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IPv6 Transition to Cost US $75 Billion?
darthcamaro writes "There are alot of reasons why the US isn't moving as quickly as Japan and Europe in migrating to IPv6. One of those reasons is likely cost. An article on Internetnews.com cites an unreleased 'Dept. of Commerce report estimating it will take $25-$75 billion to pay for the transition.'"
$50B difference is huge, this goes to show nobody knows what's going on.
I guess USA's high internet adoption and usage actually hinder its move.
This reminds me of China's ability to build its new Shanghai rail based on the magnetic levitation system, while other well-established rail-using nations like Singapore may find it difficult to switch. Talk about right place right time.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
They should have focused on how it will *GROW* the economy by creating $75 Billion in new jobs and infrastructure.
A mini-tech boom! Cisco will profit an anyone who makes switches which allow your old IPv4 stuff to communicate will make a fortune.
i'm applying for a patent on decaffeinated, low-fat, sodium free, left-handed wholly organic ipv6 veeblefetzers, axolotls and potrzebies
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That's nothing.
With all the money we've saved from taxes well be able to... ohh wait, nevermind.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
How much money would be spent on upgrading routers and internet infrastructure anyway? I can claim that over the next 10 years internet infrastructure will cost over $100B, regardless of whether or not it's IPv6 compatable or not.
Since this changeover is going to require something new, does anyone have a list or know of a place that talks about exactly what needs to be done to switch over to IPv6? Like routing tables, software upgrades/changes, hardware upgrades, network changeovers and what else?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
How many Oracle licenses did you sell them this time?
Is it really worth it?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Twenty-five to Seventy-five Billion! That's maddness! Why ... we'd have to cancel the war in Iraq for a month or two to pay for that!
K
If we eliminated most of the fraud, waste and abuse in the government. With the Department of Education not being able to account for a majority of its budget, the Defense Department losing over $12B of tax dollars in Iraq and all of the pork that goes through Congress, I can't help but think that if the Congress didn't have the power to spend money on "internal improvements," we'd not be in this problem today.
The governments in this country waste so damn much of our GDP on pure bullshit that if we actually had fiscal responsibility, this would be non-issue. We have a GDP of $11T, does anyone actually think that if the costs associated with compliance, regulation, tax payments, etc. were much easier that corporate America would be bitching about this transition? It'd be just a drop in the bucket.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
The FA makes no mention of WHY it will cost that much. I don't know anything about IP6, but $75b makes it seem like they plan on rewiring the whole government. The article cites that "one speaker" estimated the cost between $25-$75b. Is the speaker trying to just jack up the price? Perhaps someone can explain what is involved so we can decide if the prices quoted are reasonable.
Who did that estimate? The BSA?
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
Haliburton's new IPv6 division.
The Department of Commerce does not have a very good track record of forecasting market trends. I think this report is especially callous as investors might heed this "warning" and invest in IPv6 companies prematurely.
_No one_ knows IPv6's cost. The market will see a few early adopters, then a steadily growing medium-sized business buy-in, followed by a boom of users or a bust due to newer technologies.
For a government agency to print these assumptions makes me think they either needed some media spotlight or the researchers wanted their stocks to go up.
how much of that is money that would have been spent anyway? Upgrading routers and stuff when it's time came around to be replaced - it may take some time, but if all the new equipment bought is IPv6 compatable then it will only actually take the flick of a switch to make the transition - it just may take more time until the complete transition is possible.
Agreed; alot of people make that mistake.
Most routers run *nix. IPv6 transition thus requires a "firmware" update.
Not that most equipment companies will do this mind you. They are quite happy having you purchase brand new networking equipment.
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
Do we really have to throw this much money into the volcano?
this is entire estimate is meaningless. v6 was designed to
be rolled out incrementally. no one beleives that all
the endpoints are going to be upgraded.
so if some of the major backbones start peering v6, thats
a good definition for switching, but i seriously doubt its
going to involve tens of billions of dollars.
the incremental cost of new larger customers being assigned
v6 blocks instead of v4, and having to push it to the endpoints
or put in nats? the dns servers (the only thing of any
substance that was mentioned)...do the v4 roots cost billions
of dollars a year?
not to make the transition?
That's a lot of bucks, but studies like these are easy to take in isolation instead of looking at the big picture.
The U.S. economy is what? About 12 Trillion dollars a year? In 1999 the internet economy was closing in on 150 Billion, by now it has to be through the roof.
Poor software? It costs over 200 Billion a year (sorry no link). You have to put these numbers in perspective. When you are dealing with 300 million folks or so, and the world's largest free market, any kind of estimate for anything is going to be big. The common cold costs over $30 Billion a year.
Just keep it all in perspective. The internet economy will blow right through this obstacle if it gets in the way of sales
My Blog
Just phase out IPv4. Have all new equipment/software include IPv6 by default. Time for "Best of Bash.org":
Some cool info: Tibeten monks, after twenty years or so of practise in the Himalaya, control their brain stem - they can control their heart beat, blood pressure etc.
After thirty years they can connect to the internet purely by meditation, setting TCP stacks in their neurons and stuff.
Right now I am chatting with a monk who is sitting naked in an ice storm on his towel, his only possesion.
He's using ipv6.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
This is all Al Gore's fault; he invited the internet. If it wasnt for him none of this would have happened.
GL HF!
To me, it mostly comes down to efficiencies. The reason we measure things in the first place is so we can perform mathematical operations on the resulting numbers. Metric units are easier and more efficient for the mathematical operations, and therefore confer some competitive advantage on the people using them. It might be a large or small advantage, but it's always there.
