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 ..."

Comments

Re:"IPv4 loyalists"

[Ryan Amos]

Pretty much everything you listed is available via higher level functions within IPv4. One could argue that the lack of enough IP addresses has made the internet *more* secure: instead of giving every machine in your company an internet-accessible IP, everything has to go through a NAT firewall except those machines you specify to be world-accessible.

No serious business is going to migrate to IPv6 exclusively because nobody is using it. This means that anyone who has an IPv6 connection has an IPv4 connection as well, which kind of provides no benefit to anyone. Every benefit of IPv6 is lost because IPv4 is still the primary network.

Also, the costs of initial deployment for a technology nobody is using ensures that nobody will use it in the future. There is not a market demand for IPv6, and while it is nice, and has some good features that would be really useful, there are no dealbreakers that IPv4 can't provide with higher level functions.

There are going to have to be a lot of companies who feel they can make a significant ROI to justify the cost of re-designing their entire internal network. Nobody is losing money by sticking with IPv4 over IPv6, so none of the suits are gonna buy into it. I don't see the critical mass necessary to force IPv6 compliance happening any time soon.

Re:"IPv4 loyalists"

[thegameiam]

Put the kool-aide down, and step away from pitcher...

IPv6 basically promises to be the "final 7337 protocol to rule them all" and tries really hard to roll all these functions into a single protocol. The Problem is that we've been there, and done that: think IPX.

IPv6 thoroughly breaks the idea of layering protocols, and in the spirit of trying to do too many things, accomplishes far too little.

Consider the fact that multihoming doesn't work any more, and the solution to the multihoming problem is Shim6, which is host-based instead of network-based (yuck!). That won't scale to any serious number of people - it's an N^2 problem rather than N(N-1)/N^2, the way multihoming today is.

Before you tell me about any more of these functions you listed above, let me ask: have you, yourself, personally used any of them? No? I didn't think so - most of the IPv6 stuff is vaporware, and it'll continue to be until the standards get worked out. Really, IPv6 is a solution in search of a problem.

-David