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Level of IPv6 Usage Is Vanishingly Small
An anonymous reader writes "The impending IPv4 address allocation shortage has led to a lot of speculation on the future of IPv6 (including here). A new study says that Internet IPv6 migration is not just going slowly — it has basically not even begun. After spending a year measuring IPv6 traffic across 87 ISPs around the world, the study concludes 'less than one hundredth of 1% of Internet traffic is IPv6... equivalent to the allowed parts of contaminants in drinking water.'"
99% of IPv4 traffic is bittorrent. Switch it to IPV6 and the traffic figures will spike!
It may be just me, but I always felt IPv6 is a solution looking for the problem.
There is a reason IPv4 is so well entrenched. Other than availability of software, hardware and services, it is convenience of handling IPv4 in all those things. This is what permits developers to create all those wonderful products, administrators to effectively administer them and users to enjoy them. A primary reason to that is IPv4 address size - it is 32 bit which is natively handled by all current hardware, and easily remembered by humans (short term) in its quad decimal form.
IPv6 has neither of these features. It is difficult to deal with in software (I know, I do this for a living), does not fit into any native data type (and won't until we move to 128 bit architectures - which does not seem to be very soon), cannot be remembered or used by a human (so effective administration requires magic automatic tools), does not give itself with any convenience to routing related data structures (like radix trees). All this for dubious benefit of addressing directly (in non-hierarchical manner) of every toaster in the world. This is directly opposite to the way the Real World operates (i.e. your home has an address, but noone gets to talk to your toaster directly without going through you first.
If I were solving this, I'd suggest separate and non-directly routable IPv4 address spaces for separate countries (and, perhaps, for other entities). And lots and lots of NAT or proxying. Of course that is kind of what is happening anyway.
China would be happier that way too. In case of cross-border cyberattack, just cut external links and your country is self-sufficient and interconnected :)
Anyway, I am ready to bet some cash that IPv6 will never become a major transport protocol.
I know I will do whatever I can to keep it far far away.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We could have even just added a 3 more positions in the address and assumed a default of 1.1.1. as the default prefix if none was given. That would have given us 16 million * the current 4 billion addresses - 64 quadrillion addresses.
At the risk of repeating the 'no one needs more 640k', I'd have to say that I think 64 quadrillion is more than usable for the next several years. The upshot is that it would have been much easier to deal with that. From a pragamatic viewpoint, there's a whole lot of software out there invested in the dotted quad format. Modifying that to deal with a few more X.X.X places wouldn't have been as hard (think GUIs that check IP validity, for example) as moving to IPv6.
Lame excuses, perhaps, but I think we'd have seen much faster adoption to a format like X.X.X.X.X.X.X because it's an incremental, not radically different.
creation science book
I'm actually in one of the rare areas that have more than one ISP. We have three available here. Our current ISP doesn't implement IPv6, so I can't use it. I checked with the other two. Neither of them allows IPv6, either. None of the three admits to any plans to implement it.
Most people have only one ISP, of course. What incentive does that ISP have to permit IPv6? I mean, here where we have three ISPs, none of them has an incentive to do it.
I don't see how we can ever switch to IPv6 until the ISPs stop dropping all IPv6 packets, and start forwarding them properly. And that clearly ain't gonna happen without a bit of "government regulation" ordering them to do it or else. But with the current political setup here in the US, that ain't gonna happen, either.
Anyone have any idea how to persuade the ISPs to come around?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I disagree.
I used to run an amazingly high traffic site. It required quite a few GigE pipes to run the network. The datacenters combined would have required an OC192 to stay within acceptable growth potential.
I had the urge to switch or run IPv6 in parallel. I found out what was proposed to be mandatory was quite a bit harder than it appeared.
I never did find the clear path of "this is what you need to do."
The only way I found to get my traffic to other IPv6 users was to tunnel IPv6 over IPv4. If (if, if) we had done it, it would have likely swamped those gateway services. Sure, some people want to make it happen, but what happens when many multiple big companies do it. I know Google set up the IPv6 version of their site, but they have quite a bit of negotiation power. My negotiation power was in that I could say "I'm going to need lots of bandwidth, make it available to me", and the provider would ensure it was available and that the standard growth potential was available. We had our growth down to a science, almost so much as I could tell you our aggregate 95th percentile for 12 months in the future +-5%
If I, senior tech guy at a large bandwidth customer couldn't get it done, why do we think every home user, T1 user, and average Joe Slashdot User could get it done.
If IPv6 is what we're SUPPOSE to be migrating towards, a clear well defined path must be established, and some sort of encouragement must be provided.
IPv6 for us was just a play toy, even though I wanted it done. There was absolutely no demand for it. We were only using 6 to 8 /24's, so we weren't a huge burden on the available address space. Even still, I wanted to do it, and never got it done. Queries were left unanswered. No firm responses were ever given. Even the senior techs at the Tier 1 ISP's gave vague answers like "I think we can. Ya, we should be able to support it, but we don't know. We'll try to find out."
Now I work for a company with even less pull. We discussed it, but it's a much different product, and was put together in such a way that you can't be fuzzy with it's addressing. Things are very specific. Clients will connect to exactly where you tell them, and there's no room for "and you could do this...." I no longer have the opportunity to even attempt to switch, and since the client base isn't prepared, it won't happen.
I was looking forward to the change. I know there were neat proposals involved. Unfortunately, we were never able to implement it, and most people won't be able to.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
If I, senior tech guy at a large bandwidth customer couldn't get it done, why do we think every home user, T1 user, and average Joe Slashdot User could get it done.
I got it done perhaps because I'm not running a giant network. I set up tunnels from Hurricane Electric at home and at work, let our {Free,Open}BSD firewalls announce routes, and started using it. See my home page next to my name? There's no dancing turtle, but you can get to it over either protocol.
One of the huge wins for me as netadmin is that I can stop screwing around with port forwarding just to be able to SSH or make VOIP calls from home to work or vice versa. I'm loving me some end-to-end connectivity again.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?