Verizon Refuses To Provide Complete IPv6

Glendale2x writes "I'm a progressive sort of guy and I want to go full dual-stack, IPv6 for the future, etc. However I recently tried to turn up a new Verizon circuit with IPv6 (after a 6-month fiber install process), and to my chagrin the order they accepted back in May they're now saying is against their policy to provide. They're missing around 29% of the IPv6 internet and refuse to carry it. Tell me again how we're supposed to encourage IPv6 adoption in the face of a huge black hole like this?"

Comments

bullshit

[shentino]

They'd damn well better give you a full refund if that v6 was an essential part of the contract.

If verizon's pulling this shit AND trying to keep your money they need their asses spanked in court, big time.

Re:bullshit

[Sponge Bath]

...they need their asses spanked in court, big time.

That's some fine internet tough talk, but realistically the best solution open to the common man is to simply vote with your dollars and leave. Verizon is probably happy enough to let a squeaky wheel out of any time contract, if they really are in violation, knowing that the unwashed masses will not notice these kinds of failings.

Re:bullshit

[NoYob]

I wonder if a complaint or enough of them to the FCC would get them to comply.

But yeah, definitely take any and all legal recourse.

Re:bullshit

[nacturation]

That's some fine internet tough talk, but realistically the best solution open to the common man is to simply vote with your dollars and leave. Verizon is probably happy enough to let a squeaky wheel out of any time contract, if they really are in violation, knowing that the unwashed masses will not notice these kinds of failings.

The problem is if the six month install process came with a hefty price tag (article is Slashdotted, so can't read up on it). Voting with your feet and going elsewhere implies a massive sunk cost that may not be recoverable, depending on how open the fiber accessibility is to other providers.

Re:bullshit

[ZekoMal]

That's some fine internet tough talk, but realistically the best solution open to the common man is to simply vote with your dollars and leave.

I'm sick of this excuse. Voting with your dollar works when your dollar is the only dollar. When millions of other people have dollars and a good chunk of them are ignorant, your dollar won't be missed. I took my dollar away from Verizon years ago, and there's a good chance that many others did the same thing.

There are three methods to dealing with businesses: you can let them do whatever they want to you, you can quietly go elsewhere, or you can speak up loudly and take them to court. The first method makes the business happy, the second makes you feel good about yourself but does very little, and the third lets everyone hear what evils the company did and how they handle it, thus making more people make decisions of their own. Seeing as how all of the duopolies and monopolies and x-opolies are still thriving despite the silent treatment, I would think a more aggressive approach is the only way to fight back.

Re:bullshit

[kimvette]

The problem is if the six month install process came with a hefty price tag (article is Slashdotted, so can't read up on it)

Coral cache: http://www.rollernet.us.nyud.net:8090/wordpress/2009/10/verizon-refuses-to-provide-complete-ipv6/

If you use the "slashdotter" Firefox extension, it will automatically insert coralcache, mirrordot, and google cache links into the summary for you.

Re:bullshit

[Sponge Bath]

I'm sick of this excuse. Voting with your dollar works when your dollar is the only dollar.

It's not an excuse, it's a realization of the grim truth. Reread my post, we agree that it won't change Verizon's actions. It *will* free you individually from the failings of Verizon. That's about as good as it gets these days.

Re:bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Furthermore, taking your dollar elsewhere assumes that dollar can be used on an alternative. Here in the US, broadband generally means two or three options, cable or DSL, and if you're really lucky, FiOS. Although the latter being Verizon is already suffering from greed, now that they've ramped up in price, plus added extra fees to the service, especially if you don't use them as your telco.

Re:bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I would think a more aggressive approach is the only way to fight back.

So what you're saying is, we should start cutting their fiber until they don't suck anymore?

Re:bullshit

[paul248]

It won't free you from the failings of Verizon if you happen to be on one of the networks they omit from their routing table.

Re:bullshit

[PNutts]

...or you can speak up loudly and take them to court.

Let me guess. You're an attorney? 'Cause that's where all the dollars go when you take that action. But good luck and if you win, enjoy that coupon for a free cellphone with the purchase of another.

Re:bullshit

[c0d3g33k]

A-fscking-men! Thanks for the wonderful and insightful comment. When I've posted comments on forums to voice a grievance along with a promise to never buy a product from company X again, the response I've gotten from the "Company X employee" can often be paraphrased as "so what? You're not buying our product so you're not a customer. Why should we care what you think?". Voting with your dollar doesn't cause enough pain to get attention - there are enough other uninformed customers to keep the cash flowing in. Evil can't stand the light of day, so drawing public attention to demonstrably bad practices (to avoid libel lawsuits) is more likely to get their attention.

Re:bullshit

[QuantumG]

So what you're saying is that if you're a prisoner of a monopoly you should WHINE as loudly as you possibly can. Rather than, say, starting a competitor.. or just accepting that nothing you do in life matters.

Re:bullshit

[Sponge Bath]

Nothing you do will guarantee that *every* corporation in the world will do *everything* to your satisfaction, including suing Verizon.

But if you control a company that can afford the financial resources and distraction from your business to go head to head in an extended legal battle with Verizon, then get to it and report back! I'm genuinely interested to hear the results.

Re:bullshit

[c0d3g33k]

With that attitude you can be sure you won't get better than that. Nobody said fighting the good fight wouldn't be work.

You: "You have cheated me, sir! I demand retribution!"

Them: "Go suck an egg, loser! You can't make me!"

You: "Oh well, I'm taking my business elsewhere!".

Next unscrupulous business: "Look - here comes another rube! Let's see how much we can take him for before he bolts." If you walk away quietly to avoid confrontation or because you think you have to take the abuse, you deserve what you get. This includes something as simple as poor service or a corked bottle of wine at a restaurant. You don't have to be an ass about it, but politely and firmly letting them know you are unhappy and are willing take measures to get what you paid for *does* get results. These days, "I'm going to write about you in my blog" is as effective a stick as "I live next door to the local restaurant critic - he'll be extremely happy to stop by" used to be. If he has a blog, even that still works. If you think like a sheep, that's exactly how you will be treated.

Re:bullshit

[witherstaff]

Go with your state Public Utilities Commission. In my ISP days any disputes I had that I took to the PUC would get resolved rather quickly. The FCC doesn't care, Verizon lobbies them far more than a user ever could.

Re:bullshit

[Stolovaya]

If there was any realistic way to be a competitor, sure. But it's a pretty locked market.

Re:bullshit

[elashish14]

Exactly.

In particular because a lot of the money that they use to put up the lines (for their business) comes from public tax dollars. And also because they have a near monopoly in many areas. The courts have already decided that cable companies don't have to share their lines (I assume that this translates to Verizon too if they're not exactly specified by the ruling) so they have a public obligation to provide full services if it's on the public's tab.

It's okay that we live in a country where our government gives so much to business - but not that the businesses give nothing back.

Re:bullshit

[QuantumG]

It's really not. You've just gotta start at the bottom.. something Americans don't like doing anymore.

Re:bullshit

[HeronBlademaster]

I'll gladly start a competitor if you'll provide me with the funding. Personally, I don't qualify for the multimillion dollar loan I'd need to be able to build (or rent) the infrastructure necessary to compete with Comcast or Verizon in just one city, but maybe you do?

That said, yes, complaining about things can certainly make things better. Did AT&T charge you an activation fee or upgrade fee for you last cell phone? Complain - they'll waive it if you try. (Worked for me.) Think Comcast is charging too much? Call them and tell them you want to cancel service - they'll offer you a lower price to try and get you to say. (But don't say that. Manipulate them into it.)

Are you not getting paid what you're worth? Tell your manager, and explain why you think you're worth more - a simple e-mail along those lines once got me a $2/hour raise. (This probably won't work for salaried jobs.)

"Whining" is rarely productive. But complaining - especially manipulative complaining - can be very productive indeed.

Re:bullshit

[pete6677]

Easy to say when you're not the one paying the attorney's bill.

Re:bullshit

[QuantumG]

So, basically, you agree with me? If there's nothing you can do about it, stop whining?

And BTW, you don't need multimillion dollar loans, you need multimillion dollar *investment* and you'll find that's a lot easier to get if the people you're suggesting you compete with are as incompetent as you claim they are, or maybe you're just whining.

Re:bullshit

[SanityInAnarchy]

Or if you vote with your dollars by switching to another cell network or ISP... that Verizon buys.

Re:bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sick of this excuse. Voting with your dollar works when your dollar is the only dollar. When millions of other people have dollars and a good chunk of them are ignorant, your dollar won't be missed.

Let me guess: When people disagree with you, your most commonly-recited phrase when you get home (or when you log off) is "They all called me mad, but I'll show them who's mad!", right?

You're sounding like the mad scientist stereotype: Overly confident in yourself, overly critical of anyone disagreeing with you, and perfectly willing to show those fools who was mad all this time, so to speak. Because you, of course, are so much smarter than they are.

I'm not saying you're wrong (in fact, going on facts alone, you're quite right), it's just that you sure as hell aren't going to convince any of the simpletons from the village that you're right with an attitude like that, and if you start pushing them without convincing them, well, that's when the metaphorical torches and pitchforks come out of the tool shed and you learn that the power of a large group of educated stupid people is a lot greater than one guy throwing a switch and screaming "IT'S ALIVE!!!".

Re:bullshit

[Opportunist]

And just how many are going to care about the third either?

For reference, see Sony and rootkit.

Re:bullshit

[shentino]

How can you vote with your dollars if they've been swallowed by the company that already cheated you?

Re:bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends what the contract said. Expecting Verizon to provide transit for your IPv6 allocation is not reasonable unless it was specifically called out for in the contract. IPv6 is not like IPv4, it is not expected you get to keep your prefix forever. If you are multi-homing then things get messy, but again, if it wasn't spelled out in the contract...