IPv4 has some design limitations. IPv6 will address many of those problems, and the networks (and countries) that use that system will have competitive advantage.
What I find amusing is that many of the same people fighting against IPv6 on grounds of cost are the same people who want to argue the damage of Hurricane Katrina wasn't so bad. After all, it will give us the "opportunity" to invest billions of dollars in rebuilding things. Hey, why don't we destroy a major city every year? Look at all the "opportunities" we'd have. However, moving to IPv6 is NOT to be equated with random destruction, but is rather a rational form of evolution.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space
grep for "iana reserved"
Wealth isn't created by spinning your wheels for no reason. It may well be that the transition is worth doing in the long run, but simply spending money for no reason isn't a net plus. It's why we don't tear down our houses and rebuild them every year.
You suck... like.. alot.
Time to invest in Cisco.... stock price is low now... with $25-75B....
Your rite - their is many loosers that have pour grammer.
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.
... IPv6 doesn't embed the IPv4 address space and everybody has to buy a new IP and have all domains with TWO different IPs to make the transition possible?
This really is a shortsightedness of their protocol design. Until now all IP versions have contained the address space of the previous version. Until IPv6 came around.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Great, a moron apologist. Slashdot definitely needs more of you.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
What I most want is a decent howto on IPv6 transition. I know the basics, I know the theory of how it's suppose to work. But I'll be damned if I know how numbering works (I know there's some odd pre or suffix in the numbering, no?), I have no idea what theses AAAA records are, etc.
And before someone says to just go read the RFCs, no, what needs to be made is a transition guide for those already familiar with IPv4. Myself, and most others, probably don't want to sit reading dry RFCs. Give me a lesson pack on how DNS records differ, or how the numbering works in relation to IPv4.
That will be one of the most useful things in getting techies prepared for the change.
And if something like that already exists (it probably does, I just haven't found it yet), someone please post it so we can all get up to speed.
If I understood it, I'd probably take the extra time to make all my future software IPv6 compatible.
From the fine article,
"The government is supposed to be on a relatively rapid path toward IPv6 migration since the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) mandated (PDF file) this past August that the federal government move to IPv6 by June 2008."
But yes, there is an annual IT budget that is impacted by this.
IPv6 isn't going to happen, because it doesn't need to happen. I can get to all the web sites I need. So can you. My coffee pot isn't on the internet, and if it needed to be, I'd use NAT, or invent some new multiplexor protocol that sits on IPv4. Don't you people realize this???
I love the guy up their who said IPv6 will *create* $75billion in the economy. How the hell will it do that?
I'll issue my usual challenge to the IPv6-fans: If you love IPv6 so much, cut yourself off from IPv4 completely. Don't use an IPv4 address. Don't access IPv4 sites. That's what has to happen for IPv6 to be a reality. If you're running IPv6 on top of or alongside IPv4, you haven't "switched over" yet. You're just goofing around with some nonstandard network protocol. Might as well use fidonet.
Go ahead, I'm waiting......
http://www.realmeme.com/Main/miner/technology/ipv6 Dejanews.png
It will come faster and bigger than most readers here believe.
/golfclap Not to mention, 50B is...I don't know...kind of a huge number to be throwing around as a cushion. Upper level management, even if it is Government, still doesn't have a f'ing clue about technology. Gotta love it.
No, is the answer. Ok, I've been looking for an excuse to paraphrase someone's Windows-oriented .sig. Seriously, one of the problems with the Cisco gear we've gotten in the last few years is that while they'll route IPv6, the frickin' admin interface is still IPv4 only. Thanks, Cisco.
Luke, help me take this mask off
And, sadly, all the old IPv4 gear can't simply be shipped to Third World countries for a big tax break -- well, it could, but it won't work if everyone else is switching to IPv4. Back to the haves and have-nots.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
...and therefore assumes that it will be carried out under a no-bid contract awarded to Halliburton, who will bill Cat-5 cables at $10,000 each. Sounds a fair estimate to me :-)
We all know what 'alot' means.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I mean, if they really think it can be done for that, I'd be willing to pony up the $25 myself.
Oh, wait.
That green slime had it coming.
As far as I can tell, the sum total cost for all of this uber-expensive upgrade would cost (in old English currency) about 2'/6, and would take the United States less time than it currently takes for Joe Average to reboot from a BSOD. For this reason, I would like to make the US Government and the various Internet providers a special deal. I will set up IPv6 for them, with full one-year warranty, for a mere $15 billion, paid in advance. If this sounds satisfactory, just mail me the keys to the server rooms and passwords for the servers and routers, and I'll get started.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Not to be dense, but does any manufacturer in the US still use english measurements? (Not consumer-facing products or places where legacy items are measured in english units.)
I believe car manufacturers switched to metric components years ago.
I'm sure aircraft manufacturers are also metric.
Consumer electronics? Considering that the last domestic manufacturer closed years ago I think it's a safe bet that it's entirely metric now.
Other industries?
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
LOL OMG WTF
I know what those mean too.
That's exactly the problem. After spending so much in Iraq, on homeland security, and securing our borders from the dangerous Mexican population that just wants to come over and work in slaughterhouses we won't have anything left for the IPv6 conversion.
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Is that warranty good from the time you start the work, or in 10 years when you actually get it done.
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I've shocking news for you, the language hasn't even had standardized spelling for even two of its fifteen plus centuries of existence. When even three out of ten people use "alot" it will become part of the standard lexicon and then nitpickers will complain when it's NOT used. I think you should walk around talking like a sixth century Saxon, but avoid Latin since continued use by the medical and theological fields might mean a small amount of evolution and colloquialisms might occur!
