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No IPv6 For UK Broadband Users
BT (the incumbent telephone company in the United Kingdom) are in the process of spending millions of pounds on upgrading their network to an all-IP core. However, they have failed to consider 21st Century protocol support, preferring to insist that IPv4 is enough for everyone. Haven't they noticed the IPv4 exhaustion report yet?
But not enough for everybody.
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BT is too busy selling everyone's personal info and browsing habits to notice that in a few years their customers wont be able to do anything on t'internet because of a lack of IPv6.
It'll give them a good excuse to jack up prices because their 21CN (21st Century Network) is about as efficient as 1st century roman plumbing and is unable to handle current traffic let alone allow for any growth.
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I find a disturbing unwillingness to learn in the IT world.
I too am guilty of being reluctant to deploy technologies I don't fully understand...IPv6 being one of them. (I am told it isn't THAT big a deal but still... I don't know it and I know IPv4) And it is my guess that just as many IT groups want to solve problems with MS Windows (because that's all they know) BT probably wants to solve their problems with IPv4.
I'm sure everyone is going to see that your IP address is 10.x.x.x soon. Enjoy the big NAT box in the sky. And I wish you luck getting your ports forwarded.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Haven't they noticed the IPv4 exhaustion report yet?
It seems IPv4 exhaustion is the new Y2K. Lots of reports, few problems.
There is a small but growing number of folks who think IPv6 may be stillborn. The rationale goes something like this:
1. It's very expensive to upgrade an infrastructure of non-trivial size to IPv6 and that's only one of the several serious disincentives against deploying IPv6.
2. IPv6's rate of deployment to date can only be described as an abysmal commercial failure.
3. IPv6 fails to solve the Internet's core routing problem (reference the IRTF Routing Research Group). It's possible that a protocol which does solve that problem will leapfrog IPv6's deployment.
4. 2^32 addresses IS enough for everybody, IF most client computers are behind a NAT firewall. The count is too low only if most client computers need their own globally-routable address. That most client computers need their own globally-routable address is a dubious claim in light of today's wide deployment of NAT.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
It might me possible that there's not much demand for static IPs in UK. When most customers don't have problems with DHCP, IPv4 address space will be sufficient because not all customers would be using their connections 24 hours.
There's a few problems with that statement:
First: Unlike dialup users, broadband users tend to stay connected continuously (always-on).
Second: Even if the users were to disconnect from their service provider when not using the service, the DHCP lease would probably still be assigned.
Plus, it's not a long-term solution. Much like the other broadband issues here in the US (capacity), restricting users will only work temporarily. Eventually you'll still need to upgrade the system.
~t
Haven't they noticed the IPv4 exhaustion report yet?
IPv6 will continue to be used until the pain of using IPv4 exceeds the pain of switching to IPv6. The issues are many, varied, and thoroughly discussed elsewhere. My personal highlights are NAT having eliminated most of the address space limitations - most companies, even medium-large ones, can make do with 4-8 external IPs - and the complete and utter unwieldiness of IPv6 addresses. No way am I going to be able to memorize one of those, ever. DNS will become mandatory to do anything. That, and nobody uses IPv6 in the first place.
You have succinctly summed up the opinion of most of the network-engineer types that I have spoken to on the subject. Especially the part about "breaking the Internet" -- that's a very familiar refrain.
And you know what? You're probably right, in a hypothetical, pie-in-the-sky network engineer's world. But the rest of us have already accepted the fact that, as with so many other things in life, we're going to have to put up with what we get. I don't own an ISP. You don't own an ISP. So what are we going to do? Write letters? Threaten to take our business -- where? To the ISP down the block? Which has the exact same policies as the one I subscribe to now?
Telling the major telcos that they need to convert their entire infrastructures to IPv6 is like telling America it needs to switch to the metric system. Again, quite astute -- so where are we on that? The engineers have pretty much gone over to metric, but the rest of us are still counting rods to the hog's-head. Think it's going to change?
It takes force to overcome inertia. The more inertia, the more force to overcome it. In this case, the "force" is going to have to be a market force. Until the telcos see a real problem with IPv4 -- a business problem, such as being unable to reach new customers, or their services not being perceived as competitive -- they won't change. Network engineers are demanding change, but they aren't offering any reasons -- not reasons of the type that businesses understand.
And not the type of reasons that customers understand, either. I get my email, I get my Web, I get my movies and MP3s and chat rooms and everything else. In 1988 I had a 1200 baud modem. In 2008 I have a 6 megabit dedicated Internet feed. "Waah waah," indeed! Your response? "I have my head in the sand/my ass." Well, again -- as well-reasoned and cogent an argument as that may be, it's just not a compelling reason to go IPv6, in my opinion.
Breakfast served all day!
note: I'm reffering to virgin media cable here, virgin media also do a service using BT wholesale ADSL which by all accounts is shit (the samknows report uses "virgin media" to reffer to the cable service and "virgin.net" to reffer to the ADSL service).
Umm most of the graphs are smaller is better and virgin medias line tends to be near the bottom. They do worst in the voip test but not so badly that it is likely to cause pracitcal issues. They do badly in the "current speed relative to max speed" tests but it seems the rates on virgins 10MBps or 20Mbps services are better than most people can expect from the "up to 8Mbps" services from BT wholesale.
Yes virgin do some throttling, but 25% of 20Mbps is still a very respectable 5Mbps. You have to be pretty close to the exchange to get that on BT wholesale ADSL and if you want to actually achive that performance in practice you will probablly need either a very expensive ISP account or one with a traffic cap.
Unfortunately the sky results do not seem to have been broken down into BT wholesale based and LLU (sky do both) and many of the smaller ISPs don't seem to be listed.
So virgin media cable probablly isn't the best ISP but afaict for most users they are a hell of a lot better than most BT wholesale based options.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Yes the article is FUD ... My provider uses BT ADSL and also supplies IPv6 if you ask for it.
The fact is that BT ADSL just supplies a pipe to the ISP (implemented originally using Frame Relay but with the 21CN project as a tunnel over IP) and it's up to the ISP to implement IPv4, IPv6, Chaosnet, carrier pigeon or whatever they want.
Rich.
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