Why Verizon doesn't have 2620:: in their tables is another question entirely, perhaps they are opposed to the provider independent addresses and trying to use their weight to squash it? Or maybe their routers burped.

In any event, carrying ingress PI addresses does not obligate them to provide PI transit to their customers without a specific contract to do so.

Re:bullshit

[shentino]

I think it's time for the public to use eminent domain to seize the cables.

Some may balk at this, but the government already ponied up for broadband investment that never materialized, so as far as I'm concerned the lines should already be publicly owned.

Re:bullshit

[Opportunist]

Honest business has no room in mass markets. Simple reason: People want cheap goods and services and don't care about quality, simply because they don't know just what quality they may expect.

Since there are rarely "secret" ways to save money in business, the only way to offer cheaper products is to let quality slide. Usually in areas where only few of your customers will notice it. In this case, this means that v6 service will be limited if existing. Why? Because 99% of their customers won't notice it since they don't even know whether IPv6 is some protocol or some new program to download more porn.

Now, you COULD of course open your own ISP and offer better service. Less oversold bandwidth. A newsserver that carries more than your own ad-filled newsgroups. Unshaped traffic that can't only be used sensibly for http traffic (where it doesn't matter whether every other connection dies within 5 minutes, making ssh connections a PITA). You would have to charge more, though, simply because your cost will be higher. How many people are going to pay for it? Again, 99% of the users that could sign up with you won't know or care about what you offer, or at least not enough to pay the higher fee. Of that last percent, how many will even know that your service is really better?

Saying "make it better" is usually not going to cut it. Market won't allow it.

Re:bullshit

[linguizic]

A complaint to the FCC took care of my issue with Comcast pretty quickly when they tried double billing me for an old address.

Re:bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use the "slashdotter" Firefox extension, it will automatically insert coralcache, mirrordot, and google cache links into the summary for you.

Why don't slashdot do that automatically?!

Re:bullshit

[Kral_Blbec]

Worked for the guy with the Verizon Math story :D

Re:bullshit

[tjstork]

It's not an excuse, it's a realization of the grim truth. Reread my post, we agree that it won't change Verizon's actions. It *will* free you individually from the failings of Verizon. That's about as good as it gets these days

Has the thought occurred to you that maybe most of Verizon's other customers don't care if those people in that unreachable zone, cannot be reached? Like, if Verizon decreed that they would no longer provide access to google, there would be a stampede to the door. There hasn't been, so maybe, its just not a big deal.

Re:bullshit

[stephanruby]

I'll gladly start a competitor if you'll provide me with the funding. Personally, I don't qualify for the multimillion dollar loan I'd need to be able to build (or rent) the infrastructure necessary to compete with Comcast or Verizon in just one city, but maybe you do?

Even if you did qualify, you wouldn't put up your own assets/income as collateral anyway. That's just crazy commie talk! The more money you ask for, the less personal accountability is required. That is why we create fictitious legal people on paper, if something goes wrong, we can always blame that "person" instead.

Re:bullshit

[Monsuco]

When millions of other people have dollars and a good chunk of them are ignorant, your dollar won't be missed.

The fact that they are ignorant shows one thing quite clearly, they don't really mind. I could get up on some ideological high horse, but really, nobody cares. IPv6 may matter to you, but until IPv4 exhaustion causes enough problems, nobody else really has a reason to notice or care.

the third lets everyone hear what evils the company did and how they handle it

Evil? Really? They didn't correctly provide access to all computers using a protocol that has below 1% usage. That may be an obscure breach of contract, but calling that evil seems a bit much wouldn't you say?

thus making more people make decisions of their own.

Yes, it is your job to makes sure people make the decisions we want. If nobody cares then it is your right to impose caring upon them!

Seeing as how all of the duopolies and monopolies and x-opolies are still thriving despite the silent treatment, I would think a more aggressive approach is the only way to fight back.

More aggressive? It's their equipment, not ours? It isn't like there is a right to IPv6 access, they can choose whether or not to sell such services using their facilities. There is no monopoly either. You can use Verizon's fiber, your phone companies DSL, your cable company's cable, a satelight based service, a cell tower based service, or just forgo internet access and rely upon hot spots, your local library, or just do without. Actual real monopolies are extraordinarily rare and there are generally two ways they emerge. The first is by providing better service to their customers than all other competitors (your view of "better" might be different from the customers, but your view doesn't matter, while the customer's does). This is how Microsoft, Standard Oil, A & P, Ford, U.S. Steel, and Wal-Mart have gotten huge, and all either now or at one time had massive shares of their markets (though it is debatable how much of a "monopoly" each might have been). The second way is by getting a countries government to protect them or fund them. Amtrack, the former "Ma Bell" AT&T, countless local utilities, the health care companies is many countries and in a few states such as Massachusetts and Tennessee, most educational facilities at both primary and secondary levels, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Postal System (at least in the USA), the Social Security "survivor's insurance" pension system, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance, the FDIC, the now dead proposal of a "Public Option" in health care, National Flood Insurance, and in a sense most labor unions all essentially function as monopolistic companies whom are or at one time were protected by the government. The difference between monopolies in the first and in the second is that those in the first category generally are forced to serve customers well to prevent new competition from arriving and ousting them. As you can see, this is generally futile as many of these companies don't retain their dominance for long either due to new technology ousting them due to their slower response time than small companies, or due to some competitors finding a way to beat them by doing better. Companies in the second category generally have no reason to care what their customers thing. Either regulation clears the field for them or they are subsidized to the extent that nobody can challenge them. Verizon is most certainly in the first category in the few areas it may have something even vaguely resembling a monopoly, and if they do something that angers their competitors, eventually their monopolies shall be usurped.

Re:bullshit

[rastilin]

That's some fine internet tough talk, but realistically the best solution open to the common man is to simply vote with your dollars and leave. Verizon is probably happy enough to let a squeaky wheel out of any time contract, if they really are in violation, knowing that the unwashed masses will not notice these kinds of failings.

Maybe, but the fact is they had a contract and they broke it. The best thing for someone to do is to sue them, which has the additional benefit of changing their long-term policy and drawing attention to their failings.Lawsuits aren't hard and you can find lawyers to take these kinds of cases for free.

Re:bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who worked for a large corporation (DirecTV) who started a DSL company (well they actually bought Northpoint and Rythyms). I have to say the competition from telcos is fucking dirty. I the shit all the ILECs pulled on us was amazing. I couldn't believe they could get away with the stuff they did.

The best was when Qwest was taking 2 months + to provision lines for us... we started calling more often to figure out what they were doing. That is when they replied, "your contract does not specify phone supprt, stop calling us." They disconnected the line shortly after. We were fucked... yeah I guess it's some idiot's fault for not making sure the wording specifically said "phone support" but that was amazingly dirty.

We went out of business for many different reasons shortly afterward.. some our fault some because of all the dirty tricks the telcos pulled. The only one that was decent w/ us was Southwest Bell. Also, I worked for Voicestream (now T-Mobile) for a while and other phone companies fucked us over too. I'm sure we did some screwed up shit as well.. It's probably tradition.

Re:bullshit

[dcollins]

"...realistically the best solution open to the common man is to simply vote with your dollars and leave..."

No, vote with your votes. Political organization and action are the only ways that things get changed. Not passive-aggressive silent non-purchases for a few bucks.

Re:bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

There are three methods to dealing with businesses: you can let them do whatever they want to you, you can quietly go elsewhere, or you can speak up loudly and take them to court. //SNIP// I would think a more aggressive approach is the only way to fight back.

Actually, a fourth method would be to bomb and/or sabotage their equipment, lines, etc. Now *THAT* would be an aggressive approach!!

Re:bullshit

[rantingkitten]

I think part of the problem is that for every legitimate complaint someone might have against a company, there are about fifty clueless dolts making completely asinine and totally unjustified complaints about the same company. Making a public scene about a company's atrocities is a great idea but in general, looking at complaints about a company just nets the loons, the disturbed, and the just plain goofy. It's not always easy to make a real complaint heard in the sea of idiocy.

Re:bullshit

[HeronBlademaster]

I agree that whining is useless. The post you replied to didn't say anything about whining, though, and neither did that post's parent post, which is why I made a distinction between whining and complaining.

Re:bullshit

[stephanruby]

I would think a more aggressive approach is the only way to fight back.

Not me. I'm taking the more passive approach. I'm currently stockpiling static ip addresses. I've got three so far. If all the people of Dubai are surviving on one static ip address alone, I figure I should be able to easily survive on three.

Re:bullshit

[compro01]

Ad revenue, copyrights, and other legal stuff.

Re:bullshit

[Florian Weimer]

That's some fine internet tough talk, but realistically the best solution open to the common man is to simply vote with your dollars and leave.

This isn't about the garden variety Verizon, it's about ex-UUNET/MCI/Worldcom IP carrier services. Such things used to be fixable.

Re:bullshit

[Planesdragon]

Let me guess. You're an attorney? 'Cause that's where all the dollars go when you take that action. But good luck and if you win, enjoy that coupon for a free cellphone with the purchase of another.

You're assuming that this would lead to a class action. Not all vs. corporation lawsuits go along that route -- I wager your state has its slew of "little guy X sued big corp Y to get Y to do what Y promised" lawsuits.

Re:bullshit

[Planesdragon]

I think it's time for the public to use eminent domain to seize the cables.

Eminent domain is the gov'ts ability to force a private party to sell something at fair market cost. So, what you're suggesting is that the gov't give verizon MORE money for their network.

The power you're looking for is "anti-trust" or, if you prefer, "nationalization."

Re:bullshit

[dword]

Is it going to be your own time and are you going to pay the lawyers for this? You know, some people don't have time to go to court, because they need to feed their families.

