Slashdot Mirror
IPv6 Still Hotly Debated
inkslinger77 writes "A significant stumbling block to IPv6 adoption may be IPv4 loyalists who are keen to keep the old protocol in preference to the 'new improved' version, according to a Computerworld Australia article. The article covers the views of Cisco's senior technical leader for IPv6 technologies, Tony Hain and Geoff Huston, a senior Internet research scientist from Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (Apnic)." From the article: "Go to your favourite venture capitalist and say 'I want to be an ISP'. By the time he stops laughing and [finds you want to run] IPv6 - the discussion gets terminated. No one wants to hear this. IPv6 is well ahead of adoption in this market so everyone is deferring. No one is running IPv6, because there is no business case for it ... if we really wanted to leave a legacy to our children we'd review the crap we have today which is pretty ghastly ..."
At Tuesday's IETF meeting in Vancouver the vote for consensus was many for and none against elevating the IPv6 Protocol Standards from "draft Standard" to "Internet Standard" and make them part of the everyday production Internet. The IPv6 WG is even shutting down as it has accomplished its mission and designed a good working protcol. The wired and wireless networks provided for the engineers at the IETF is running IPv6 and we are regularly using it to get information from our working group colloboration sites like: www.v6ops.euro6ix.net/
. If you don't understand because of FUD, please read up on our North American IPv6 Task Force website website [ www.nav6tf.org/ ] or the similar European/Asian sites.
Don't fear, the IETF V6 Operations (V6OPS) team and the IPv6 Forum will continue work to better clarify how to deploy IPv6 and to help build new network services around the new features. Most of the new network services groups in the IETF are basing new services on the features of IPv6 - early examples are Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) and Network Mobility (NEMO) both of which are being extended to offer IPv4 access through IPv6 tunnels in order to get IPv4 native service through IPv4 NAT.
If you actually have useful comments or design alternatives for IPv6, bring it up in IETF working group mailing lists [http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/wg-dir.html%5D
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Uh, no. The universe has around 10^85 atoms (plus or minus a few orders). 2^128 is approximately 10^38. A much smaller number. About 10^63 times smaller. You can only assign IP addresses to each atom in New Jersey.
128-bit addressing isn't really necessary -- but it makes life really simple. With IPv4, you have a subnet mask (that AFAICT, 90% of people never quite understand) that tells how much of your address is devoted to the local subnet, and how much isn't. With IPv6, this has simply been fixed at 64 bits apiece, so using it, nobody ever has to figure up a subnet mask again.
A better question would be to turn this around: what would we really gain by reducing the addresses from 128 bits to 64 bits? We'd save 128 bits per packet. Even over a 28.8K dialup line, that's approximately 4 milliseconds per packet. However, IPv6 increases the maximum packet size you can reasonably use, so unless you really need to send lots of tiny packets, its addressing overhead may well be lower than with IPv4. In most cases, you gain a bit, and even in the worst case you lose very little.
If you're doing things like VoIP, IPv6 helps a lot more: in IPv4, QoS was hacked on after the fact (and has never really worked very well), but in IPv6, it's part of the base protocol.
Personally, I think we need to consider the source of TFA: Cisco and APNIC. Cisco is the leading provider of IPv4 routing (etc.) equipment by a wide margin. APNIC derives it "power" largely from the scarcity (and therefore value) of IP addresses.
A shift to IPv6 gives other router manufacturers a much better chance of gaining market share over Cisco -- about the best Cisco can hope for is to maintain their current position, but in reality they're likely to lose at least a little. Cisco has only to look at what happened to Lucent when the market shifted from ATM to IP to see how badly a technology shift can hurt even a huge market leader.
APNIC stands to lose even more: rather than a chance of losing market share, they face a near certainty that a large part of their power base simply ceases to exist.
Looking at it from this (admittedly cynical) direction, what are the chances that they were going to write an article in favor of IPv6, regardless of its merit?
--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.