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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."
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.
I for one would not be surprised to see China and the likes implement IPv6.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
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.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
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.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
I'm seeing two copies of this story posted on the front page, both posted in the same minute. That has to be some kind of Slashdot record. Even normal user comments can't be duped by the same person less than two minutes apart....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Oh yes, finally. It has occurred! A story duped right next to each itself. Timothy FTW!
[Error 407: No signature found]
As a developer and network security professional, I frankly can't wait until everything under the sun is addressable. I really do want my car to be able to talk to my electric razor.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I demand it because I'm tired of NAT. As I have more devices at home that I might want to access remotely, or that need full inbound and outbound access for full functionality (as jump-in, jump-out games often do), I get more and more tired of dealing with NAT.
And it's not just me. When I'm trying to help my dad with his machine, I can't connect to it remotely to access it.
Even my DirectTV satellite receiver uses IP access now, and due to NAT, they can't count on being able to contact your receiver from their end. So, any centralized service like remote booking has to take special measures to work.
IPv6 makes all this a lot easier, for example if you "request assistance" on Windows Vista/7, the first thing it does is create a Teredo tunnel so that your machine can be accessed remotely to diagnose and fix it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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.
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.
People ask what can IPv6 offer that NAT cannot. Try running multiple servers on multiple machines behind the same NAT, where one would like them to be accessible to the outside world via default port numbers. No amount of NAT configuration can get around this limitation, so saying NAT solves all the problems that IPv6 is supposed to answer is nothing more than self-delusional. Let's flip the question now.... what can NAT do that IPv6 cannot? Especially considering the fact that even *IF* for some reason that didn't involve how many IP's you actually have available, you still wanted to utilize NAT for some reason, you still could do that with ipv6... no problem at all. So what does NAT do that IPv6 can't? The only answer that might actually exist to this is that it arguably costs less to implement. So in reality, it's not that there's no business case of IPv6, it's really the case that these businesses are just cheap.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
2009 will the Year of IPv6 to the Desktop.
Part of the problem at the moment is that because network companies are failing to provide IPv6 ready equipment, it is only the dedicated few that are moving to IPv6. Linksys, D-Link I am talking about guys like you. The there are the ISPs like Bell and Telus here in Canada who have to plans, or even anything beta.
Now look in Africa, Asia and Europe and you will see some serious movement in that direction.
Don't get me wrong, I have my computer enabled with Tiredo, providing me IPv6 access, but companies are going to want the easy route to IPv6 and until they are provided the support, or like my experience two days to immenent failure they aren't likey to do sod.
I have a Linksys WRT54G v8 and there isn't even the possibility of installing a version of DD-WRT that supports IPv6 :(
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I suspect the switch to IPv6 will take about as long as the switch from DC to AC electricity. IPv4 is so ingrained in hardware and software that it will take decades after the last IPv4 only hardware has been produced for the switch to occur. Additionally, the cost of IPv4 addresses is going to need to rise above the couple of dollars a year it currently is at. http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/off-goes-the-power-current-started-by-thomas-edison/
and the basic low cost data planes are nat'ed
Yes, I know. That's what I said it had to take special measures to work as opposed to saying it doesn't work.
There are inward-bound services that are precluded by the lack of incoming access. No, none of these are on the PVRs right now, because there is no such incoming access.
As an example, when you remote book, why don't you get any confirmation? Why does it just make you select "record if possible" (instead of priority record) and then you just go home and hope it recorded? Why can't it contact your box with the request, get a response saying "yes, it will record" or "this won't record, which conflict would you like to cancel?" The reason is because it cannot contact your box as there is no incoming access.
The current feature set is partially determined by what can be done under the current system. With IPv6, the feature set could be expanded.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I tell this story all the time, and I'll tell it again.
I *tried* to build up a new fiber network in downtown St. Louis using IPv6. I couldn't get the address space!
It's insane - I could get 3x/24 blocks (non-sequential) assigned to my ASN, but in order to get an IPv6 allotment, I had to show proof that I *already* had utilized a full /24 of IPv6 addresses (which is NOT 256. It's 256*256*256!) They said to get it from my upstream provider - they said they don't do that, get it from ARIN. I go back to ARIN, ARIN says "They're full of it, get it from your upstream provider."
Even more insane? IPv6 allotments are FREE! I had to pay per year for an IPv4 allotment, but the free stuff? Pfft...we have it, we'll never run out of it within your lifetime, but you can't have it.
WTF?
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
This is a minor nit - ARP cache timeouts are normally on the order of 300 seconds, not two minutes.
A less minor nit is this: IPv6 does not help decrease the size of routing tables as seen by major providers. Nor does IPv6 reduce the burden of sending routing updates so that routing updates are propagated faster than the underlying rate of change of usable net paths. (Enterprise subnets, whether IPv4 or IPv6, don't generally propagate into the routing announcements as seen by the big carriers.)