Re:bullshit

[haruharaharu]

So, basically, you agree with me? If there's nothing you can do about it, stop whining?

And BTW, you don't need multimillion dollar loans, you need multimillion dollar *investment* and you'll find that's a lot easier to get if the people you're suggesting you compete with are as incompetent as you claim they are, or maybe you're just whining.

If I did that, I'm pretty sure comcast/verizon would drop prices in your city long enough to choke your cash supply and possibly get laws passed that make it harder to do what you want to do (see muni wireless). They're a monopoly - good luck.

Re:bullshit

[shentino]

Which is exactly the sort of defeatist attitude that lets verizon get away with crap like this.

Verizon knows that its customers can't easily fight back, so it feels justified in screwing them.

A few lawsuits against Verizon for pulling this crap might change their tune.

Re:bullshit

[ShakaUVM]

>>They'd damn well better give you a full refund if that v6 was an essential part of the contract.

From my Terms of Service with Verizon, defining a 'bit': "A unit of information that respresent a single character."

Sigh... both a Tech and Grammar Fail.

I wonder if I can sue them for breach of service if they can't come up with a coding scheme that can pack ASCII into a single bit.

Re:bullshit

[MrNaz]

We're all just so glad that US style capitalism won the cold war. USSR style communism would have delivered poor quality goods and services due to poorly allocated capital and human resources. Instead, we get poor quality goods and services due to unfettered abuse of financial and informational inequalities. On the up side, our farmers don't have to give up their crops to the elite. Oh wait, yes they do.

Re:bullshit

[rant64]

Worked for the guy with the Verizon Math story :D

That was a myth.

Re:bullshit

[Toonol]

Since there are rarely "secret" ways to save money in business, the only way to offer cheaper products is to let quality slide.

And that's often a good thing, since in that case that is what your customer wants. I would often be happier with lower quality for cheaper price.

You're overlooking efficiencies, of course. The reason we're so much better off than a few centuries ago is not because our stuff is lower quality; rather, we've found ways to make better stuff with less effort. Saying the market won't allow "making it better" is ludicrous when the market is ISP service, which didn't even EXIST twenty years ago. I'd say it's being made better.

Re:bullshit

[Toonol]

I'm sick of this excuse. Voting with your dollar works when your dollar is the only dollar.

Bit iffy on the whole concept of "voting", aren't you? If your dollar is that only one leaving, the company's probably doing a pretty good job.

Re:bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Your argument is ludicrous. "Serving customers better" and "the government" are certainly not the two ways monopolies form. Standard Oil, for example, became a monopoly by colluding with the railroad companies to screw over their competitors. That stuff is basic high school history. After this you go on to list off a series of government programs, calling them monopolies and getting more and more ludicrous as you go. I'm surprised you didn't include political parties and charities in your definition of monopolies. But I wish you well with your fight against the evil FDIC.

Re:bullshit

[TapeCutter]

I agree, it should need little more than a judicial reading of the contract and an itemized list of costs. However we are talking about the US legal system which even after a decade of reading slashdot still does not cease to surprise and entertain me.

Re:bullshit

[selven]

Do you vote? If so, why? There are millions of other votes, yours won't be missed.

Re:bullshit

[Jared555]

Too bad you can't file for a restraining order against a corporation to get you out of your contract when they buy out whoever you are with

Re:bullshit

[drinkypoo]

You try starting at the bottom and see how well you do. In fact, it is basically impossible to start any significantly-sized business from the bottom any more, at least in any competitive market, because the entrenched players have already purchased legislation (and are already working on buying more) to prevent new players from entering the market. Technical superiority is not enough, and really never has been. In order to grow a business large, you must be "in bed" with those who make decisions. Look at the last Tier 1 phone/net provider to be spun up: Qwest. The only way they were able to get enough right of way to lay enough fiber to become relevant was that their CEO left Southern Pacific Railroads after brokering a deal there that would get him that right of way from SP. (Or was it UP? I forget. The point still stands.) Qwest therefore never had to start from the bottom: they began from a position of power, and were backed by a fairly awesome amount of capital. For YOU to get to the same point, even if you had more business savvy than trump and more technical ability than everyone who wrote Unix and designed the internet combined, you would have to be likewise connected. That is very much the opposite of "Starting at the bottom".

Re:bullshit

[Walter White]

... but realistically the best solution open to the common man is to simply vote with your dollars and leave.

I did that with General Motors and put them out of business!

Wait...

Re:bullshit

[vtcodger]

***I'm sick of this excuse. Voting with your dollar works when your dollar is the only dollar.*** Voting with your dollar works poorly with actual or defacto monopolies. Copying your correspondence asking why they are not complying with their contract and if they have any plans to stop lying to customers to your state's Attorney General, Public Utility Commission, the FCC, your senators, your congressperson, etc. might have some positive impact on their attitude. Probably not, but worth trying. Ayn Rand's solution -- blow up their effing headquarters --- has a certain appeal, but probably would work out badly.

Re:bullshit

[natehoy]

I had a similar experience when canceling service with a web hosting provider (lowestcosthost.com). They started out OK. and I finally decided to prepay for a year to get a slight discount. A few weeks later, their service rapidly became abysmal, to the point where email would go down for hours, then instead of dealing with the issue they'd just reboot the email server and clear the email buffers on the way back up (losing any email that was in queue). This happened three times in the same month, and I finally called it quits.

After posting a number of requests for help on retrieving the lost email on their help forums and getting no response, I finally vented about their incompetence on their customer forums, whereupon all of my help requests and negative comments were deleted, several were replaced with "EXCELLENT HOST A+++", and I got a nasty letter from someone saying I wasn't a customer any more and I could just piss off and they were keeping my prepaid annual fee thankyouverymuch.

Unfortunately, I had my domain registered through them as well, and had to wait the better part of a month before they finally "abandoned" it and I was able to snap it back up.

So two lessons learned: Never register your domain with your web hosting provider, and never prepay for a year.

Re:bullshit

[ftobin]

I can also recommend Slashdotter as a great extension for Firefox. I still use version 1 Slashdot comment style, and the ability to dynamically load sub-threshold comments is very handy.

Re:bullshit

[L4t3r4lu5]

Use some different dollars, and hire a lawyer.

Re:bullshit

[steelfood]

looking at complaints about a company just nets the loons, the disturbed, and the just plain goofy.

And they gather to create critical mass in a weird little site called slashdot.

Re:bullshit

[fast turtle]

No Lawyer works for "Free" but they would be willing to take such a case on "Contingency", which means they only get paid if you win.

Re:bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

How true this is! I recently went through the painful procedure of purchasing a foreclosed property. The bank's lawyers and title company proved to be entirely incompetent. Never using the title company again doesn't do anything... after all, title companies are a dime a dozen and most folks don't really care who they use. When I filed a formal complaint with the BBB with them though, you'd better believe that got their attention. The owner actually contacted me... she later proved her own horrible ignorance - but that's beside the point.

It's sad we live in a world where, to speak to anyone in charge, we have to file a formal complaint with a third party... and I largely blame that on the "sue them for all they're worth" mentality that seems to be running rampant in the U.S. That's why healthcare costs are so high as well (coincidentally). Life would be so much easier if folks could just be honest in their business dealings. Such honesty and up-front-ness with the customer tends to make everything go more smoothly. I can't for the life of me figure out why big business hasn't figured that one out yet. Mind-boggling really...

Re:bullshit

[digitalunity]

The existing telcos do not like competition, at all. They actively challenge any community-run networks, so even a group of citizens can't sidestep them.

Here in Minnesota a town decided the telephone companies were taking too long to roll out DSL so they started a project to bring broadband to the city themselves. A telephone company sued saying it was unfair competition. The real goal was to delay the co-op until they could get their own network in place so they could undercut the co-op.

If a bomb hit that company, I can't say I wouldn't have some measure of satisfaction.

Re:bullshit

[2obvious4u]

So what you are saying is that it is a government problem, not an ISP problem...

Re:bullshit

[REggert]

They can define the term "bit" to mean whatever they want for that legal document. However, if they make any promises about bandwidth, the same definitions apply. So, if, for example, they are guaranteeing you 10 megabits/second bandwidth, that had better mean you can download a 100MB file in 10 seconds.

Re:bullshit

[shentino]

RTFFAQ

Re:bullshit

[shentino]

Customer indifference isn't what keeps honest business out of the market.

Honest businesses simply can't compete with sleazeballs period, because let's face it, if you cheat and get away with it, you are better off than an honest john no matter what the customer thinks.

It's the same reason you can win a fight very quickly by hitting below the belt, and if the ref isn't watching it pays off every time.

Re:bullshit

[John Bayko]

Check your terms of service. If it's a typical consumer contract, then the company isn't legally obliged to actually perform any service for the money you give them, or reserve the right to change "at any time" the terms of service so what they promise doesn't matter anyway. Any service given is basically for PR purposes, to prevent too many customers from leaving.

This is done because the disparity in power between customers and corporations in high utility, capital intensive industries ("natural monopolies" in economics terms) is so large that customers have no practical choice (when some choice is available, "industry standard practice" generally means all options operate the same way - it's an informal collusion, even among competitors, because the competition is for revenue, not customer service, and they all practice every way of obtaining money from the customer that the others do).

This is why customer protection laws are important. They are meant to "write into" customer service contacts the minimum performance guarantees that customers, by collective political power, want but cannot demand through individual power. It's inefficient and still not generally adequate because corporations have political power too, but better than nothing.

Re:bullshit

[Ajaxamander]

Now that, sir, is an *interesting* idea.

