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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?
BT wholesale provide the underlying infrastructure, and then third party ISPs, or other divisions within BT, provide the IP level connectivity...
It's possible to get native IPv6 connectivity today through several ISPs in the UK, tho it's not really an advertised service because very few people are looking for it...
http://www.goscomb.net/
http://www.nitrex.net/
Incidentally, BT themselves used to offer an ipv6 tunnel broker service, so they clearly have some ipv6 capability.
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we are switching over from analog to digital television transmission in february 2009. at that date, analog tv will simply disappear. if you have an older tv without a converter, it simply won't work. to get this to happen, the government and broadcasters had to sit down, make a timetable, and implement it
in this way, and ONLY IN THIS WAY, were we ever going to switch to digital transmission. furthermore, in this way, and only in this way, will any country ever make the switch to IPv6
there is no free market solution to this problem. in fact, according to principles of the free market, you are punished for making the extra expense and becoming a first adapter: you spend all this time and money, and no one is going to consume what you offer on the new protocol. why? because everyone is making their material avaiable on IPv4, so that's where the audience stays. the inertia is heavy
so either everyone switches to IPv6, or no one switches IPv6. there is no gradual changeover, because there is no incentive, and only punishment for all of the effort, for being a first adapter
governments have to mandate IPv6 changeover. that is only way IPv6 will ever happen. doesn't matter in the slightest how superior IPv6 is. punishment of early adapters trumps all observations of technological superiority
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's not flamebait - it's informative. Virgin aren't a good ISP by most measures. It's sort of the ITV, or Channel 5 of ISPs. If you're from the UK, you'll know what I mean.
Although I'm not sure about the claim about not running fibre to the kerb.
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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.
I fail to understand point 1: at the hardware level, I see no reason why any hardware equipment needs modification to support IPv6, unless you rely on "firmware-accelerated" hardware (TCP offloaders and whatnot). At the upper layers, all you need is software which handles both protocols. They're pretty much universal today.
I agree and disagree with point 2:
* imho, the main problem is the "misdistribution" of the IPv4 space to begin with. Do you think it's normal that Hewlett Packard owns two (yes, two) A-class IP networks, yet certainly does not have 2*(2^24-2) reachable hosts? Or that, for instance (real life example!), a VPN, P as in private, for one of our clients, uses a 126.192.0.0/14 network mask?
* this very same poor address space distribution, on the other hand, incites so-called "developing" countries to embrace IPv6, especially in Asia: they just don't have enough unique IPv4 addresses to fulfill the current customer demand for Internet connections, so IPv6 is a reality over there already.
The IPv6 rate of deployment is abysmal in Europe and the US, maybe, but not in several other parts of the world - which happen to weigh more and more on the global state of things as time passes by.
I don't know about 3, so I won't comment.
As to point 4, I wholly agree that NAT won't go away. I'm not sure that even then, the IPv4 address space will be enough eventually.
Roman plumbing was very inefficient. Firstly they had no concept of a tap, the water just flowed continuously 24/7, so huge quantities of water was simply wasted.
Rain in mountains + aqueduct + gravity = 24/7 water supply. Waste? So what?
Secondly it was largely done in lead piping. yeah way to go there.
Hard mountain water quickly generates a coating of lime in the pipes. Lead? No problem
Thirdly there was a great deal of corruption. The amount you paid for your water depended on the diameter of the pipe coming into your property. However it was common place to bribe the local water inspector to fit a larger pipe than it said on the records.
Normal bureaucratic graft here. I cannot imagine any sufficiently civilized society without it.
In short, the Romans were not backwards. I've seen (and used) plenty of Roman plumbing. Did you know that the city's system still employs some of the (admittedly refurbished) lines? Best tap water I've ever tasted.
Here's a hypothetical situation for ya:
Assume IPv6 is "mainstream" now. Every IP enabled device created in the last four years has supported it. All major OS manufacturers support it. All routers and associated devices on the public Internet support it.
Assume that every consumer-grade IP(v4 or v6) enabled device has a "friendly name" that can be queried programatically.
Assume that every home router sold for the past four years provided the following things:
1) A "web interface" for managing computers attached to the router. (Where "attached" means "has acquired DHCP lease or has been manually configured to communicate on the LAN".)
2) A default firewall policy that worked out to: "only accept inbound connections that are related to an already established outbound session".
3) A method to select a computer by its "friendly name" and allow inbound connections that are unrelated to an established outbound session. [1]
Given that situation, I'd like to ask you a question.
How is this any less secure than hiding your live servers behind a NAT?
Additionally, if we disregard all that stuff about IPv6, and only assume that IP enabled devices have a "Friendly Name" [2] do you feel that we currently have the technical prowess to produce the router described above?
Looking forward to your reply,
Simon
[1] You could make it a Wizard interface that asks you questions like "Is this a web server? Are you hosting $VIDEO_GAME?" Add in an advanced option that skips the wizard and permits you to specify ports or port ranges.
[2] All Windows PCs that I've run into have a hostname that would function as this "Friendly name".
Not having a tap was not that great a problem for them. Don't forget that the number of people back then was a tiny fraction of the number we have now. Most probably they were tapping natural springs and just diverting the water into a pipe. It would have been flowing away either way. Also, without chlorination you really don't want sitting water as it will gather all manner of "bad things".
There is a lot of rubbish talked about lead piping. The actual danger of lead piping is minimal to non-existant. Lead is exceedingly insoluble in water so the amount that makes it into the water is tiny.After a year or two lead pipes gather scale on the inside of them which actually stops the water coming into contact with the lead reducing concentations to tiny levels. Finally, lead taken in orally is not a huge problem for humans as it can't pass through the gut wall in any great amount. Lead breathed in has been shown to be a problem though.
This is not to say the Romans didn't have a problem with lead poisoning. They used to boil up old wine in lead pots because they discovered that they could produce a sweet tasing wine or crystal. That crystal was lead acetate. Some people used to consume vast quantaties of this stuff which was cause them to slowly starve to death (lead blocks the absorption of nutriants from food in the gut the treatment is normally just stop eating lead and eat lots of fibre rich food for a few weeks).
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