No Business Case For IPv6, Survey Finds

alphadogg writes "Business incentives are completely lacking today for upgrading to IPv6, the next generation Internet protocol, according to a survey of network operators conducted by the Internet Society (ISOC). In a new report, ISOC says that ISPs, enterprises and network equipment vendors report that there are 'no concrete business drivers for IPv6.' However, survey respondents said customer demand for IPv6 is on the rise and that they are planning or deploying IPv6 because they feel it is the next major development in the evolution of the Internet."

Comments

Ever?

[WillKemp]

I'm beginning to find it hard to believe that IPv6 will ever be implemented. It seems to have been on the verge of it for close to a decade now.

Re:Ever?

[QuoteMstr]

Me, I would have preferred to extend the dotted-quad notation over using the colon-separated hex format usually used for IPv6. Dotted quads look more familiar for network administrators, software developers, and so on. As you noted, IPv6 addresses look strange and scare people. This fear of the unknown is a barrier to adoption. Any unnecessary break with IPv4 hurts IPv6 adoption, and we can't afford that; IPv6 with dotted quads is better than IPv4.

Well,

[TinBromide]

In a world without sharp objects, knives, or sidewalks, there would be no business case for bandaids. IPV6 is a solution to a problem that hasn't asserted itself. How often do you buy cough medicine when you haven't been sick in a while? This goes the same for ipv6. Until ISP's start charging more for ipv4 addresses due to scarcity, nobody is going to switch beyond digital survivalists and people who like to tinker with new technology.

Re:Well,

[mellon]

I guess you don't care about end-to-end connectivity. P2P, VoIP, skype, stuff like that? Obviously not something you want.

As we run out of IP addresses, we will have more NATting of IPv4 networks. This will mean that instead of having a single global IP address with your ISP, you will have an RFC1918 address. The people who have global addresses will be fewer, and so Skype's nat traversal will depend more heavily on them, which they will notice and which will decrease Skype's popularity. Same with p2p.

Consequently, at some point it will be the case that the only applications that are well-supported on the Internet are walled-garden apps run by commercial sites. Innovation will drop off.

It's not a pretty scenario. To me, the main selling point of IPv6 is *not* that we are running out of IP addresses and need more. It's that end-to-end is getting less and less available as the internet grows. Deploy IPv6, and end-to-end comes back. That's why we need IPv6.

It will happen

[Daimanta]

With the rate IPv4 adressess are running out it is only a matter of time before we will switch to ipv6. It might be 3 years from now or perhaps even more but when ipv4 becomes scarce(and it will), people and (internet)companies will try and make the switch to ipv6.

Don't get started about the turd that is called NAT, that's a problem posing as a solution.

Re:It will happen

[arkhan_jg]

NAT is the only reason we still have ipv4 - if we hadn't had that nasty hack, we'd have had to move to ipv6 out of necessity some time ago. I'm really looking forward to going back to having every PC with a globally routable IP address, it will make application communication work so much easier, and firewalls can stick to being allow/deny/drop firewalls instead of all this stateful masquerade hack-job stuff on top.

The main sticking point for me is all UK ISPs are IPv4 only. There's not much point running IPv6 internally if you're only going to have to tunnel it or 6to4 it once it leaves your network, though I'm thinking of converting a VLAN or two internally to IPv6 for a systems and applications trial.

Customer demand should be the business case.

[mellon]

I don't mean customers should want IPv6. I mean that that's what should drive IPv6 deployment. Address depletion is a problem, but it's a problem that has workarounds, and to the extent that customers aren't bothered by the workarounds, there will be no IPv6 deployment.

The main impact of the workarounds is twofold. First, your outward-facing global IPv4 address will go away. Right now, your ISP has probably assigned you a real IPv4 address, not an RFC1918 address. So people can get packets to your gateway directly. That will go away.

The second impact is that we will have more and more layering of NATs. This will make peer-to-peer applications harder and harder. Also, as more users are piled up on single IP addresses, we will start to see port starvation. What this looks like is that iTunes will start acting funny - displaying some things, showing error messages for others. DNS lookups will fail, and you'll have to retry. Google maps tiles won't show up, so you'll see a partial map, and have to reload (possibly to see different tiles not show up).

So yeah, things will keep chugging along. But it will work less and less well as time goes on.

And I think that is what can, and should, be driving demand. If you don't want that, you might want to start fantasizing about how to get IPv6 into your own home. I have it in mine, it works a treat. I think it's too hard for the average person to do right now if their ISP doesn't support it, but that's a problem that we ought to try to solve if we want the internet to keep being a place where peer-to-peer is possible, and where innovation is possible.

Running out of address won't kill the internet. But it will suck the life out of it.

Cell phones

[FranTaylor]

If cell phones turn into real computers, which has probably already happened, then we will need IPv6 if all those phone users want to surf.