Re:bullshit

[rastilin]

Check your terms of service. If it's a typical consumer contract, then the company isn't legally obliged to actually perform any service for the money you give them, or reserve the right to change "at any time" the terms of service so what they promise doesn't matter anyway. Any service given is basically for PR purposes, to prevent too many customers from leaving.

True, but as I remember, these contracts don't actually stand up in court. They can write a contract that gives them ownership of your children if they want but that doesn't mean it will hold. The understanding is that when you give someone money, they will give you something in return.

If those contracts serve any purpose, it's that they discourage people from attempting to sue.

I don't think IPv6 is really the future any more..

[Anrego]

I think IPv6 is going to end up as another VCD (Video CD). That is, a pre-mature solution that won't ever actually see wide-scale adoption, but will merely fill the space until the _real_ solution is invented (out of genuine necessity).. which will probably be widely adopted quite quickly.

Lets face it.. we've been on the brink of running out of IP's in the IPv4 space for _years_... and life has continued. One day we will... but I think by that point a better technology than IPv6 will have been invented to fix the problem.. and IPv6 will be viewed as a bad dream :(

That being said.. the situation you describe is complete bullshit.. and inherently _everything_ we've come to expect from a large telco

Verizon are just protecting you

[sakdoctor]

From the EVIL 29% of the internet.

Re:Verizon are just protecting you

[Anonymous Coward]

AT&T ?

Re:Verizon are just protecting you

[sconeu]

Does IPv6 have the Evil Bit?

Re:Verizon are just protecting you

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the evil octal. 666.

(Yes, I know that's invalid for IP's, but that's why it's so EEEEVIL.)

Re:Verizon are just protecting you

[dazjorz]

Invalid for IP's? IPv6 has it! *proceeds to ping6 2001:666:666:666:666:666:666:666*

Re:Verizon are just protecting you

[Anonymous Coward]

666 is not invalid. It would actually be 0666, but shorted is 666

Re:Verizon are just protecting you

[Junta]

Dancing turtles are indeed quite evil.

Re:Verizon are just protecting you

[Fireshadow]

Somebody with mods points PLEASE send this up.

Re:Verizon are just protecting you

[Anonymous Coward]

It contains TERRORISTS and LIBERALS.

Re:Verizon are just protecting you

[fluffy99]

I can see how Verizon would designate the prefix for Independant Providers as evil.

Re:Verizon are just protecting you

[selven]

I think you made a typo there - the evil percentage is 92%.

Re:Verizon are just protecting you

[noidentity]

I'm trying to figure out this 29%. Does that mean they for example block the address when the first two bits (out of 128) are 00, but not when they're 01, 10, or 11? So instead of being able to access 340282367000000000000000000000000000000 addresses, you can only access 241600481000000000000000000000000000000 addresses?

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[mysidia]

IPv4 Exhaustion is expected approximately 734 days from today's date. That is just about 2 years.

It takes a lot longer than 2 years to develop a networking standard, and gain acceptance from the community, and no alternative has even been proposed.

There are two solutions on the table: IPv6 and IPv4 with carrier grade NAT.

It's going to be one of those things, in two years.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Drinking Bleach]

IPv6 is a very mature solution. The reason you've been hearing about the IPv4 space running out for years is because it's been prepared for, for about that long of a time. Estimates as to when it'll run out haven't drastically changed, although we are now much closer to the point than we were five years ago :-)

Plus I have an IPv6 connection and home and I'm loving it!

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[NNKK]

I'm sure Comcast will find it very interesting to know that their impending deployment of IPv6 to millions of devices will have all been a bad dream.

If you don't know what's actually going on behind the scenes with IPv6, I suggest you stop talking. You just make yourself look silly.

Order Accepted?

[WiiVault]

Does that imply there was a contract between you and Verizon? If so you should pursue them for breach.

Re:Order Accepted?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Who's solicitors are more numerous, better connected, and have more financial backing for a lengthy legal battle?

Pyrrhic Victory

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[conureman]

I don't think the Telcos are finished punishing us for de-regulation yet. They want us to cry for Ma Bell, and then when the rates go through the roof, we might be forgiven.

maybe AT&T is better(?)

[UncleWilly]

Maybe AT&T is better; I just came off a two year contract at Verizon, supporting provisioning tools for your very product. For years the big push at Verizon has been to off-shore. I'm not sure they really understand Data they way they run "worldcom/MCI".

If it was my money, I would try AT&T, they are way bigger (I hear) than Verizon in the Data arena.

Re:maybe AT&T is better(?)

[Anonymous Coward]

From a perspective of what the submitter is trying to accomplish, I can't comment because I don't know.. I will tell you however, that for the average DSL user out there, it is standard practice at AT&T to turn off Ipv6 during troubleshooting.. I don't know if this is specific to Vista, which comes standard with it enabled.. but there must have been problems because if you call tech support with a Vista machine, during troubleshooting they will direct you to turn it off.. Now here at home, I have it on both my Linux and Win 7 partitions, and haven't had a problem and I am using AT&T.. so maybe it's just the Vista implementation of it.

Google Cache link

[Anonymous Coward]

http://[2001:4860:b006::84]/search?hl=en&q=cache:http://www.rollernet.us/wordpress/2009/10/verizon-refuses-to-provide-complete-ipv6/&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

Re:Google Cache link

[paul248]

Fail. Looks like Slashdot doesn't provide complete IPv6 either.

Re:Google Cache link

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot is a proper American site and refuses to surrender to new-fangled hippie bullshit like Unicode and IPv6. If ASCII and IPv4 was good enough for George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, it is good enough for us!
The abundant usage of Javascript and AJAX may suggest differently, but after any amount of actually using the site, you'll see it's really a undercover op to make people long for the simple functionality of the pre-Web-2.0 days.

Re:Google Cache link

[ion.simon.c]

Damn. /.'s linkifier really fucked that one up!

Re:Google Cache link

[Tony Hoyle]

It always amazes me that slashdot goes on about how great ipv6 is at least once a month and still doesn't have an ipv6 address.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

I think IPv6 is going to end up as another VCD (Video CD).

It's gonna be HUGE in Asia (for a time) while being ignored by the rest of the world?

slashdotted wordpress install... any details ?

[johnjones]

so are you saying that the ISP is filtering the packets ?

can you tell what equipment they are using ?

personally I wish ISP's would just send out routers that where IPv6 compliant (are you listening British Telecom...)

regards

John Jones

Re:slashdotted wordpress install... any details ?

[Glendale2x]

This is on an OC-12. They're filtering using BGP prefix lists.

I concur...

[TheSHAD0W]

ipv6 access to rollernet.us seems to be down.

Either that, or your site's been slashdotted...

Re:I concur...

[Glendale2x]

Server's overloaded. I didn't expect me complaining about Verizon would hit the front page. Trying to convert it to a static page.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[NNKK]

"Carrier-grade NAT" is not a solution, it's an oxymoron, and one that has already been rejected by the real world.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[sakdoctor]

another VCD (Video CD)

You mean it will be widely deployed in Asia, be very cheap, better compression and without DRM?
Sounds good.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[glennpratt]

What's wrong with IPv6 exactly?

I've been running dual stack on test servers just because and it seems to work fine. I've tested Windows Server 2008 and Vista clients with IPv6 and it works fine. I even get IPv6 connections to some internet servers like Mozilla.

Admittedly, I'm not an expert, but I'm looking forward to the end of NAT on every router.

One fact the story left out

[Anonymous Coward]

That 29%? All porn. And we're talking good stuff, too.

29%

[Scutter]

They're missing around 29% of the IPv6 internet and refuse to carry it.

That's because 28% of it is 4chan and the other 1% is unaccounted-for dark matter.

Re:29%

[Kizeh]

I guess the University of South Florida falls into that dark matter. (2620:0:c30::)

Obvious answer...

[Totenglocke]

Tell me again how we're supposed to encourage IPv6 adoption in the face of a huge black hole like this?

Well call me Captain Obvious, but I'd say don't subscribe to Verizon. If enough people want it, eventually either Verizon will offer it or they'll go out of business. Either way it's a win for consumers.

Re:Obvious answer...

[im_thatoneguy]

That sounds great on paper. But in the real world you often don't have a choice between providers. Even if there isn't an official monopoly the carriers hate laying redundant cabling and won't service an area covered by someone else and would rather invest in areas where they don't have to compete for customers.

Re:Obvious answer...

[Totenglocke]

Most civilized areas have at least two options. If you live in the woods in a cabin, you get a lack of choices. It's your own damn fault for choosing to live where companies don't go (because there's no customers).

Re:Obvious answer...

[causality]

Tell me again how we're supposed to encourage IPv6 adoption in the face of a huge black hole like this?

Well call me Captain Obvious, but I'd say don't subscribe to Verizon. If enough people want it, eventually either Verizon will offer it or they'll go out of business. Either way it's a win for consumers.

Since when did customers (they're not consumers*) decide that the purpose of corporations is to serve them, and any corporation that is unwilling or unable to do so does not deserve their business? I missed that meeting...


* If you like, I'll explain that one. The two terms are not interchangeable unless you're a fan of Newspeak.

Re:Obvious answer...

[poopdeville]

Most civilized areas have at least two options.

That's not enough "options" when the "options" don't compete on price or features.

Re:Obvious answer...

[shentino]

Living in the woods has plenty of good points. Fresh air, low crime, and peaceful rest without having cars honking 24/7

I think what people are really griping about is being stuck in a rock and a hard place.

People have to make balancing choices every day about what they'd rather do without, and half the time most of the sacrifices are caused by other people being greedy and exploiting the situation.

Re:Obvious answer...

[Totenglocke]

Please tell me that you're just trolling. Please?

The entire purpose of a corporation is to serve customers - if you don't give people a reason to do business with you, they'll go somewhere else. Eventually you'll go bankrupt if you don't give people a reason to business with you and then you no longer have a corporation.

