Comcast To Bring IPv6 To Residential US In 2010

darthcamaro writes "We all know that IPv4 address space is almost gone — but we also know that no major US carrier has yet migrated its consumer base, either. Comcast is now upping the ante a bit and has now said that they are seriously gearing up for IPv6 residential broadband deployment soon. 'Comcast plans to enter into broadband IPv6 technical trials later this year and into 2010,' Barry Tishgart, VP of Internet Services for Comcast said. 'Planning for general deployment is underway.'"

Comments

Asprin

[Kid Zero]

Do they make enough painkillers to deal with the headaches this'll cause?

Otherwise: Good Luck, guys! You'll need it.

Good news..

[Manip]

That's great news for the people within the trial area. They will have much more free time to, you know, go out and meet women. Since now a ton of web-sites break when they attempt to visit them.

If it was just a matter of software updates, but alas there are mountains of sites that are literally hard-coded to store IPv4 addresses and you get a nice PHP error when you attempt to visit them.

IPv6 is the new Y2K.

I still don't like IPv6

[tjstork]

IPv6 is like the phone company saying, hey, we have a (aaa) eee-nnnn system doesn't have enough room, so let's replace it with a system that has 20 digits.

It just sucks to use for consumers, making everyone else's life more complicated just to simplify it for the service providers.

I would prefer an addressing system that simplifies life for me.

Re:I still don't like IPv6

[MaerD]

It's slightly worse. It's more like the phone company going "we can only handle phone numbers from (000)000-0000 to (255)255-2555" and instead of going "Hey.. let's try making go up to (999) 999-9999 and maintain the pattern everyone knows, or even say adding another set of numbers to make 255(255)255-2555 available, let's change it all up into some long string people can only half pronounce and you have to be a telephone repairman to understand... your new phone number is now ab823:fff::324223 and your neighbor is ab823:fff:731:823:324223". Can you imagine the confusion?

I never liked ipv6 is you end up with addresses like 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 that can also be written as 2001:db8:85a3::8a2e:370:7334. Trying to get "what's your ip address?" when doing telephone technical support is going to be nightmarish. Not just from the fact it's now a long hex string, but also from a complete lack of understanding by users, much less some level 1's I've dealt with.

Heck, just try diagnosing a user who "can't get to the internet" and it turns out to be a wrong dns server entry. It's hard enough to get them to go to google's ip now.

Re:I still don't like IPv6

[characterZer0]

They can't really forbid something that gets built into the OS like these sorts of features probably will.

Of course they can, and they will.

Re:I still don't like IPv6

[tlhIngan]

What it's supposed to mean is that every computer can have a public address. So if you sign up with one of the dynamic DNS providers (which will probably be integrated with your OS fairly soon) you should be able to share pictures and things from your own computer without having to upload them to somewhere, or be able to log in remotely to look at some file (private) you forgot to bring with you, or any number of other things (fewer firewall errors on p2p networks? true p2p voip, without needing to sign up with a service that lets you punch holes in NAT?). This would also work without the dynamic DNS provider, but the URL would look uglier.

Most likely, this would also lead to relaxing the typical rule ISPs tend to have against running servers on home connections. They can't really forbid something that gets built into the OS like these sorts of features probably will.

No, it'll be an excuse for an ISP to give you a /64, but firewall out all but the number of addresses you get unless you pay for more.

And servers will still be banned - there's not enough bandwidth upstream from most connections to handle everyone serving something (last mile problem).

Everyone thinks IPv6 is the magic savior - it'll enforce net neutrality, it'll prevent your PC from getting infected, it'll solve the public IP issue, it'll solve NAT issues, it'll have QoS for real, blah blah blah.

Sure IPv6 has it all. But I doubt any ISP will do business any differently with IPv6 than otherwise. In fact, they'll just salivate that any caps will be reached a bit quicker because of the increased IPv6 header size. Mobile operators are probably salivating as well - 5 cents per kilobyte (not kiB), which includes the OTA headers, plus increased IPv6 header size, means the real payload per packet goes down, and more data usage results (== more $$$ - the incremental network cost for IPv6 is low to the network to support IPv6, but not you the user have to pay more for the same traffic since the amount of data you need to transfer increased).

I see IPv6 as allowing an ISP to ding people for more. "You set 20% of your packets last month to have QoS high priority, while your plan only allows 10%". While worms will have to do more work to infect hosts, they'll just be a lot smarter about checking hosts. And the home user, even if they got 1:1 IP mappings, will probably stick a nice firewall in front of their modem that blocks incoming packets. Cablemodems (not sure about ADSL) can also be blocked from recognizing more than N MAC addresses per boot, too, so you'll have to alias your NIC to have more IPs (how many home users can do THAT? And it makes routing so much more fun!).

