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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.'"
I never thought I'd say this, but I'm glad that I'm a Comcast customer!
(Please excuse me while I go wash out my mouth with soap)
Do they make enough painkillers to deal with the headaches this'll cause?
Otherwise: Good Luck, guys! You'll need it.
I have Comcast. Typing ipconfig into my command prompt returns IPV6 addresses.
I did not RTFA but it seems to me that they have already started with this in 2009.
As long as DNS works fine, and I can access all my favorite porn sites, I don't care what is going on under the covers.
For all I know, it could be hamsters squeaking in HyperCard. As a user, it really doesn't matter.
Now buy the T-shirt. ::1 (0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1)
There's no place like
Will comcast unveil a "tiered plan" whereby you only get the first 5 groups of four hexadecimal digits at the base price, with prices increasing up to 8?
THL phish sticks
Bbrrrriiiing. Bbrrrriiiing.
You: Hello?
Dependant Relative: My internet isn't working!
You: Is the modem turned on?
Dependant Relative: Yes it IS!! It even says I'm connected with eye-pee-vee-six now. But now none of my programs work!! The man from Comcast said it was an upgrade from than eye-pee-vee-four. I thought six was better than four!? Is it because I'm using Windows 7? Do I need to get Windows 6? And my internet is explorer 8? Can I still get emails? And the computer is really slow! Can you come over? ... etc. etc.
You: Curse you Comcast. Curse you!!!
May the Maths Be with you!
I've been hearing that IPv4 addresses are "almost gone" for maybe 10 years now.
Verizon has IP6.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Potentially these customers will have a small block of ipv6 addresses. Will they be allowed to run their own web or email services?
UNIX/Linux Consulting
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?
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.
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.
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.
I put on my robe and wizard hat..
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.
I would prefer an addressing system that simplifies life for me
Agreed. What I'd really like to see is some kind of naming protocol so I don't have to remember all these long strings of numbers separated by dots. It would be awesome if internet addresses were identified by an alphanumeric name, then when I use that name there is a server somewhere that figures out what IP address that name is really pointing to.
I bet if everyone here at 216.34.181.45 put their minds to it we could even come up with something here.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
There will be no paying extra for additional IPs. Everybody will get a /64. Look at this:
Addresses available in IPv4: 4,294,967,296
Addresses available PER CUSTOMER for IPv6: 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
This enables stateless autoconfiguration (usually based on MAC addresses) that simplifies everybody's lives.
Of course they can, and they will.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
[citation needed]
Crap. That was one of those slashdot comments that don't really require a response.
Feel free to whoosh! me.
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.
I guess I live a sheltered life, because I've been using IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel for about 7 years and I've never had a site break like that.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
That's because you are using an IPv6 address in the 6to4 address space, not a native IPv6 address.
And according to trace, your ISP doesn't have their own 6to4 router deployed, so the traffic gets sent to whoever announces the shortest route to 192.88.99.1 route via BGP.
(192.88.99.1 is a special IP which means 'any 6to4 router')
throw new SuccessException("Sig read successfully");
That was one of those slashdot comments that don't really require a whoosh.
The large telecoms and cable outfits have tons of unused IP space that could be CIDR blocked out, think of the class A 24.X.X.X for instance that used to be @Home and Rodgers, large portions are empty! AT&T moved @Home to 12.X.X.X and then subsequently provides managed space to cable outfits like Mediacomm etc.
Now Mediacomm has just finally got around to getting its own space, is AT&T offering to CIDR out their precious class A?
No of course not, like some of the others, they get allocations from ARIN and sit on them instead of consolidating. They have scads of CIDR blocks used by all sorts of companies out there. Heck ARIN should just re-map some of those AT&T direct to the customers, let them keep the 12.X.X.X A Space.
Back in the day, Mark Lottor did mapping of all live ping able IP's before firewalls were so common and NAT extremely rare. If he were to make a comparison with whomever does like mapping today to those legacy maps and IP allocations, it would be a fascinating graphic to show the transformations and if by carrier, show how greedily the Worldcom/UUNets Sprints and Baby Bells have asked for space, color to their identity and now look to see many time those scattered CIDR blocks are empty. Sprint, old UUNet and Baby Bell CIDR's if unused, should get back into the pool.
Where is Mark Lottor and these newer guys with the latest IPV4 utilization's mapped out for the comparison analysis.
Enough said.
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
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.
The large telecoms and cable outfits have tons of unused IP space that could be CIDR blocked out
No, they don't. The last I heard, reclaiming all /8 netblocks would return something like 8% of available space back to the pool. When usage is growing exponentially (or would be if it wasn't constrained to a tiny fishbowl), 8% isn't worth the aggravation.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I have a WRT54G running Tomato and Comcast gives it a IPv4, and Tomato assigns IPv6 to my internal network.
How did you get IPv6 working on Tomato? I was under the impression that it wasn't supported.
Does anyone have instructions?
Just because you can't ping something doesn't mean it isn't in use. ARIN and the other RIRs require extensive documentation before they give out more space, and all of the companies you've mentioned have received it. I recommend reading up on how a SWIP works, followed by getting an understanding of rWhois. At that point you might have a better understanding of some of the issues. Heck, NANOG has had some excellent discussions on the subject of IPv4 address reclamation, and the outcome of those discussions is that it's a lot of work for very, very little benefit.