I'd love to know what kind of drugs you're on where you think that people would do business with a company that doesn't give them anything they want at all (ok, well except the government, and that's because it's forced).

Re:Obvious answer...

[causality]

Please tell me that you're just trolling. Please?

The entire purpose of a corporation is to serve customers - if you don't give people a reason to do business with you, they'll go somewhere else. Eventually you'll go bankrupt if you don't give people a reason to business with you and then you no longer have a corporation.

I'd love to know what kind of drugs you're on where you think that people would do business with a company that doesn't give them anything they want at all (ok, well except the government, and that's because it's forced).

I'm not trolling, though I wonder if you are overeager to be trolled...

The obvious point was that corporations in general are both better represented in government than the people and more powerful in the marketplace than the people. There are, after all, multiple ways of serving or failing to serve people. When the RIAA lobbies for more authoritarian copyright laws that I don't personally want, they are not serving me and they are not serving you. The implied point was that this is not the way things should be. The second implied point was that this wasn't some inevitable consequence of living on planet Earth, but rather, that this shit goes on because we as a large group are too willing to accept it.

Part of the problem is that few average people make any effort to really know with whom they're doing business. The occasional sensationalist story highlighting how badly someone got screwed and by whom is only a partial solution, as it is no substitute for due diligence. As others have pointed out, this has nearly destroyed the effectiveness of "voting with your wallet", because while you may be conscious enough to do this, a quick look around will reveal to you that no one else does. So the bullshit and the abusive practices go on, and will go on as long as they are rewarded with profits. They will end the moment they result in losses; that day, however, is in the future. So like I said, if the people have decided that corporations exist only to serve them, I missed that meeting, and just for you I'll add because their behavior seems to indicate otherwise.

Hope that clears up your misunderstanding.

Re:Obvious answer...

[Silicon Jedi]

The entire purpose of a corporation is to

enhance shareholder value. Anything else is invalid.

Re:Obvious answer...

[HeronBlademaster]

Most civilized areas have at least two options.

Sure, if you don't mind slow speeds. My choices are as follows

- A 1.4Mbps T1 shared among several apartment buildings, for $50/month
- A 1.5Mbps down, 768Kbps up Qwest DSL connection for $40ish/month
- Comcast's full range of offerings, anywhere from $45/month to $90/month or higher

Verizon advertises FiOS around here, but I haven't found an address in my zip code or the neighboring one where FiOS is offered. Not to mention that my address isn't even in their computers, so the first-level techs can't even enter a note into their system that I'm interested.

Qwest advertises fiber, but they don't even offer decent speed DSL around here, let alone fiver.

Given that I do more than check my e-mail on my home connection, do I really have a choice? My choice is between a) Comcast or b) pay just as much for a far slower connection and abandon most of my normal internet usage (gaming and streaming video). You might be about to say "you don't live in a civilized area, then", but I'm only ~20 minutes south of downtown Seattle... hardly an uncivilized area.

Re:Obvious answer...

[rockNme2349]

The purpose of a corporation is to serve investors, not customers.

Re:Obvious answer...

[Totenglocke]

Yes, which only happens by having customers. If you drive away all of your customers, the shareholder value drops to 0.

Re:Obvious answer...

[Totenglocke]

And when you piss off customers and they take their business elsewhere, that's not serving the investors.

Re:Obvious answer...

[Totenglocke]

So because stupid people don't tell a company to fuck off, everyone doesn't? That's very flawed logic, especially since you're on a site where people routinely talk about companies they boycott.

Also, the RIAA does work for their customers - their customers are record labels / musicians.

Re:Obvious answer...

[causality]

You now know that you were completely mistaken about both my perspective and my meaning, and I have already answered this, yet still you persist with a regurgitated form of the same faux reasoning. Sigh. You're quite the stubborn bastard. In recognition of your persistence, I'll explain why this is silly, but it's the last time I'm bothering.

It's hard to choose where to begin. Your text:

So because stupid people don't tell a company to fuck off, everyone doesn't? That's very flawed logic, especially since you're on a site where people routinely talk about companies they boycott.

For one thing, the correctness of logic has nothing to do with the Web site you visit. Slashdot is one site. Millions of sites don't mention boycotts at all. I hate to break it to you, but Slashdot is a self-selecting group and does not represent the average person (in many ways it'd be nice if it did, but it doesn't). So, I hope you understand how weak that position really is. If not, look up "anecdotal evidence" sometime and see for yourself how useful it is (hint: it isn't useful).

Now, if you were correct about my logic being flawed, then where are the big business and social changes that effective boycotts would have brought about? Oh, that's right, they aren't happening because we are a tiny minority who act on principle. That we are a tiny minority is what should change, ideally. That means you and I really want the same thing, which is for more people to be more aware that they can vote with their wallets and more willing to do so in a responsible way. However, you completely misinterpreted my initial post. You were dead wrong and now you lack the courage to admit it. You feel a need to save face now that you realize you could have correctly understood me from the beginning, so here we are arguing over nothing. Good job.

Also, the RIAA does work for their customers - their customers are record labels / musicians.

Try taking your observation one level deeper. The RIAA's customers are the record labels. The record labels' customers are everyday people. So the RIAA should serve the labels which serve the people, and thus, indirectly serve the people. That has not been the case. It is not the case because the RIAA can afford lobbyists, the average person cannot, and (here's the key part) the average person isn't bothered enough by the abuses to stop buying music from RIAA labels, as evidenced by the fact that the major labels are still doings lots of business. This brings us back to my original point, that not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets in order to effect meaningful change. A point you continue to deny despite its extreme obviousness.

So what was the purpose of telling me the already well-known fact that the RIAA is composed of its constituent record labels and musicians? Oh, right, you were continuing to argue long after it was evident that you had the wrong idea. Has that worked out for you yet?

Anyway, I'm through with you. Have the last word if you like. I've expended far more patience on you than you are capable of appreciating as it is, so I am done with this particular thread.

Re:Obvious answer...

[causality]

And when you piss off customers and they take their business elsewhere, that's not serving the investors.

And when the vast majority of customers tolerate things that really should piss them off, that's the moment your model breaks. This possibility did occur to you, right?

Re:Obvious answer...

[Tony Hoyle]

You'll never drive away *all* your customers. There will always be a segment of the population that whilst complaining about high prices and crap service will still take it because they believe they have no choice (bonus points if you can arrange that they *do* have no choice). You see a few of them on slashdot, even.

Re:Obvious answer...

[Anonymous Coward]

The big problem with that as has been stated before is 90+% of people are brain dead sheep that just follow the TV adds and if twats like verizone say we ARE the best then the sheep will blindly follow nose to tail cus not many other people have the financial clout to sponsor a TV ADD to the contray .

(On the other hand if verizone got their asses melted and smoked that would make em stand up an listen would it not ;-) ) just a suggestion mind know what i mean nudge nudge wink wink, nods as good as a wink to a blind horse

Re:Obvious answer...

[Archangel Michael]

And when the vast majority of customers tolerate things that really should piss them off

Yeah, because people should be pissed off at ______Corp because you said so.

The problem is when being pissed off doesn't matter to the people who are running things. Take for example all the recent TownHall, and 9/12 march and such, being passed over by the Elitists because it doesn't fit their model of what people SHOULD be pissed off at. They are going to RAM health care "reform" (complete overhaul) in our faces because they know better.

This quickly turns into apathy, and people just stop caring, because all that anger doesn't do any good if you cannot change things.

Serenity Prayer and all that..

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[kimvette]

IPv4 Exhaustion is expected approximately 734 days from today's date. That is just about 2 years.

Right, and they have been saying two years for about 12 years now. Just like how we've been 10 years away from running out of oil for close to 40 years, and about 10 years away from commercialized fusion for about the same amount of time.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Ant P.]

Except China. The latest figure I've heard is six levels of NAT in some places.

Lack of support by vendors

[kaiwai]

How many vendors right now are still deploying products that don't have ipv6? how many of these companies who could provide firmware updates won't so that they can simply force hardware upgrades on users? ipv6 can be easily switched in 6months if the networking hardware companies were willing to provide free firmware updates for hardware up to 2 years old. If they did that we'd be talking about ipv6 coming in 6months instead of the current situation of non-existance.

Re:Lack of support by vendors

[paul248]

As long as the ISPs and core infrastructure support IPv6, it doesn't really matter if the crappy end-user routers do. Users who don't care about end-to-end will stay behind their carrier-grade NAT. Users who figure out that IPv6 will make their torrents go faster will go buy the IPv6-capable hardware.

Re:Lack of support by vendors

[Junta]

However, those 'crappy end-user routers' require that ISPs maintain their IPv4 infrastructure. If IPv4 infrastructure must be maintained, the IPv6 infrastructure by and large ranks as a 'novelty' and as such is pretty much not on the priority list of most ISPs.

Re:Lack of support by vendors

[Kral_Blbec]

Not really. Most people have their external ip comming in from a dsl or cable modem. That is the only thing that really needs to be IP6 capable. Issue a firmware update or hardware replacement to end users and they can still sit behind their IP4 router.

Re:Lack of support by vendors

[Monsuco]

How many vendors right now are still deploying products that don't have ipv6? how many of these companies who could provide firmware updates won't so that they can simply force hardware upgrades on users? ipv6 can be easily switched in 6months if the networking hardware companies were willing to provide free firmware updates for hardware up to 2 years old. If they did that we'd be talking about ipv6 coming in 6months instead of the current situation of non-existance.

Your forgetting the other side of the story. Even if companies were willing to support legacy hardware with current updates, how many users do you think would be willing to go through with patching everything? How many Grandma's do you expect will want to learn how to flash the firmware on their DSL modem and then apply a hotfix their e-mail client and patch their OS to support this new protocol? How many do you think would just be irritated and confused by this change? If you thought people panicked over DTV, something users didn't even have to really re-configure assuming they bought proper hardware, imagine that with user error thrown into the mix?