Nothing will change, really, other than not being able to run out of IP addresses. Business as usual.

Hell, NAT has had one benefit - it's made firewalls a lot easier to configure because you don't have to open 20 ports to play a game like you used to just over a decade ago. Torrent clients seem to work fine using one port rather than one port per torrent like they used to. Online gaming seems to work just fine with 2 or 3 ports opened (or none - it was ironically easier to configure my PS3, Xbox360 and Wii to play online than my PC - and I have UPnP disabled!), and many protocols that required incoming connectivity got phased out or adapted (e.g. FTP). And the prevalence of ssh makes life a lot easier for remote access and poor-man's VPN stuff.

services?

[Neil Watson]

Potentially these customers will have a small block of ipv6 addresses. Will they be allowed to run their own web or email services?

What's the big deal with IPv6

[pak9rabid]

Why does everyone here get so excited when anything about IPv6 is mentioned? From an end-user's perspective, it appears to accomplish the same thing that IPv4 does, except addresses are longer and contain more characters. Are there any real benefits from and end-user's perspective in using IPv6? ISPs are still going to charge the same amount for public IPs and people are still going to user routers with NAT to save money on having to pay extra for additional IPs. From a sysadmin point of view, it's just going to mean more work and probably sleepless nights as we discover quirks with software and equipment that don't play nicely with IPv6. So, whats to get excited about?

Re:What's the big deal with IPv6

[z4ce]

Let's say you're using Skype or bittorrent. And you want to do it on more than one computer, and you want to do it relatively efficiently. You need IPV6. Creating P2P apps is a pain with all of the NAT in the world.

Re:What's the big deal with IPv6

[kimvette]

A lot of devices still do not support IPv6. Phones, cellphones,

A lot of people have to type in IP addresses (sysadmins, etc.) when configuring devices, DNS, web servers, and so forth, and those huge address strings are a pain in the ass. I don't want to deal with them. I like the dotted quads.

Also, one occasionally needs to access machines by IP address when DNS flakes out. What do you do when a DNS server goes down? Ideally you have a secondary DNS however not all organizations are willing to spend the money - especially in this economic climate.

OMG! OMG!.IPv6 is coming for ME!

[ae1294]

It's funny how all of you are complaining so much about this. IPv6 is a required evil for the internet to keep going and it will simplify things greatly and should speed up things in general too. That is if and when they get rid of the IPv4 hardware...

I've never seen a bunch of self described computer geeks whining so much about something that will simplify routing and get rid of NAT which is a truely horrid hack.

Come on guys, you know you are going to have to deal with problems no mater what happens in computer land?! Might as well deal with a problem that will make the internet routing make sense again and it's not like it will need to be done again in your life time.

Re:OMG! OMG!.IPv6 is coming for ME!

[Just Some Guy]

But guess what, if you understand NAT, you will NEVER have to upgrade past IPv4, because you will NEVER run out of IP Addresses. NAT is just the flexible approach to the problem that alot of people don't like because they don't understand.

Meanwhile, back in reality...

In abstract, NAT treats addr+port as a 48-bit address, so you're effectively trading ports for address. That means you only get one port 80 per public IP, so forget having more than one webserver (unless you can somehow get your visitors to go to http://www.example.com:8080/ ). Every P2P app, every Skype, every game server, every random application you want to post has to have a unique port number across your entire network.

Can you really not see why that sucks in comparison to IPv6 which lets every machine on your LAN listen on the whole 2^16 port range as your firewall allows?

People who don't understand NAT at all like IPv6. People who only barely understand it, like yourself, think IPv4+NAT is spiffy. People who actually understand NAT and what it implies think that it needs to be taken out back and shot.

Re:REPENT!!

[garcia]

If I had the ability, I would rate this "+5 You Owe Me A Dry Keyboard"

Re:Proud to be a Comcast customer?

[Tacvek]

Indeed. I am always shocked that people install any software provided by the ISP. They don't need some broken net-nanny software, a half-assed firewall that does not work as well as the Windows firewall it disables, having branding adding to internet explorer and outlook express, yet another worthless IE toolbar, or even worse, some form of stand-alone (screen edge docking) toolbar. The only feature that might be reasonable, is changing the IE homepage, and they can install software to do that.

Then again, I also find it incredibly annoying that home routers come with big warning stickers that you should install the software on the cd, since that software is in no way nessisary thanks to the web interface. Indeed, I honestly have no idea what is even on said CDs, but whatever it is, I don't miss it.