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Lets clear this up.
All you know from this traceroute is that the routers between 2002:185a:90f:1234::1 and ams-core-1.tengige0-0-0-0.swip.net are acting in a transparent manner. It could be because they are not decrementing the TTL on each hop.
This could be because they are transparent routers, it could be an IPv6 tunnel over IPv4 or something else, you really don't know and are making silly assumptions.
What bothers me however is that either your Windows Vista/7 PC (as noted by the C:\Users in the command prompt and your use of windows tracert instead of traceroute) is directly connected to the Internet, while it is possible that you are doing that, it would be utterly stupid and I'm going to make an assumption of my own, that you are not directly connected to the Internet. Why do I make this assumption? Well partially because its a rather quick way to get exploited, theres always SOMETHING you can exploit in an MS OS and that it means you only have one PC, being that this is slashdot I can guess that those are not the case, so you aren't directly connected to the Internet and the first hop you're talking to is a DLink or Linksys router or something.
Now this makes sense, as it simply means your router is connected to swip.net using an IPv6 over IPv4 tunnel. Since this is a free service and several consumer grade devices support it, this is more likely the case. I'm not real sure how you end up with IPv6 enabled on your router and not have any clue about it, but perhaps it was done by a roommate or something like that.
Eitherway, me thinks it might be better for you to learn wtf is going on with your own internet connection than talk about how Time Warner handlers theirs.
Finally, since you're obviously new to IPv6 and networking. SWIP sells connections, they are a backbone provider which is why you see a direct connect from them to Google. They also provide IPv6 tunnel endpoints so you can tunnel it over IPv4, which appears to be exactly whats going on in your case. This tunnels are free to anyone who signed up. With that in mind and the fact that tunnels have to generally be setup on both ends in advance its likely that if Time Warner IS involved in this, they are simply working a deal with SWIP, not robbing service from them. I would have to say that SWIP.net is fully aware of the tunnel route and has authorized it, that is after all one of their core businesses.
I suggested you learn a little more about the current state of IPv6, the existing providers with IPv6 support, and most importantly, what your little Linksys or DLink router is doing that you are completely unaware of. At least go turn off your tunnel to swip.net before claiming that TWC supports IPv6 in your area.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Uhm, reclaiming ALL /8 netblocks would return 100% of the network.
You people really need to get over this classful idea of routing and assignment, its hasn't been that way for years, we use subnet masks now, you heard of them?
But back to the errors in your statement, each /8 assignment accounts for approximately 3.125% of the total network address space (not usable space, TOTAL space). So about 2 and a half of these assignments now account for your 'random, pulled out of your ass 8%'.
Well, since I know that it is impossible to get anything close to 8% of the address space using only /8s I can immediately assume you don't have a clue at all.
What else? Well, there are 128 /8 blocks in classful routing. That is half the address space total, or 50% if you recalled them all and ignored other classful networks. Again, we're not seeing your 8%.
So, if it isn't possible to get 8% of the address space using /8 allocations, perhaps you should consider that the source of said information is most likely incorrect. If they can't do simple math, its going to be hard to take anything else seriously. When you start a statement, as if it were fact, by saying 'last I heard' its generally a sign that you are wrong and someone is going to point it out to you shortly.
For more clues about classful, classless and the Internet back when EVERY assignment was a /8 by design, please checkout the following Wikipedia articles, they make great starting points to get a clue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classful_network
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address_shortage
Is reclaiming the /8s worth it? Yes, far more so than reclaiming the smaller wasted blocks. But thats the problem, blocks were allocated poorly from day one and now its a freaking mess thats a bitch to clean up. So we have two choices, clean it up or move to IPv6.
In case you haven't noticed, the current trend is to just clean it up, much to the disappointment of many slashdotters who want IPv6 so bad it made them forget why exactly they wanted it in the first place. :)
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Uhm, reclaiming ALL /8 netblocks would return 100% of the network. You people really need to get over this classful idea of routing and assignment, its hasn't been that way for years, we use subnet masks now, you heard of them?
That's what we call "irony". You see, there aren't that many /8 netblocks, and you don't hear people clamoring for the subnetting of anything smaller. I mean, what are you going to do with a /20? Break it up and route two /21s?
But back to the errors in your statement, each /8 assignment accounts for approximately 3.125% of the total network address space (not usable space, TOTAL space).
There are 256 /8 netblocks, each accounting for about .4% of the TOTAL space. If you somehow missed that, then you're not really qualified to argue either side of the debate.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Err, I might be wrong. . . but while it's possible (may even be the default - if that's true, that's unfortunate) for your IPv6 address to use the Mac address as the last 48(?) or whatever bits of the IP address, I don't believe you *must* do that. I believe you can just use ::1, ::2, ::3, ::4, etc as the 'host' portion of the IPv6 address, can't you?
It's my understanding that IPv6 really doesn't care what the last 48 or 64 bits (I don't remember the exact number of bits for the host portion - just that it's a very large number of em) of the address is, so long as it's unique? I think the use of Mac addresses was just an 'easy' way to get a unique bitmask for that part of the IP address, isn't it?