Consumers, too. Everyone likes to check their car's EPA kilometres/litr--no wait...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Also, a LOT is a parcel of land having fixed boundaries; "he bought a lot on the lake". Has always been one of my pet peeves. One of many.
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
How about NOT building that "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska. That would save some money.
Marine Sergeant: Did I give you permission to b*tch, soldier?
-
Construction - lumber is still purchased in feet
-
Bakeries - Donuts are still sold by dozens
-
Daries - Milk is still sold in Gallons and half Gallons
-
Agregates (one of the largest industries in the US) - Rock is still sold by the standard ton of 2000 lbs
-
Oil - still measured by the gallon, quart and barrel
Seems like there are still quite a few people using standard measurements.Find coupons in Greeley
Check out this IPv6 deployment guide for a number of solutions how to save money with freely available software (NetBSD, Linux, ...) in the transition to IPv6.
the number of people who care is alittle.
Just an FYI, but I know someone who used "alot" in their masters' thesis at Belmont U. It's kind of ironic, really, because she always put forth a front of being a very literate individual. She advised a high-school student that "alot" was indeed a legitimate word and when that student's teacher marked the "word" out and corrected the mistake, said student was quite unhappy. She defended herself for her mistake, as well, by using her thesis as an example. Just struck me as funny when I read the parent's post.
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
Hmmn. $25-75 billion? We could completely storm-proof New Orleans for less than that.
We must move to IPv6, because the Internet just doesn't seem to be working right (or at least I tell myself that, because I wouldn't want to fix it if it weren't broken). I look forward to a time that each of my Happy Meal toys will be able to be connected to the Internet, yes we need IPv6 Now!
Bah! As others have pointed out, there will not be much cost, if it rolls out more slowly. As you update hardware, get stuff that can do both IPv4 and IPv6 next time... eventually a critical mass will be reached and the switchover will happen.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Link to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
And we don't have to wait for our ISPs, either. I've been using 6to4 (IPv6 tunneled over IPv4) for years. It's especially useful on home networks where multiple servers have to share a single IPv4 address on a cable or DSL modem.
6to4 works very well. A 6to4 tunnel coexists nicely with an IPv4 NAT on my home router. The computers on my home network can run conventional clients through the NAT just as they always have, while servers running on those computers can be contacted directly from the outside using IPv6.
While not every Internet application yet speaks IPv6, the important ones already do. SSH is the most important, but popular SMTP, IMAP and HTTP implementations do as well.
I cannot believe the handsprings users are expected to perform on retail commodity routers with kludges like "port forwarding" when 6to4 tunneling is both simpler and far more general and powerful.
But there are hard problems and easy problems
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
$25 billion sure buys a whole lot of Linksys routers!
On the other hand, the folks who brought us Y2K consulting would all like their piece of the pie as well. Much of Halliburton's work in Iraq could be done by other people if they had the same political connections, but there are some parts of the oil business that Halliburton are not only the best at what they do, they're almost the only people capable of doing it, and only Schlumberger are close.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Except that the war in Iraq costs very little compared to most wars we've fought, homeland security is a joke, and we do nothing to secure the borders. That means we have plenty of money for IPv6 (although the government isn't responsible for maitaining the internet anways....).
I'd guess that it'd cost you a couple billion dollars getting the really big peers using IPv6 between each other and just tunneling IPv4 traffic around. By the time you get the players to the table and you get Cisco, Juniper and the big consulting firms all into it and the couple really big ISPs to show up at the table you've already blown a few million. By the time the pissing contests are all done, I could see that "project" costing a couple billion, easy. It's going to be a money grab any way you cut it.
When you step back and look, you can migrate it down, start at some top level peers and push it down. ISPs can roll it out, smaller ones would have it easier but it's doable. A couple of big schools could switch over to IPv6, there is enough support between Linux, Windows and MacOSX that all the students could show up one year and it could be an ipv6 network. You start looking at businesses and that's when it starts to look like a mess. Every layer 3 device in the business will have to be evaluated, many replaced, many might not even be really audited as it is. It looks like y2k all over again. I don't even think most IT guys have IPv6 on their mind when they buy stuff.
I'd wager, you could get all the top level peers to IPv6 and that would cost $5B or there about. Maybe you could get the 10 biggest ISPs to switch, that'd probably cost another $20B, I'm just swagging $2B a pop for the big 10, probably lot's of infrastructure upgrades to make it happen. So that's $25B. Start looking at corporate networks, who knows? I'd imagine it would cost a pretty penny just to get them peering IPv6 and using IPv4 internally; of course by this point there might be some really good reasons to use IPv6 across the board because you'll be losing access to things from IPv4.
You take another step back, I setup IPv6 at home for my own good, not super easy. All my network jock buddies are IPv4 savvy and while they know specs and such, none seem to have a lot of IPv6 known-how for real. I think there is a pretty big void there. On the up tick, I think this is going to happen, it's just a matter of when, I also think that if we play our cards right we might be able to clean up a lot of the bullshit that is out there right now.
But there's also a lot of custom server applications that would need to be rewritten to support IPv6 (not even counting the stuff that needs to be rewritten to support IPv4 instead of SNA, or to use DNS instead of hard-coded IP addresses :-). Most of it can be kept going by hiding it behind 6to4 gateways of various sorts, so you'd end up with a lot of 10.x IPv4 islands connected to the rest of the world by IPv6, and optionally tunneled with each other, somewhat the way a lot of the SNA stuff is really running as emulations and tunnel servers on top of IPv4 these days.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
When I met Andy Thomas (the Australian astronaut) a while back, he said that all of the measurements that are used in the shuttle designs are all imperial. I'm not sure whether that's everywhere though.