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Ant P.]

IPv4 is a measurable finite resource. There are 2^32 of them. You can plot it on a graph fairly accurately.

I wonder

[DaMattster]

if the reason that the big boys don't want to go to IPv6 is that they stand to lose an additional money maker. They can charge for publicly available IP addresses with IPv4. In IPv6, every address would be public. This might explain carrier reluctance to make the change. It gives them one less way to nickle and dime the consumer.

Re:I wonder

[value_added]

They can charge for publicly available IP addresses with IPv4. In IPv6, every address would be public.

All IP addresses issued by an ISP for its customers are "public".

I think what you're referring to is non-dynamic (static) IP addresses. For that ISPs do charge more, but then they give you extra addresses (typically a /29 block instead of a single address), and remove certain "restrictions" applicable to most other customers.

Granted, for that kind of setup, an increased monthly fee vs. a one-time provisioning charge does equate to pure profit for the ISP, though most such packages are packaged up and marketed as "business" or "super-whatever" accounts to make the extra monthly fees more palatable. Whatever your opinion of the business practices, and given the workarounds and hoops folks routinely jump through to deal with the shortcomings of a dynamic address, the benefit of static IPs for the customer aren't without value each and every month.

Re:I wonder

[mirix]

Sounds about right to me. ISPs *are* that evil.

Re:I wonder

[Scooby Snacks]

Nah, they could just slap on an "IPv6 fee" line-item that will never go away. If you have a land line, just take a look at it sometime and notice that you're getting charged for touch-tone service, and wonder if there's actually anybody *without* it anymore.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Doubtful. The failed adoption of IPv6 means ISPs cannot acquire enough IPv4 addresses to satisfy customer growth. They want to expand their business. They are being forced to do carrier grade NAT which means NAT happens at the ISP since they need to share IP space. That also means they need to buy a new class of networking hardware to do this carrier NAT. These boxes will require large amount of logging & administration.

If IPv4 continues to be the plan going forward, it's a crappy deal for everyone.

Re:I wonder

[unity]

True enough and if they don't do it the govt will find away to charge you for it. We are afterall still paying a "temporary tax" on phones that was put in place to fund the Spanish-American War of 1898. Hell, they will both probably find a way to charge you something extra for IPv6. Big govt + Big corporations = all your money are belong to us.

Re:I wonder

[jandrese]

Nothing says they can't charge for every IPv6 address as well. In fact I fully expect them to. No, the reluctance to change is simply because there is still a ton of legacy equipment everywhere that is not IPv6 enabled, or worse, is misconfigured on the IPv6 side. Do you want to try to explain to some large percentage of old and retired people on your network why suddenly they aren't able to get to aarp.org because aarp's ISP misconfigured the IPv6 setup on some of their equipment?

People are going slow on this because it's scary. The early adopters are going to be burned. If it's bad enough, companies might collapse. And yet it's the good and necessary solution, the only one that makes sense in the long run. Everybody is working as best they can behind the scenes to try to make sure that their own stuff will work, but nobody wants to flip the switch and see just how bad it might be.

Re:I wonder

[tlhIngan]

if the reason that the big boys don't want to go to IPv6 is that they stand to lose an additional money maker. They can charge for publicly available IP addresses with IPv4. In IPv6, every address would be public. This might explain carrier reluctance to make the change. It gives them one less way to nickle and dime the consumer.

No, because they will just ensure that everything except x:x:...:x:0001 is firewalled out. If you want, you can buy additional IP addresses, and they'll just give you another x:x:...:y:0001 IP address. There's so many IP addresses, they can waste the other 65534 of them. And still bill you $5/month extra as per IPv4 addresses.

They're not giving up that money maker anytime soon. And we'll have NATv6 soon enough so we don't have to waste another $60/year extra for each new computer.

Re:I wonder

[DaMattster]

Sorry, you are correct. In my tired state of mind, I meant static IP

Re:I wonder

[QuoteMstr]

Big govt + Big corporations = all your money are belong to us

Actually, small government leads to large corporations. At least I can change the behavior of the government by voting; a huge corporation? Not a chance.

Re:I wonder

[TheThiefMaster]

At least I can change the behavior of the government by voting;

Are you sure about that? It's amazing how many people seem to have been against the recent war, yet the government waged it anyway...

Re:I wonder

[Mr2001]

Are you sure about that? It's amazing how many people seem to have been against the recent war, yet the government waged it anyway...

It would have ended in 2005 if Bush hadn't been re-elected. Obviously, changing the behavior of the government by voting only works when you win.

Re:I wonder

[Jared555]

Well considering you usually end up getting charged $0.50-$1 per IP/month from a server provider or $5-$20/month from an ISP plus any setup fees it could be possible.

Re:I wonder

[Jared555]

Offer carrier grade NAT along side IPV6 for when IPV6 screws up

Re:I wonder

[bernywork]

The reason I haven't rolled out IPv6 comes down to 3 factors:

Cost: It's going to cost me money for upgrades on firewalls, pay the staff to do the upgrades etc etc.

Upgraded hardware doesn't exist: I can't switch IPv6 in hardware, we have a low latency environment, the moment I start pushing around IPv6 it leaves hardware and goes to the CPU. You show me one vendor who is doing IPv6 in hardware and I'll show you someone who'll consider upgrading.

No business benefit: I lose nothing but not upgrading. I get nothing by upgrading.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

It would have ended in 2005 if Bush hadn't been re-elected. Obviously, changing the behavior of the government by voting only works when you win.

Just like it would have ended in 2009 if only McCain hadn't been elected? ...Oh, wait.

Don't forget, Kerry voted for the war. He wasn't going to be pulling us out of it.

Re:I wonder

[jandrese]

Carrier Grade NAT is hardly without its troubles either. Now the people calling to complain are the ones who are trying to play online games and failing because they're trapped behind a NAT system they don't control.

Re:I wonder

[Kabuthunk]

I think that's thinking too much into it. Personally, I think their line of thinking goes more like:

We haven't run out of IPv4, therefore it is unnecessary to change from IPv4.

I don't think anyone will 'really' change to IPv6 until we are literally fully, 100% out, and they have no other option. And even still, it'll take at least a year after that point.

Re:I wonder

[Mr2001]

Just like it would have ended in 2009 if only McCain hadn't been elected? ...Oh, wait.

You're right, it'll actually be the end of 2011 by the time all American troops are out of Iraq. So maybe I should've said "It would have ended in 2007 if Bush hadn't been re-elected."

Don't forget, Kerry voted for the war. He wasn't going to be pulling us out of it.

We'll never know what he actually would've done, but I see no reason to focus on that vote in 2002 while ignoring the platform he was running on in 2004, which did include withdrawing from Iraq.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Foundry/Brocade is doing IPv6 in hardware, and tons cheaper than Cisco. Look at the XMR series of routers.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Let us know when the exact number of available IPv4 addresses is in dispute. A comparison to oil in this context is absurd.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[ekhben]

[citation needed]

In 2003, RIPE NCC noted that estimates fell around 2012. I will grant you that 2003 is not 12 years ago, only 6, but that was a result on the first page of google for "IPv4 run-out estimates over time."

I'm unfamiliar with oil reserves and cold fusion research, but I'd like to see your justifications for those claims, too :-)

If you think this is bad just wait for comcast to

[Joe The Dragon]

If you think this is bad just wait for comcast to bill you per ipv6 ip how about $5/m per system.

Yes, but watch for...

[Junta]

-Aggressive purchase/selloff of unused IP space (there are companies with class As that come no where near 16.7 million systems).
-ISPs dropping granting an IP to residential customers and phones on the base plans, using NAT upstream

In other words, the world is so IPv6 averse that the IP exhaustion will not really happen in the medium-term future. While it is sad, the fact that 95% of the internet does not care or know about having a globally unique IP address will keep NAT a viable solution for a while. I.e. just as some people pay extra for a single static IP address, in the next few years, expect to have to pay a premium for a single real IP for others to reach you at.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[shentino]

v4 addresses will stop getting scarcer when they're in high enough demand to make it profitable for early assignees to let some of their hoarded addresses go for sale.

IANA let too many organizations grab a shitload more addresses than they needed, and now they're sitting on gold mines and aren't letting go. We already have cases of companies flatly refusing to give back their v4's. Considering the address scarcities and the potential for profiteering, who can blame them?

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[SanityInAnarchy]

95% of the internet does not care or know about having a globally unique IP address will keep NAT a viable solution for a while.

It used to be that I didn't care about that.

Then my brother got himself banned from Slashdot by IP (while we were both teenagers).

At that point, I started caring whether I shared an IP with someone I didn't trust, who was likely to get banned from somewhere. (The first, most obvious change was to convince my brother to stop trolling.)

It may take awhile, but if people start finding themselves banned from, say, YouTube or Facebook by IP, they'll start caring about NAT.

There's a reason people move away from AOL.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[Silicon Jedi]

It may take awhile, but if people start finding themselves banned from, say, YouTube or Facebook by IP, they'll start caring about NAT.

At the point where NAT is that heavily used... IP addresses will no longer be viable identifications for bans.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[TheSHAD0W]

-ISPs dropping granting an IP to residential customers and phones on the base plans, using NAT upstream

That... actually might not be a bad idea. $5/mo discount for being NAT'd, maybe with SOCKS 5 server proxy support. I'm sure a lot of people would be up for it.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[norpy]

And then what do you propose to use?

Cookies?
Something else that the user's computer provides to identify themselves - and can easily change?

Good luck with that buddy.

