IPv6 Tested in Space

An anonymous reader writes "Remember the Cisco router orbiting on a satellite in space? Well, it's now also the first to run IPv6 in space. Since no-one is choosing to run IPv6 on the ground, isn't this a bit pointless?"

Comments

Re:Not true

[anticypher]

French telecoms have it
France: Great way to get govt. funding for R&D and keep a telecom business alive while you develop

You don't seem to know anything about this. Are you trolling, or just an ignorant american?

France Telecom, at least the major parts of it such as OpenTransit and Orange, are junking all of their old Alcatel kit (which was never that predominant) for Cisco and Juniper. They are doing this because they have so many customers, and so much equipment, they have been specifying IPv6 for years now, and rolling out IPv6 internally for the last year. All of their major competitors (there are 5 major broadband providers in France) are readying IPv6 to the end user, and many smaller broadband providers already offer it.

Alcatel, while it was once a subsidised French company, hasn't received any handouts or tax breaks from the French government in quite a few years. Mostly this was due to pressure from Brussels to play fair in the European market. Since the merger with Lucent, the new company is considered a pariah by just about every major telecoms and datacoms player. The merger was so badly bungled, that if Scott Adams were to try and put some of the major fuckups into Dilbert strips, nobody would believe that such idiocy could exist.

Apple: What happens upstream, on one side of an ISP is one thing. Still lots of activity happening downstream, inside private IP address space, away from the ISPs

While others have pointed out your ignorance of how ZeroConf/Bonjour works, on this point you are certainly correct. Only it isn't just Apple, Microsoft has also realised the same thing. There are lots of nifty little services that can do cool things with the features of IPv6. For those of us who have had IPv6 around for a while now, it is just so much easier to administrate and maintain, and many of the kludgy hacks to IPv4 are just part of the v6 spec and mostly just work.

Many forward looking companies are turning on IPv6 on their internal routers, just waiting for the day when their ISP finally gets a clue. With IPv6 addressing, all kinds of autodiscovery happens, and all kinds of useful tools are being built on top of that. People who install the new Apple 802.11n Airport Base Station can get IPv6 connectivity just by clicking a checkbox, and it automatically finds a nearby 6-in-4 tunnel broker. So just by installing one of these boxes, not just Macs get IPv6, but Vista users as well. At CeBit this year, almost every Chinese and Taiwanese maker of consumer grade DSL/Cable/WiFi router boxes were showing off automatic 6-in-4 tunnels, expect them to hit the American market within the next year unless the Chinese authorities decide that such advanced technology has to be kept out of the hands of the new axis of evil.

the AC