like it was tapwater
Uhhh... Internet2 is a private academic network. What exactly were you expecting from it, except a set of high speed data links between research universities? It was never intended for the average person to get a DSL connection to Internet2, because all the sites connected to Internet2 also have connections to the Internet, so there would be no benefit. The advantage is that the big universities have a dedicated network, without napster and all that crap bogging it down.
RFC stands for "Requests for Comments," btw.
Korea is a lot more densely populated than the USA, or most of the western world, as far as I know. It makes a big difference on returns if the infrastructure you're laying down is reaching 10 times as many people per unit length.
That doesn't explain the excellent, although probably not quite as good, internet connectivity in Sweden and the Netherlands.
~phil
NAT is no substitute for real address space. The only reason so many people use it today is because real address space is too limited.
50 addresses for every square foot
I stand corrected. It's been years since I even given IPv6 even a first though, I forgot all about it. The 50 addresses statement would be true if IPv6 had a 6 byte address (48 bits), not the actual 128 bits (ipv4 is coincidentally 4 bytes, ipv6 is version 6, not 6 bytes long, and as I've discovered, the version and bytes in IP addresses are not related).
So doing the math (this time entire earth surface area, not just land mass, as per equator diameter with something more manageable like square millimeters):
IPv6 addresses = 2^128 = 3.4 * 10^38
earth diameter = 12,760 km
radius = 6380km = 6380000000 mm
surface area = 4 * pi * r^2 = 5.1 * 10^20 sqr mm
address density = addresses / sqr mm = 6.7 * 10^ 17
There are more ipv6 addresses then atoms in your body. My back of hand calculations show 4*10^10 addresses per atom.
mass of a person: 80kg
molecular mass of water: 18g/mole
approximate moles of water in body: 2.7e27 = 80e3 / 18 * 6.03e23
approximate atoms in body: 8e27 = 2.7e27 * 3
address in ipv6: 3.4e38
approximate addresses per atom: 4e10 = 3.4e38 / 8e27
The mass of water was used as water is a significant portion of the body.
One of the biggest things that we've used it for is something that needs low latency and big pipes, videoconferencing. We have had classes that have students at 3-4 different universities with the profs at each contributing to the class, even in the same session. These were the high quality 5MB/s streams times the number of universities. That's ~20MB going back and forth with all the overhead that that would have. We needed Internet2's pipes to do that.
It's also used to do regular Polycom conferences without the latency you see with busy Internet1 connections. Our I1 pipes get pretty clogged in the afternoon, and it's a mess to try to keep the connection, even with QoS. We've had conferences with others from Hawaii to New York over I2 with minimal dropouts or frame rate problems. Without the I2 pipe, these meetings would not have been possible, or at the least uncomfortable to be in. And it saves so much in travel time and money.
Heck, even the MCU that we use (to allow more than 2 units to talk) is in another state.
Another thing that I2 has done is start linking K-12 schools together as well. Many states use the same network for higher ed and K-12. So not only are the universities getting the benefits, but so are regular elementary and secondary schools that are using the same pipes.
Oh yeah, lots of it. One of the things is IPv6 and multicast. The Abilene backbone (one of the I2's biggest) is entirely v6. The knowledge there on how it works on a grander scale is helping to tune and shape the works that come out of places like Cisco and Nortel. Thier code gets production tested first on Abilene and then to the big networks. We also get the new big routers to test with usually before anybody else does. If you go look at Abilene's website, you can see from the network graphic that it's pretty busy.
Interestingly enough there seems to be a moving away from expensive ATM connectors to cheaper 10GigE connections. Our state network has just converted the backbone to GigE, and I expect that our connection to Abilene will change to that soon as well. I think ATM for medium length hauls will die out, only to be used on extra long hauls like across contries and oceans. I can see the big networks doing this to to cut down on costs and brainpower. ATM is just too complicated.
don't be silly, anyway they're talking about the net, not the web, ie, the infrastructure, not format's of files that could be transfered over it.
No. IETF spends more of their time on file content than byte-pushing "infrastructure". For example, the HTML format is IETF RFC 1866. Any file that's mainly viewed over the internet is potential IETF fodder.
(Flash is too old and too intentionally openness-hostile to ever become an IETF standard, of course. But it'd be good if it could be replaced by something which is a standard, maybe SVG)