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

what about caps?

[gandhi_2]

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?

REPENT!!

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

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!!!

Re:REPENT!!

[thesandtiger]

My brother in law used to call me up, frequently, to ask me for tech support help. He's a doctor, so I solved it by calling him up every single day to ask him some inane question about medicine.

"Hey, so I'm at the store and I want to buy band-aids. Which ones are best?"
"Hey, it's me again - so when I called up 5 minutes ago to ask about band-aids, I didn't realize they had purple ones. Are those going to work differently than the beige ones?"
"Oh, hi, me again... I was walking by the frozen food section and it was kind of cold there but it's a really hot day outside - can I catch sick from the temperature differential?"
"Yeah, it's... well, this is a bit strange. But I was at work today and one of my co-workers kind of has a limp. Can you tell me what that's from? I don't wanna ask him - let me put him on with you, maybe you can fix him..."
"So I was on a date last night and we went to a used bookstore and I started sneezing. Is that the swine flu? Well, yeah, it was dusty in there, but Oprah was talking about the Swine Flu, and I had bacon the other day so maybe I'm going to ... hello? Helloooo?"

For people who don't have a particular profession, calling them up at odd hours to ask them for tiny favors also works. My next-door neighbor used to ask me for tech support all the time, so I started asking him to pick things up at the store for me, give me rides, loan me odd random items ("Can I borrow one of your bookends?" "Do you have a shoehorn I can use for a couple of days? Mine's in the shop.")

Are we serious this time?

[CobaltTiger]

I've been hearing that IPv4 addresses are "almost gone" for maybe 10 years now.

Re:I still don't like IPv6

[oldspewey]

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.

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:Asprin

[swillden]

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.

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.