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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 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.
The problem is that the guys that were working on the big IPv6 transition quit there jobs to work on the Duke Nukem Forever project.
As a person who's involved in an implementation of IPv6, let me say that it's difficult to see it implemented without ubiquitous gigabit networks all around, as well as network equipment (routers) that run on the kind of CPUs we don't nowadays expect such hardware to run on. On the one hand, they've made stuff easier (no more checksums on IP level, addresses that tell you something about themselves); on the other they've made it more difficult (potentially quite a lot of headers before you get to ICMP for example, as well as up to seven addresses that any device must listen to, address sizes that don't fit a natural integer), but the network is also busier: network meta-messages fly around all the time - much more so than with IPv4, its ICMP, IGMP and ARP (ARP times out in 20 minutes; link-layer address mapping in IPv6 expires in less than a minute), and don't forget multicast: it's obligatory and used a lot on IPv6, meaning that routers will be so much more busy synchronizing.
Then again; the time that hardware and linespeed catches up, *will* come. It's just not now, and nobody is in a hurry either. But running IPv6 over lines that do 1 Mbps in practice, however doable; it wouldn't make anyone happy.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Um, what the heck are you talking about? The ARP timeout is two minutes, not twenty. Speaking as someone who's also implemented IPv6 and used it pretty extensively, it sounds like you really don't know what you're talking about.
There is a known failure mode with ICMPv6 if you have a 127-bit prefix, but this is well-known, there's a fix for it in the standards, and the workaround is that you just don't ever use 127-bit prefixes. There's no particular benefit to using 127-bit prefixes, so this is kind of a no-brainer.
As for CPU consumption, again, what are you talking about? On the backbone, the proliferation of micro-routes for IPv4 is a *huge* problem. IPv6 route aggregation makes things *faster*, not slower, and consumes less CPU time as well.
If you are working over low bandwidth links, you might want to take a look at 6lowpan, which allows you to statelessly compress headers down to under twelve bytes.
Bottom line, the conclusions you've drawn are, as far as I am aware, complete nonsense. I'm sure you believe what you've said, and it's the result of real things that you saw, but without a bit more back story, I don't think it contributes any useful knowledge to the discussion.
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.
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).