But upgrading custom software is a much different scale of project than simply upgrading boxes and reconfiguring some web servers. There's a huge amount of mission-critical big nasty badly-documented stuff out there running on mainframes, PCs, and Unix boxes of various sorts that knows about IPv4 and might or might not know about DNS and DHCP. Finding all of it isn't quite the same level of effort as finding Y2K bugs, but it's still a huge hard-to-estimate job.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
We're not providing free nation-wide medicare on top of setting IPv6, you only need to cancel it for a week.
OT: This confirm script is really scarying me. It's always so ironically appropriate for the conversation. For example right now it's "unarmed".
Can someone point me in the right direction? I've looked for this information before and I keep running into very technical articles and articles about how things will change for ISPs and network administrators. What is the average high-speed cable user going to see?
The cost estimate we (Army CERDEC IPv6 Team) have done for the Army IPv6 transition leads us to believe essential $0 acqusitions costs if all IPv6 transition is done within regular tech refresh cycles. If we're buying IT gear anyway, IPv6 comes as regular product improvements over the next 3-5 years. The money DoD is spending at this point is aimed at getting MORE CAPABLE networks and at operations costs to train admins to run two IP stacks (v4 and v6) until we can phase out v4. By more capable, we are referring to new IPv6-only services like network mobility (NEMO) and multihoming (SHIM6).
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I believe the parent remark does, in fact, fit this definition. Thus a moderation of Funny would make a hell of a lot more sense. Get a life people.
I have it. The method to force the world into adopting IPv6 right NOW. Get google to make the switch, and to totally ignore IPv4. All IT businesses will grind to a halt until the change is made. For an even faster adoption, get all porn websites to change. The change won't be visible until the sun goes down (for the average user), but I predict the phone lines will melt, be they copper or optical fiber, from the desperate horny men trying to get IPv6 addresses.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
I hope that $75 billion includes fiber to the curb in every house in America.
I love IPv6 and all, but lets do the fiber first and then deal with the protocol.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
For a second I thought you were being serious....
Is the Google calculator widget.
It's a bad sign when some of the most popular portals are to your arch enemys content.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
What about the man-hours on each site, setting up a new IPv6 address on the machines there, and new AAAA records for the machines, etc?
What about all the machines which are not updated or updated infrequently, which don't have people around to make them IPv6?
IPv6 has not been designed to allow an easy transition from IPv4. You can't just throw in new A records, or say that ISPs now hand-out IPv6 addresses, or any of the other hundreds of time-intensive things that are required for an IPv6 switch over.
There is no special room with a switch:
IPv4 [is no fucking transition phase in any of the IPv6 designs.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
You forget that (1) the transition is designed to take about 20 years during which IPv6 and IPv4 will run in parallel. This thins out that 75 billion per quarter quite a bit, and (2) the amount of money saved in the private sector over the years post-transition will slowly make up for the initial cost. Remember, we're dealing with business-men here -- if IPv6 is a huge money-drain, the cost-benefit analyses would show as much and no body would want to migrate to it.
This sig rocks the casbah.
IPv4 has some design limitations. IPv6 will address many of those problems, and the networks (and countries) that use that system will have competitive advantage.
IPv6 has some problems, too.
A big one is that some of the fast hacks for routing table lookups don't scale to the bigger addresses. So (absent a breakthrough in hacks) you have to do more brute force work (or switch to slower hacks). Which means you need to throw more instructions at each packet. Which means you need more processing power in the networking boxes - the core routers, edge routers, and BRAS boxes.
You need more than just a software upgrade if you still want to do everything ELSE that you're doing to the packets. You need more processing power per unit of bandwidth. More processors and faster clocks in the packet processor chips. More and faster memory. More of a balancing act if you have to distribute a stream across multiple processors - and greater likelyhood you'll have to do that. And so on.
That's just to stay even, in ADDITION to any multiplier for providing additional services.
So what you're asking the ISPs to do is replace the old routers with newer, faster, more power-hungry devices - when the old ones were doing just fine. There's no value proposition for them to do so until, for some other reason than "being nice", they HAVE to do it. It's a competitive market with tight margins. First guy to break from the pack incurs a big expense and gets squeezed out if his competition can continue with IPv4 and undercut him.
It gets done in Japan and some other countries because they're setting up for lots of mobile devices, and expect to need lots of address space to handle them (and simplify handing them off between base stations). They DON'T expect to be able to get enough IPv4 addresses to handle it after a year or two, so there's no point in deploying IPv4-only boxes just to tear them out before they really get rolling.
In the US - expect IPv6 to be deployed first as a network internal thing for particular carriers catering to mobile users (cellphone, IPTV, and the like) as they work their way through "the convergence". At some point there will be a tipping, where some killer app needs IPv6 support exposed to the users, and carriers providing it will start eating the lunch (and customer base) of those that don't. Then it becomes "change or die" for the rest.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So each IP will only cost 0.00000000000000000000000002 cents. Sounds like a good deal to me.
with that kind of cash.
You know, it's an awfully large amount of money that you guys could better spend invading somewhere.
.jebus and .id will cover everything you could need? We were going to offer you part of our new .sci space as well but we understand you prefer to cover that with .jebus these days?
How about you guys keep IPv4 and righteous control of its domain name servers. We'll just take those spare extra bits in the IPv6 address space, the really expensive ones you don't really want anyway. Of course, we'll need a naming system for it, but you don't care about what you can't use, right?
Heck, to show our understanding, we'll even open up some new top level domains in our new system, just for you. We trust
we do nothing to secure the borders
Actually, I was watching 60 minutes last night and there's a congressman that wants to spend $20 Billion to fence off the whole mexico/US border. That's why I brought it up.
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Around 30,000 dead Iraquis citizens and 2,100 dead US Citizens and a smattering of other people from other nations.
Or are we merely just talking dollars and cents here?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
While people are puttering around with patches and kludges and crap they are not taking advantage of what their machines could be doing with the IPv6 address space and with end to end connectivity.
Stop thinking that the internet is about anthrocentric communication.
Its not and never was.
See http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml for a clue.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
This is easily affordable if that's all it is.
I've tried to get this point across before, and I'll continue to. The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 will indeed cost quite a bit even just for upgrading hardware. Here's why:
The transition will happen incrementally and will involve a period of IPv4 and IPv6 overlap where any given internet entity needs to have both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address--obviously, most will have plenty more than a single address. Presumably your browser will then attempt a DNS query for the IPv6 address and fail over to IPv4, though some may give priority to IPv4 for various reasons. The overlap may be in terms of hours or it may be in terms of years for any given entity. We have the means to translate the entire IPv4 space into an IPv6 range, so many people won't notice when their ISP switches.
The cost, aside from technical hands to make the transition, will come in terms of hardware. If you run your router with 20% free memory and 70% CPU load, then you are in the green by today's standards, but when you add in IPv6, you need to upgrade memory and you start dropping packets to load. This doesn't take into account any extra fun that your router may need to do.
I don't know what percentage of active switches do IPv6, but many of the older switches will start broadcasting the IPv6 because they don't understand it. Now your switch is a hub. That will choke any network that needed switches in the first place. Even a single switch that doesn't do IPv6 could take out a large chunk of your network.
So to sum it up, the transition period will crank up the router requirements by 150 to 200% of the current requirements, which will blow much of the internet into the packet-dropping red. Many switches will need upgrading, which may include hardware. Network techs will be paid for all of this. Don't forget that any company that plans to have continued coverage will also need to have an escape plan in case things don't work like they are supposed to.
WAY WAY overrated. "... crop of economic vandals..."? That's thoughtful and interesting?
No, that's GROUPTHINK. Seriously, congrats that he can bash Bush and all... but (Score:5, Insightful)? Give me a break.
Yeah, but only if you have four 6313's. If you have more than four, Cisco will want LOTS more money.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
These damn moderators... 9/10 of them can't differentiate "funny" from "insightful".
25-75 billion means the high amount is 3X the low amount..
If I take a 10-question test and get between 3-9 questions right, then should I always pass???
Meanwhile, some of us have been ready for five years or so. Even back in 1996, everyone knew IPng was coming. And hardware has had minimal support for it for almost as long. I'll bet most networking equipment has been purchased subsequently, and probably by people who knew about IPv6, too. I just wish they'd implement working Internet multicast routing by the time IPv6 reaches the 50% usage mark. Universal access to Internet multicast was one of the promises of IPng, and it really really needs to happen.
Is because there's no compelling reason to the average person. The US government actually likes metric, and all government contracts (like construction) are done in metric. However selling it to the average citizen is much harder. See for normal things in life, all you need to know is roughly what something is. Like how long a foot is, how much a pound weighs, how much a gallon is. Then you memorize a couple conversions and you are good. You don't need to do inter-unit conversions.
Well inter-unit conversions are where the metric system becomes useful. It's not hard to remember 12 inches in a foot, despite what metric proponents claim. However while it's trivial to calculate the energy required to heat a cubic metre of water 10 degrees celcius, trying to calculate a similar thing with the US system would require conversion lookups and a calculator.
Thing is, you just don't do that in everyday life. I got real good at it in chemistry, and then proceeded to never use it again other than for geeky trivia purposes. It's just not the kind of thing you need to do as an average individual. Hence metric is a tough sell. Trying to legslate it probably wouldn't go over very well, thus we are stuck where we are.
First off, I'm not sure that there's more households on the net in Europe and Japan than the US. I'd want to see a reliable source on that. However all that aside, that's not the real problem, companies and major backbone infastructure is and in that the US is far ahead. Though the Internet has been growing globally at a fantastic rate, espically since 2000, it it is still heavily US based. There's a lot more large (and thus expensive) infastructure that needs to be upgraded.
Also the US has an additonal problem in that a lot of the net here was developed before other countries started really taking off. That translates to old equipment, some of it has been replaced, of course, but an amazing amount of it still works fine and thus is still in place.
Well, when you are building new infastructure, it's not that hard a sell to pay whatever small amount extra to get IPv6. When you already spent $500million on a facility that still works fine, hard to get another $500million to upgrade it for a feature nobody is really asking for yet.
Guess how much did it cost to US for migrate from Windows 95 to Windows 98, to Windows 2000, and finally to Windows XP ? Even if it costs 50B it is really nothing compare to what we waste (time and money) with crapy software.
IPv6 would roll out in a lot faster if the standards were a bit more friendly to partial implementation.
A few simple classes of automatically granted prefixes would do wonders along with a few simple routing rules. For example, to accomodate situations where NAT is used as a workaround to scarcity rather that for security, why not an address in the form of prefix, IPv4 address (of NAT device/firewall), arbitrary Ipv4 address. Addresses in that prefix could automatically be encapsulated into IPv4 to the firewall. The source address would make the right thing happen for the reply.