I remember recently when half of the UK were identified as malicious editors when wikipedia started being routed through a proxy because of child porn and 30million people suddenly started coming from a single address.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[GigaplexNZ]

How about a MAC address? While it is often changeable if you know what you are doing, not everyone will know about this (and many modems may not support it). It's not a good way of identification, but it's probably better than IP addresses.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[Bruha]

Patently untrue. The costs of vacating spaces is enormous. Nobody is sitting on ip's they're going to give up. To give up any portion of a /8 implies that you actually segmented your network from day one and are able to shave off those pieces. In most cases were talking about 20+ years of network growth and re-engineering. I'm sure enormous chunks are tied up and to clean that out will just never be worth the trouble.

IANA is requiring company officers to attest to the need of the remaining IP space personally in D.C. Guess what, they're denying everyone unless failure to allocate anything less than a /8 would cause economic or communications harm to a high degree. Were talking about national level impacts or exhaustion that could bankrupt a company.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[GigaplexNZ]

$5/mo discount? No... they'd opt for a $5/mo premium if you specifically asked for an IP.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[AuMatar]

Mac address doesn't get sent tot he remote host unless you're on the same ethernet network. MAC address is an ethernet concept, not part of IP.

Besides which, it's trivially changable. Most routers allow you to set it to whatever you want.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[zn0k]

How do you suggest a remote site determine your MAC address?

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[A beautiful mind]

1. IP addresses cannot be bought or sold.

2. Even if that were changed and massive efforts would set up a trading system it wouldn't achieve much. Out of the pre-RIR assignments of 48 /8, the legacy blocks reclaimable are less than 16 /8 unused blocks. and I'm for example pretty sure the US DoD wouldn't want to give up their 8 /8 either.

Pretty much all these what if scenarios you're talking about have already been considered and if they would work we wouldn't talk about IPv4 exhaustion in the next 2 years.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[GigaplexNZ]

ISPs can determine the MAC address of routers already. If the heavy NAT solution takes place instead of IPv6 then I wouldn't be surprised if MAC addresses start getting tagged into traffic for identification purposes (RIAA won't be happy if they can't track down people to sue, for example).

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[muridae]

By asking nicely? And making you promise not to lie!

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[pyite]

How about a MAC address?

MAC addresses are not known beyond your first-hop router, so this doesn't really work.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[tsm_sf]

From a Linksys router administration page...

MAC Address Clone: Some ISP will require you to register your MAC address. If you do not wish to re-register your MAC address, you can have the router clone the MAC address that is registered with your ISP.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[GigaplexNZ]

Perhaps if you read my comment again, you may notice I said many modems may not support it. You have one that does, which says nothing about my statement. I don't claim to know what percentage do and do not support it (mine doesn't), but the types of users who are going to manually fake their MAC (assuming ISPs find a hack to propagate it with traffic) are the types who are going to delete cookies, use proxies etc to hide who they are.

Then again, there's always the username/password.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[M8e]

That really is the same thing. Either you pay $5 more for the more expensive alternative, or you pay $5 less for the cheaper(compared to the other). Non of them need to be the "real" price.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[PeterBrett]

-ISPs dropping granting an IP to residential customers and phones on the base plans, using NAT upstream

That... actually might not be a bad idea. $5/mo discount for being NAT'd, maybe with SOCKS 5 server proxy support. I'm sure a lot of people would be up for it.

Um, I think you'll find that, in reality, there will be a $5/mo premium for not being NAT'd. And SOCKS 5 proxy support? Hahahahaha.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[Tony Hoyle]

1. IP addresses cannot be bought or sold.

Tell that to most ISPs. Some of them charge *per month* for them.

IPV4 exhastion has been predicted as '2 years' for about 5 years. The 'exhaustion counters' are not going down. Someone needs to plot a graph of the days left to see if there's a general trend downwards or whether it's static - to my eyes it looks fairly static, but there should be a slow decay in the number of addresses theoretically.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[Jared555]

I think he means $5 more than you are paying currently

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[Jared555]

They can not be bought or sold but they can be rented/leased/whatever the correct term is.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[A beautiful mind]

IPV4 exhastion has been predicted as '2 years' for about 5 years. The 'exhaustion counters' are not going down. Someone needs to plot a graph of the days left to see if there's a general trend downwards or whether it's static - to my eyes it looks fairly static, but there should be a slow decay in the number of addresses theoretically.

Actually, your opinion is just uninformed. It is true that IPv4 exhaustion estimates varied over time, but never in the pattern you suggest. Here is Geoff Huston's excellent IPv4 Address Report and if you actually bother to read through it carefully, it is very informative and will answer most of your questions.

There is also an overview on the predictions the IPv4 Address Report has been making since 2003, you can read it here.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[SanityInAnarchy]

What I would hope is that websites start getting aggressive at banning IPs of abusers anyway, even if there are false positives. Including an explanation of why, say, AOL is blocked might cause customers to complain to AOL.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[N1ck0]

Even if it didn't violate standards and cause a complete rewrite of IP protocols, MAC addresses would make internet routing tables impossible to manage. Move a single public router, server, etc and you would need to push routes out to hundreds if not millions of network providers. Then of course you could something like prefix the MAC with a network address to make it routeable based on network topology...but I dunno maybe a 64 bit network ID, the 48-bit MAC, and a bit of padding to round it up to a nice manageable 128-bits address. That would be a great idea...you know something like IPv6 does.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[N1ck0]

IPs are a finite resource and when there are no longer any left to allocate they will grow dramatically in value. So companies that can segment their networks and sell off chunks of their space will buy and sell them like commodities for awhile. Of course smaller companies will start hopping on the free bandwagon to keep costs down and will demand IPv6. Then like everything else larger and larger business will cut costs by moving to IPv6 spaces and selling off their IPv4 networks. Then as retail and consumers start moving, so will everything else. The costs of IPv4 addresses will plummet as almost everyone has replaced all their antiquated equipment and has the 6 & 4 routing tables. Sure lots of people will be running v6 on the edge and translating to v4 on the inside for some time...but after a decade or so it'll be cheaper to eliminate all v4 infrastructure.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[shentino]

Which is why I said profitable, and not merely lucrative.

Scarce resources are expensive, that's basic supply and demand. Whether that scarcity is contrived by hoarding, derived from cost, or both, it matters not because it's going to get expensive.

And, no matter how expensive it is to give up a resource, if there's a potential for monopoly profit to be earned by hoarding, companies will do it long after the price has risen enough for them to break even.

Given the primary causes of the current recession, I wouldn't put it past simple greed to be playing a significant role in the problem.

Especially now that there's news of companies (I'm looking at YOU verizon) that are outright OBSTRUCTING v6 adoption, as a recent slashdot article revealed.

I think it is telling indeed that there are companies out there willing to actively oppose v6 adoption rather than passivly not supporting it.

Re:Yes, but watch for...

[shentino]

I propose that any network that has arseloads of IPs that can't be changed isn't being managed intelligently to begin with.

DHCP can take care of the vast majority of IPs, most commonly workstations as well as ISP clients.

DNS can take care of many other tasks.

how do you think they manage to "have the network"

[grapeape]

Verizon has been notorious for seriously resticting its network usage on both the wired and wireless sides. When your able to shape things to minimal usage, its easier to have 5/9 service and minimize congestion.

You aren't seeing the whole picture

[davidwr]

Thanks to China's Carrier-grade NAT you aren't seeing levels seven through 1,345,751,000. In China OLPC means One Level of network address translation Per Citizen.

Re:You aren't seeing the whole picture

[mysidia]

That would be OLTPC or OLNATPC

Actually, n/m, come to think of it.. many to one translations are commonly called PAT, NAPT, PNAT, or "Overload NAT".

Oh, and though it may be a matter of debate, some folks swear that it's incorrect to call those NAT.

So OLPPC (One layer of PAT per citizen) or OLNPPC (One layer of Network and Port Address translation per citizen), OLNAPTPC, or respectively OLNAPTC OLPNATPC, or OLNPC

But not OLPC...

Oh, what were we talking about again?

Re:You aren't seeing the whole picture

[petermgreen]

Oh, and though it may be a matter of debate, some folks swear that it's incorrect to call those NAT.
Well the RFCs on the subject clearly use the term "basic NAT" for a device that just changes IPs, "NAPT" for a device that changes both IPs and ports and "NAT" as a catchall term convering both.

"PAT" appears to be a ciscoism

BGP aggregation policy

[chrylis]

I know I'm only seeing a small piece of the diagnostics here, but it's my understanding that they are correct that Verizon's end-user network should act as a stub as far as end-user traffic is concerned. If the problem is that they won't route traffic from your address (inside Verizon's /32) to another direct-allocation network that is in fact a legitimate BGP peer for IPv6 services, I'd complain to ARIN directly that their traffic is being dropped.

Re:BGP aggregation policy

[Glendale2x]

If the problem is that they won't route traffic from your address (inside Verizon's /32) to another direct-allocation network that is in fact a legitimate BGP peer for IPv6 services, I'd complain to ARIN directly that their traffic is being dropped.

Yes, this is the problem. Unfortunately then you'll hit the "well, just because ARIN says so doesn't mean we have to route it" excuse, which is what I'm waiting for them to come back with on Monday.

Re:BGP aggregation policy

[harryjohnston]

It seems entirely plausible to me that the problem really is at the other end; that is, the missing routes aren't in fact globally routable and are only visible from Sprint and Hurricane Electric due to some sort of hackery.

So the first question I'd want answered would be: which backbone provider do those blocks belong to?

I may be mistaken, but it's my understanding that IPv6 addresses, unlike IPv4 addresses, include information about the backbone provider, so you really can't get your own allocation from ARIN and expect an ISP to route it for you. It doesn't (or isn't supposed to) work like that, for good reason. So, if the missing blocks are people who aren't backbone providers but have some kind of back-door deal with Sprint and/or Hurricane Electric, Verizon may be in the right.