The compelling argument, for me at least, is that IPv6 is really a new internet that runs along side of the existing IPv4 net - there is no direct interoperability. This means that pretty much any new expansion of the net is going to require IPv4 connectivity, and IPv4 addresses, to reach the legacy net. And that makes IPv6 redundant from the user's point of view. That sort of drains the oil out of the IPv6 crankcase.
Of course the biggest argument of all is that IPv6 does not solve the hard issues of propagating routing information and finding usable paths across the net, particularly as the demands of human-conversational traffic and the political acts of nations are (unfortunately) driving routing to become increasingly aware of the types of traffic being routed.
I'm waiting to be shown that I'm wrong - I helped do the very first calculation of IPv4 address consumption back in the mid 1980's. And I was in the group at Sun back in the very early 1990's where IPv6 took form. I spent time at Cisco wrestling with questions like how to efficiently mechanize 128-bit longest-prefix matching on 32 and 64 bit hardware. And my company currently has IPv6 testing products. So I've been watching IPv6 for what will soon be two decades.
To me one of the tilt-points of IPv6 will be when I can go into Frys Electronics and find IPv6 capable print servers and other widgets of that ilk on the shelves.
I saw ISO/OSI come and go (I was rather a fan of TUBA - which included the use of ISO/OSI CLNP for the new IP layer - when the various IPv4 alternatives were being considered in the early 1990's.) It would not surprise me to see IPv6 go the way of ISO/OSI.
I'm going to sacrifice 5 of my mod points to comment here, just because I have to in order to refute your preposterous point.
"Climate change" and "fossil fuel supply" sure sound like big FUD points. We have little of the former, and much of the latter at this time. Thus, at this time, any radical and painful "cure" is not indicated any more than it would be for giving an ultra-aggressive course of chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgury to a person who has a potentially pre-cancerous cell.
Could it be real? Yep.
Could it be wrong? Yep.
I guess some people are SO uncertainty-adverse that they would rather guarantee an absolute collapse of the entire world's economy. Absolute collapse is easy and "certain" (properly engineered) and very comforting to the asshats that actually want such a thing to happen.
We can't just up-end an installed base that would cost tens (or hundreds maybe) of trillions of dollars to replace.
Truly clean energy in abundance and cheap enough that even the poorest person can have 10 kW/h sustained in perpetuity? Yes - I'm for that.
Energy so expensive that only the richest among us can have any? Fuck that, fuck it in the ear, and fuck anyone advocating such an approach in the ass with a canon firing a shell at full velocity.
And if a new tax or "cap and trade" law makes my heating bill double, I'll be beyond angry.
The recession occurred because there was no business case for financiers and banks using common sense.
He and the entire 100,000 person corporation he works for are sitting behind half a dozen routable IPv4 addresses on their own private 10net. He is already overworked supporting the infrastructure which is in place already and when an IPv6 rollout is suggested the first thought which comes to mind is "Just how retarded are you?".
IPv6 is neither exotic nor frightening. Admins and programmers have been dealing with differing networking protocols for decades, including IPX, IP, OSI etc. IPv6 is nothing new. It's simply a fuck of a lot of work for little or no gain.
The question is. What is the "killer application"? If you want IPv6 adoption to proceed at faster than a crawl, you're going to have to come up with something as compelling as the WWW but which simply cannot be realistically achieved over IPv4. Maybe some sort of peer to peer mobile phone application might do it, otherwise, go away and come back when you have something worth talking about.
Deleted
And if everyone could have as many IPV4 addresses as they wanted, you could still probably buy a $50 appliance that had a firewall configured to deny everything incoming except established traffic out of the box.
NAT exists entirely because of the need to provide point to point routing with a shortage of IP addresses. Remove the shortage and you remove the point of NAT.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
The official philosophy behind IPv6 addressing was that they wanted to keep everything hierarchical, to avoid the IPv4 problem that makes everybody's routing table have to keep track of (currently) ~300,000 separate routes plus whatever their own users and customers need. So they want to hand out fat blocks to ISPs, and have those ISPs hand out whatever-sized blocks to their users, and if you change ISPs, IPv6 is supposed to be easier to renumber than IPv4.
In practice, of course, this doesn't help the problem of business users who need to be multihomed for reliability, so their 2nd-Nth ISPs are still going to have to announce their little blocks to the world. There are ugly hacks like shim6 that some people think will help, but it's basically an unsolved problem. So you can generally get larger blocks if you're multihoming, and if you were asking for a /32, that's a typical ISP allocation, so it makes sense that your ISPs said to get it from ARIN.
If you wanted to get a /48, your ISP should be handing those out like candy, but of course that's still Provider-Assigned address space.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And I'm saying the point is irrelevant. You could categorise broadband consumers as (a) those who need more than one computer to access the internet and (b) those who don't. (a)-type users need a router anyway, and (b) type users don't - they can just plug their modem into their PC.
/64, they would still need a router, and would be able to buy one with a firewall on it. Users in the second category don't need NAT, or a router.
Users in the first category only need NAT because their ISP gives them one IP address. If they got a ipv6
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog