(Almost) All You Need To Know About IPv6

Butterspoon tips us to an article in Ars Technica titled "Everything you need to know about IPv6." Perhaps not quite "everything"; the article doesn't try to explain the reasons behind IPv6's meager adoption since its introduction 12 years ago. But it should be regarded as essential reading for anyone overly comfortable with their IPv4 addresses. Quoting: "As of January 1, 2007, 2.4 billion of those [IPv4 addresses] were in (some kind of) use. 1.3 billion were still available and about 170 million new addresses are given out each year. So at this rate, 7.5 years from now, we'll be clean out of IP addresses; faster if the number of addresses used per year goes up. Are you ready for IPv6?"

Comments

I'd have built our whole network on IPv6, but...

[numbski]

ARIN wouldn't give us an allocation. In their rules, I have to be able to prove that we have a customer base large enough to use up a full /32 (of IPv6) addresses before we can get an allocation. So in order to get IPv6 block, we have to have enough customers to use up 2^16, or by IPv4 standards, a Class B block. WTF???? IPv4 allocations are handed out for free, but you can't get one unless you're a mega-conglomerate.

IPv6 adoption won't occur in the US unless ARIN comes up with a better policy. :(

Re:Meager adoption

[jguthrie]

Unlike most people here, I have been using IPv6 for years. I started with a tunnel to Sprint back when the 6bone was the only way to get access, and I now have a tunnel to Freenet6, which even usually works although I get maybe a dozen IPv6 connections per month over it. I honestly don't think that NAT should be given the bulk of the blame for the lack of IPv6 adoption. To be sure, NAT and the general environment of scarcity associated with IPv4 addresses (which turns out to be the primary thing encouraging NAT adoption--and slowing down the rate of increase in the numbers of IPv4 addresses being assigned) are important, but I think that the way that the IPv6 promoters went about trying to get folks to use IPv6 should bear the bulk of the blame.

When the folks who invented IPv6 wanted to give people a chance to use the new protocol in a test environment, they created the 6bone. They then spent years getting the folks who make backbone routers to implement the new protocol on those routers, and when the backbone routers had firmware that would do IPv6, they declared victory and went home. One of the last exchanges I participated in on the 6bone mailing list talked about how, since everyone in the world now had access to IPv6, there was no more need for this test network.

The only problem is that protocol adoption and demand for addresses typically happen from the leaf nodes first, and then they move to the backbones. The sole focus on the backbone providers meant that IPv6 became a solution looking for a problem. Yes, I could have gotten native IPv6 service....if I had been willing to get an OC-512 backhauled from Germany. The problem is, I was (and am) a user with a SOHO LAN and I can't justify paying better than commercial cablemodem rates for access and, as far as I am aware, native IPv6 transport is still not available from Time Warner or Comcast or whoever does the service in my area.

Of course, the news isn't all bad. All the operating systems I routinely run now speak IPv6 natively. The thing is, if I can't buy transport for the protocol, it doesn't matter how cool it is, how cheap the addresses are, or how easy the autoconfig is, it's not at all useful in the real world.