Doing things like that could create an incentive for the edges to upgrade even if their providers can't be bothered to do so. It would provide value even if individual workstations/PCs were upgraded (OS) for IPv6 support. Intermediate routers wouldn't even know the difference.
Once things like that are in place, we will see other convieniances come into play, such as the ability to specify prefix per zone or system wide for DNS and have individual RRs just specify suffix.
Another useful convention would be that every router currently speaking BGP MAY take it's peering address(es) as IPv6 prefixes with no need to apply (or pay) for an allocation. It's not as if v6 addresses are scarce. The scarcity is routers with enough memory to hold larger routing tables. That's why I think routing it on the back of the existing v4 tables will help.
Actually, the current estimate on the war in Iraq is $350 billion.
Wait a minute! I thought this Iraq affair was part of the IPv6 migration plan. Cheaper gas, faster internet I was told.
Now that I've checked around on some websites, it looks like the current story is something about preventing torture and human rights abuses. Either that or implementing them abroad-- the photos and the text aren't matching up.
Anyway, the big obstacle seems to be these fundamentalist zTerm zealots kidnapping our telecom engineers and holding them hostage trying to block multimedia internet content and return us to tools like lynx and gopher.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The usual theory is that mobile IP will be the nucleus of IPv6 and may actually end up being larger in terms of the number of devices than the rest of the internet since lots of people have phones but not necessarily PCs.
Even if there were less phones, there would still be an incentive for business to IPv6-enable their software and hardware if there was a large market of mobile users to supply with servies.
Cheers,
Tim
This is all just my personal opinion.
Not true. The english Imperial system is completely different from the US customary system, even though they share the same names. For example, a US standard ton is 2000 lb, while that same measure is called a short tonne in the Imperial system. A standard Imperial tonne (also called a long tonne) weighs 2240 lb.
p erial_and_US_customary_systems
Another example would be the gallon, and this one will blow your mind, as its completely ridiculous and you probably had no idea. In the Imperial system, a gallon is ~4.546L, no matter what. (Regardless of gallon type, a gallon has 128 of the appropriate ounces, so a comparison requires us to use a neutral 3rd-party unit. The liter seems excellent.) A US LIQUID gallon is ~3.785L, which everyone is vaguely aware (at least in theory ("a gallon's a little smaller that two 2L pop bottles.")). A US DRY gallon is ~4.404L. I really have no idea what these differences are from, but they're there.
Checkout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_Im
Watch this Heartland Institute video
We have the means to translate the entire IPv4 space into an IPv6 range, so many people won't notice when their ISP switches.
I don't believe IPv4 will be completely turned off within a reasonable length of time of the introduction of IPv6 at an ISP.
For a while we'll have IPv4 addresses for end users just as we do now, but also hand out IPv6 networks to them as well. (This is the start of the transition - IPv4 is still used by the masses, IPv6 traffic gradually increases)
At some point I suppose the ISP may well stop giving people global scope IPv4 addresses - give all the customers RFC1918 addresses and NAT everything at the ISP's border. (IPv4 usage is in decline - only a small percentage of traffic is IPv4, most is IPv6)
Eventually IPv4 will be turned off completely, but because they coexist I don't see a time when translating between IPv6 and IPv4 will be necessary (at least for the ISP).
I don't know what percentage of active switches do IPv6, but many of the older switches will start broadcasting the IPv6 because they don't understand it. Now your switch is a hub. That will choke any network that needed switches in the first place. Even a single switch that doesn't do IPv6 could take out a large chunk of your network.
I'm sorry, you are wrong. Switches don't know or care about network layer 3 (IPv4/IPv6/IPX/NetBios/etc) - switches only care about layer 2 (Ethernet). This is why your Ethernet network can run any of IP, NetBios, IPX, PPPoE, and anything else that runs over Ethernet regardless of what switches you have.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
There are conditions when it makes sense to provide /64s to smaller customers - I wouldn't be surprised to see home broadband service assigned that way, since that lets the ISP's /32 support four billion customers, each of whom can support 64K LANs each with host addresses assigned based on the 48-bit MAC address. Whether small-business-office customers get /64 or bigger remains to be seen - a typical standalone office really doesn't need a /48, but the politics of address space assignment may encourage ISPs to do it anyway. On the other hand, a gas station clearly doesn't need more than a /64.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Some of the original motivations for end-users getting their own address space have gone away - DHCP means the cost of readdressing computers has gone to nearly zero, especially for desktop machines, and DNS means that you really _can_ move a server, though you might need a week or two of overlap on the address space for everybody's caches to time out (and IPv6 might force you to do some kind of tunneling deal with your old ISP), and firewalls mean that you might not by exposing most of your IP devices to the outside world anyway, just your public servers.
But even that doesn't mean that routing becomes much simpler, because that's only useful if you can aggregate - for instance, you could get /48 of provider-assigned address space from ISP1, and advertise that space on your connection to ISP2, so the global routing tables still have two entries for you even though they're assigned somewhat more cleanly. And aggregation doesn't always work well for geographically dispersed end-user customers - it's one thing for a university to aggregate the addresses from a bunch of buildings that are all in the same city, but if you've got a retail store chain with a thousand stores, should they all be part of one /48 at headquarters and route their external traffic there through IPSEC tunnels, or should each branch get provider-assigned address space from whatever ISP is nearby and try to tie that mess together, or some hybrid of both? For performance reasons, especially with VOIP, you'd like to keep latency down, so it's better to keep traffic in the same half-continent or so if you can, but it's not clear that there's an obvious answer.
