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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)
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.
Are you sure these are not 6to4 addresses (2002:::xxx)?
By default, Vista and Win7 will automatically allocate a 6to4 address for each non-private IPv4 address configured on the computer.
(since you mentioned ipconfig and not ifconfig, I assume you are using Windows)
throw new SuccessException("Sig read successfully");
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.
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.
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 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.
Do they make enough painkillers to deal with the headaches this'll cause?
What headaches are those? Have you dealt with IPv6 at all? It's very easy to work with, and co-exists perfectly well with IPv4. I set up IPv6 in my house with a tunnel and it was amazing how smooth it was. I set up the IPv6 tunnel and addresses on my router (that was a little tricky -- but no more than any other router configuration), started up radvd, which periodically broadcasts an announcement about what the local IPv6 router is, and instantly every machine on the network -- Linux, Mac and Windows -- had an IPv6 address in addition to their private IPv4 address (10.x.x.x). Of course, the typical home user couldn't do any of that stuff, but they don't have to if the v6 service comes directly from their ISP.
What's more, I was surprised to note that as soon as all my computers had v6 adresses, they started using them! IPv6 DNS is in place, and all decent applications do an IPv6 name lookup in parallel with the IPv4, and if they get an IPv6 answer, they connect via v6. I know Firefox does because I have a Firefox add-on that shows the IP of the web server in the status bar, and sometimes I come across sites for which it shows a v6 address.
About the only part of the infrastructure that really isn't ready, as far as I can tell, is everyone's home routers. Those ubiquitous Linksys boxes mostly don't support v6 unless you put third-party firmware on them (which I did, but most people obviously wouldn't do). But I'm sure the next generation or two of home routers will come with IPv6 support enabled and it will Just Work. Oh, and they'll also be configured by default to reject externally-originated connections, so that Joe Sixpack will still have the same level of firewalling he has with NAT -- but with lower overhead and fewer limitations. Until those routers are widely available, v6 and v4 can coexist quite nicely.
I predict that this will be relatively painless for Comcast's techs, and completely transparent to their customers.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?