IPv6 was supposed to free us from the evils of NAT. But the easiest ways to do multihoming either get into the swamp scalability problems or else do some kind of NAT or tunnel things to let you advertise one set of address space from two ISPs. Maybe that's not such a huge problem?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...on an address per dollar basis.
(65,536 ^ 8) / ((25 to 75) * 1,000,000,000) =~ 1.36e28 to 4.53e27 addresses per dollar.
So, about one address per atom of your body, for only a dollar. Not a bad deal.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I'm thinking by "active" switches the GP may be referring to multi-layer switches, which provide routing and other services at the network and transport layer. Probably not, but one can be hopeful.
While you're right that switches pretty much don't care for most uses, I can think of two cases where fancy managed switches actually might care...
1) Management traffic (telnet/snmp/etc. for monitoring/configuring the switch)
2) IGMP Snooping (without this (or something similar like Cisco's CGMP), multicast traffic effectively becomes broadcast traffic on the switch)
Of course this isn't counting multi-layer switches, which effectively are routers built into switches. (which most definitely do care about IP)
Here is an example of a problem with NAT and private addresses that I face frequently:
In my house I have several computers which all have addresses with 192.168.0.0 addresses. My router, which does NAT, has the address 192.168.0.1. My local web/email/nameserver box has the address 192.168.1.1. Client machines have various addresses that are unimportant here. At my office there are also several computers. The office network, which existed long before I worked at the company and is not under my control, also uses addresses in the 192.168.0.0 range and uses the same subnet mask.
Occasionally I work at home. When I do this, I establish a VPN login to my office which gives me one address on the office network. Now the system that logged into the VPN is now a member of two networks with the same subnet mask. Worse, many of the servers at the office have IP addresses which exactly match computers on my home network. Hopefully you can imagine the resulting problem. I can renumber my machines to use the 10.0.0.0 prefix, but then I suddenly find that I need to create a VPN connection to a client site for support and they use 10.0.0.0.
One can envisage schemes for crazy NAT arrangements between the networks to make them appear to be on different prefixes, but this functionality is not readily available as standard. My solution is a little more mundane; I just add entries to my routing table for specific hosts that I need to connect to and keep my existing route for 192.168.0.0/16 pointing at my home LAN. This works, but each time I need to connect to a new server I must find its IP address and add a new route for it.
This would be so much easier if all of the involved systems had globally-unique addresses, even if those addresses were not actually accessible over the public Internet directly due to a firewall. I'm not the only person in the world that uses a VPN, either.
There are serious security problems with IPv4 that are costing a lot of money every day. With all the squawking about rolling out IPSEC, why not just skip that step and go to IPv6 which has IPSEC built in? Or can key vendors *cough*M$&cough* provide systems or applications that can handle IPv6 yet?
The routing for IPv6 is both simpler and more hierarchical than for IPv4, that's also got to be a cost saver.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
What the hell is IPv6? No seriously.
Anything that costs $75 billion dollars should never be refered to by an ancronym.
Why build IPv6 into anything when no one's using it? It's just extra cost. Maybe a few cents, but extra cost nonetheless.
I agree with you, but unfortunately, in the real world, we'll probably cling to our IPv4 like a crackwhore to crack until all ISPs are charging $300/month for a real Internet IP address, people are finding all the things that will never work well on NAT, and those who dialup into real IP addresses actually get the DHCP equivalent of a busy signal, just as we'll probably cling to something as archaic as oil until gas is $300/gallon at the pump, and just as we cling to Windows and Office even after we've been charged thousands of dollars in upgrades and STILL frequently upgrade hardware or wipe the hard disk to live with or eliminate spyware.
Nothing will ever change in a purely capitalist situation. The current system will remain until it becomes so stupendously expensive that corporations are actually willing to produce the alternative for a reasonable price, and consumers figure that one more month of this will be more expensive than a year of the alternative and the cost of switching, and there's a significant amount of marketing that said users are even aware of the choice.
That's still theory, of course. I've never seen it happen. Ever.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Think: The space shuttle was designed in the 70's. That was before most of the USA knew much about SI/metric units.
(NASA had to go metric partly when doing the Apollo-Soyuz project, when actually meeting the requirements of a standard androgynous docking module meant meeting metric measurements)
The whole docking interface on the Shuttle was an afterthought, developed for the Shuttle-Mir project.
The US-designed aircraft that I've flown (designed in the 1950s/1960s are designed in feet and inches). I guess that new designs are more likely to be dimensioned in millimetres, even if the publicity/marketing departments might translate the wingspan etc to a near feet and inches for American publicity).
(or for UK tabloid publicity, they probably get translated into tabloid units - 8 times as long as a double decker bus)
Assign IPv6 Nos to all the IPv4 addresses and map them somehow. Limit the expansion into IPv6 to Nos that can be also assigned to the remainder of the IPv4 numbers so IPv4 and IPv6 "punters" can still see everything on the internet.
IPv6 Only Nos could also be available to people/corporations who don't necessarily want to be publicly available, indeed they should be encouraged to do so. Actually, there's maybe the opportunity for such groups to return old IPv4 Nos to the pool if they upgrade lock, stock and barrel to IPv6, thus keeping the IPv4 setup available for longer, which would help spread the changeover costs over a longer period of time.
How much breathing space do we have in IPv4? I guess if we really are up against the end-stop, then this won't work, but assuming we have a few years left, gradually change equipement over to IPv6 until it is all IPv6.
If we run out of IPv4 Nos too soon, then IPv4 "punters" will be only able to access a sub-set of the Internet, not being able to reach the non-IPv4-mapped IPv6 Nos. This might be sufficient incentive for them to upgrade their IPv4 kit to IPv6, or it may not, but it will be their choice.
Of is that just not possible?
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Already done. There's a prefix reserved for "4in6" addressing: you drop your IPv4 address in behind it and you have an IPv6 address. That isn't the hard part; the hard part is getting router manufacturers to do the firmware changes needed for 4in6 routing policies and the ISPs to buy the firmware upgrades. I'd guess that the router builders are about done and it's the ISPs who need prodding.
*sigh* I've had my pppd asking the ISP for an IPv6 address for a couple of years now, just in case, but so far they're not interested.
If you are interested in keeping track of what is going on in this area the IETF has a working group that is fairly active trying to figure this problem out.
http://ops.ietf.org/multi6/
There are some interesting solutions. Some look like hacks, but there are smart people thinking about it.
I looked up IPv6 on Wikipedia and found the following info:
IPv4 supports 4.2 billion (4.294 × 10^9) addresses, which is inadequate for giving even one address to every living person, much less support the burgeoning market for connective devices. IPv6 addresses this problem by supporting 340 undecillion (3.4 × 10^38) addresses. For scale, this would allow an average of about 430 quintillion (4.3 × 10^20) unique addresses per square inch, or 670 quadrillion (6.7 × 10^17) per square millimeter, of the Earth's surface. In other terms, assuming a population of about 6.5 billion humans, there are enough IPv6 addresses such that every atom of every person on Earth could be assigned 7 unique addresses with enough to spare (assuming 7 × 10^27 atoms per human).
They haven't just planned for the next wave of cell phones. They've planned for the Technological Singularity.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
*pinky to mouth*
75 BILLION DOLLARS!
Yikes!!!
w00t
First of all, the US Government is, at least in the US, going to be one of the early adopters of IPv6. AT&T, MCI, and Sprint have yet to announce plans for IPv6 availability. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has already manadated adoption of IPv6 for Federal agencies, and they have already done network inventories and are developing transition plans. I have yet to read a single comment on this thread by anyone who has even the foggiest of clues what is going on. Gee whizz, you managed to activate the IPv6 stack on your Linux box at home. Wow, what an accomplishment! Compared to your home network, converting a typical agency with over 100,000 PCs, 5,000 servers, and 500 routers all located in over 200 field offices is like building a space shuttle compared to building a rubber-band powered balsa airplane. Here's a few trivial problems to chew on- How does my firewall stop viruses, when the virus can use a level-3 encrypted channel to talk to its author? What's the procedure for differentiating between vulnerable and necessary ports in Longhorn and Vista once you do away with NAT and your PCs become visible to everyone in the world. No BS, I want port numbers and specific vulnerabilities I have to check for, along with the security product that will detect and block illegitimate access attempts while allowing the proper access to make real websites, java, .net and oracle work.
How many addresses should I allocate to each facility, server, and PC, and what DHCP software do I use to assign and manage them? And how to I stop neighbor-discovery spoofing?
Should my voice-over-ip network be deployed in the initial deployment? Will that disrupt vital voice services? What about multi-cast video-over-ip? Is it cost effective? How do I deploy it to PCs, but control the usage so that it doesn't suck up all my network bandwidth and create an accidental DOS for my web servers?
Are those questions too easy? I've got a list a mile long that I have to solve before we convert.
So how about a nice big cup of shut-the-f#ck-up for all the useless little kiddie network engineers out there. Your constructive criticism is as ignorant as it is unwelcome.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
Well, except that the military is probably quite interested in IPv6, since it'll give them lots of shiny new IP addresses for their shiny new cyberwarfare robots and guided missiles and soldiers with HUDs, etc.
Well now that it comes to mind, BRL-CAD (the US Army's modelling program) uses millimeters by default. I'm not sure if this has any meaning though.
to upgrade to IPV6 to fight the "War on Terror"... He'll get congress
(opposite of progress) to approve $75B in no time.
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
For construction, baking ... etc, the English system makes perfect sense. Many operations consist of halving, doubling or even trebling. Less common is dividing or multiplying by 10.
Actually, the only advantage I see to metric, a big one I'll admit, is that the rest of the world uses it. For scientific stuff, we can as easily perform any mathematical operation in feet/pound/seconds as we can in cm/gm/sec. Who says 1 decimeter instead of 10 cm or .1 m anyway?
Long live the King!
My personal opinion is that the Pentagon and Administration lied to get us into the war, so Congress should tell them to use their existing budget to fight it, and if that means reallocating funds from other programs, then they'll have to decide what they most want to spend it on.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't know what percentage of active switches do IPv6, but many of the older switches will start broadcasting the IPv6 because they don't understand it. Now your switch is a hub. That will choke any network that needed switches in the first place. Even a single switch that doesn't do IPv6 could take out a large chunk of your network.
Woah, I was tired when I wrote that. I was specifically thinking about layer 3 switches and everything is jumbled up.
As many pointed out, the majority of switches out there function at layer 2 rather than layer 3. Those are the ones to worry about anyway. It is a moot point: any layer 3 switch will probably be able to handle IPv6, currently or software upgrade, anyway.
Ha!
Big-router companies are as slow as molasses on a cold day.
Couple that with software revisions that don't work on some hardware preventing people from upgrading and you have a lot of software to update.