If those blocks *are* owned by backbone providers, I'd want to talk to some of them and see what they say about it. They're the ones who should be talking to Verizon about why they're being blocked.

Re:BGP aggregation policy

[Glendale2x]

So the first question I'd want answered would be: which backbone provider do those blocks belong to?

A whole lot of different ones. They're ARIN's PI multihoming block.

I may be mistaken, but it's my understanding that IPv6 addresses, unlike IPv4 addresses, include information about the backbone provider, so you really can't get your own allocation from ARIN and expect an ISP to route it for you. It doesn't (or isn't supposed to) work like that, for good reason. So, if the missing blocks are people who aren't backbone providers but have some kind of back-door deal with Sprint and/or Hurricane Electric, Verizon may be in the right.

You wouldn't have been mistaken before 2006. ARIN does allow you to get your own IPv6:

https://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/2005_1.html

I believe RIPE is following suit next month.

Re:BGP aggregation policy

[DeadBeef]

You are mistaken, the prefixes in question are blocks assigned directly to end users that qualify for a block by needing multihoming.

The first few prefixes in the list in the article have been assigned to organisations like CNET and the Smithsonian Institute, that require reliable connectivity, but don't qualify as an ISP as such.

The messy bit is even some of the IANA name servers look to be in those blocks, so they are even blocking access to some important infrastructure by choosing to filter them.

Re:BGP aggregation policy

[RichiH]

RIPE decided to allow PI IPv6 at RIPE58 last May, so yes.

Re:BGP aggregation policy

[petermgreen]

I may be mistaken
You are a bit out of date.

but it's my understanding that IPv6 addresses, unlike IPv4 addresses, include information about the backbone provider
Normally it's the ISP (which may be anything from a small colo provider to a huge backbone providers) who gets a block and then they suballocate that block to thier customers. The same way a lot of IPV4 blocks are allocated.

The original intention was that multihomed sites would be given multiple IP blocks (one from each ISP) and would run multiple prefixes in paralell on every host. A frightfully complex addition to DNS known as A6 records was designed to support this but the system still didn't prove very practical.

So afaict they have gone back to doing things the old way and giving multihomed sites thier own prefixes.

Re:BGP aggregation policy

[harryjohnston]

Fascinating. Is there a corresponding document somewhere explaining how this is supposed to be implemented? It seems to defeat one of the design criteria of IPv6, i.e., keeping routing tables simple.

Regardless, I still think it would be a good start to identify one or more ISPs that are serving some of those blocks and talk to them about it.

Re:BGP aggregation policy

[Glendale2x]

Fascinating. Is there a corresponding document somewhere explaining how this is supposed to be implemented? It seems to defeat one of the design criteria of IPv6, i.e., keeping routing tables simple.

You are correct that it does defeat the routing table simplicity goal because implementation of multihoming is exactly the same as it is with IPv4. This happened because IPv6 was left without a sane way to multihome. I don't know what block RIPE will use, but AFRINIC (2001:43F8::/29), and APNIC (2001:0DF0::/29) also have a similar policy to ARIN.

Re:BGP aggregation policy

[chrylis]

IPv6 has a number of sane ways to multihome. The problem is that network implementers (at whatever level these decisions are made) just don't want to bother.

Additionally, TCP is the only protocol that has serious issues with this. Yes, we can't handwave it, but for new protocols, why isn't SCTP usually a better choice?

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Blakey Rat]

IPv4 Exhaustion is expected approximately 734 days from today's date. That is just about 2 years.

Remember the story about the boy who cried wolf? Yah. This is that.

It's either IPv6 or carrier-grade NAT or ???

[davidwr]

IPv4 is a measurable finite resource. There are 2^32 of them. You can plot it on a graph fairly accurately.

Predicting the end of IPv4 addresses is like predicting the end of any other measurable, finite resource:

As we get near the end, if there is demand there will be rationing or an increase in price to drive demand down. Either way, the supply will last longer than a naive prediction would indicate.

IPv4 NAT has already reduced the rate of exhaustion beyond what it would be without it, albeit at the price of reduced inter-connectivity.

If IPv6 isn't rolled out nearly globally soon, I think you'll see a lot more carriers handing out NAT'd addresses for new customers unless those customers are willing to pay extra for a world-visible address. Within a year after that they'll jack up the prices on existing customers who don't "downgrade" to the cheaper NAT'd plan. This will buy more time, but, again, at the cost of decreased connectivity.

Of course, I could be wrong, there could be something new and easier to implement coming down the pike, in which case all bets are off.

Re:It's either IPv6 or carrier-grade NAT or ???

[sjames]

I doubt very much there is anything other than IPv6 coming down the pike in the next 2-3 years. It's taken a decade to get IPv6 stacks enabled by default in all the major OSes. Besides that, anything that might come along would have the same problem with acceptance that IPv6 has. That is, it wouldn't be EXACTLY like IPv4.

The ISPs would love to hand out NATed addresses since that would introduce major brain damage to 3rd party VoIP and other services they'd rather supply themselves (for a price) or not have exist at all.

Re:It's either IPv6 or carrier-grade NAT or ???

[HiggsBison]

If IPv6 isn't rolled out nearly globally soon, I think you'll see a lot more carriers handing out NAT'd addresses for new customers unless those customers are willing to pay extra for a world-visible address. Within a year after that they'll jack up the prices on existing customers who don't "downgrade" to the cheaper NAT'd plan. This will buy more time, but, again, at the cost of decreased connectivity.

IPv6 addresses aren't scarce, except where monopoly games are being played. Someone will offer them cheap, and the trumped up scarcity of IPv4 addresses will fail.

If Verizon wants to be a dick about it, their bluff will be called and they'll get hurt by their competition. Yes, I said competition. At some point they will get a (whup!) boot to the head. The CCCP didn't last forever, and neither will Verizon.

Re:If you think this is bad just wait for comcast

[paul248]

I expect RFC 3041 will make that somewhat difficult.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

VCD's never caught on in the U.S. or Europe, but they were quite important in East Asia. According to Professor Wikipedia, over half of all Chinese have a VCD player.
 
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_cd#Adoption

Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[davidwr]

You actually have to twiddle a setting to block all incoming unsolicited connections! *cue rim shot*

Thank you, thank you, catch my next show tomorrow night and every night at:
http://192.168.0.1/davidwr/shows

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[Drinking Bleach]

That's called having a firewall. All decent operating systems come with one built-in these days.

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[Xtravar]

... and all decent people disable the firewall immediately so that their software works.

Not that that's right, but...

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[glennpratt]

Consumer IPv6 routers should go ahead and block all unsolicited connections by default, just like modern IPv4 routers. It's not a complex problem or one the user should even need to think about.

Every OS has a built-in firewall as well.

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[Omnifarious]

Well, that may be true. But a 128 bit address space is so sparse that passive scanning like the current worms do isn't much of an option any more. Even if you know a prefix to use the chances of your hitting a host in that prefix are still woefully small.

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[thejynxed]

That is assuming it doesn't become profitable for spammers and other evil-doers to focus IP4-based botnets at the problem. The 'IPv6 lets me hide!' fallacy only works for as long as people aren't actively looking.

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[mikael_j]

And that's why there's a saying among those of us who remember when NAT was something a handful of Linux users did with their 56k connections (and called "IP Masquerading") "NAT is not packet filtering". Just stick a real firewall between the big bad internet and your network, most NAT routers even have one of these (duh!) it's just that to most people "firewall == NAT" which just isn't true.

/Mikael

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[TeknoHog]

Thank you, thank you, catch my next show tomorrow night and every night at: http://192.168.0.1/davidwr/shows

Actually, that link takes me to my ADSL box, not your machine. These are unroutable addresses, how would you access one over the Internet?

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[hab136]

But a 128 bit address space is so sparse that passive scanning like the current worms do isn't much of an option any more. Even if you know a prefix to use the chances of your hitting a host in that prefix are still woefully small.

Assuming people don't allocate like ::1, ::2, ::3, etc like many will.

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[asaz989]

Did you read the post you're replying to? The issue isn't how many people are "actively looking" - it's how many possible addresses they need to guess among before they find your hosts. In IPv6, each subnet is assigned an address space of 64 bits - twice as long as a complete IPv4 address, with as many possible unique addresses as all of IPv4 worldwide - squared.

For example, let's take some random small-medium business. They buy a /24 address space. Some random cracker tries to find an open port on one of their machines by trying to connect to every possible port on every possible address - 254 possible addresses times 65535 possible ports is a manageable number of connections to try. In an equivalent IPv6-addresses subnet the number of possible addresses they need to try goes from (say) 255 for a subnet with a /24 in IPv4, to 2^64 (= somewhere in the neighborhood of 16 followed by eighteen zeros). This is a ridiculously large number of connections to try and open, even for a good-sized botnet (remember - connection setup takes more time than just doing some computation locally). Trying to scan this small-business subnet for machines with open ports would take the kind of resources people usually use to crash the internet services of small countries.

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[amorsen]

Network firewalls are fine and dandy, but they don't help you when your employees connect to a hot spot in an airport or through 3G/WiMax...

The time for them has pretty much come and gone, except for their ability to detect infected hosts on the inside trying to connect out.

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

http://192.168.0.1/davidwr/shows

Well if you didn't bother to twiddle that setting then accessing that is actually pretty simple for anyone on the same logical subnet on the outside of your router (other broadband customers in your area, perhaps), or anyone with access to your ISP's routers.

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[Omnifarious]

The default mode for IPv6 is to assign the lower 64 bits based on the MAC address of the interface. Now, that is still far from random, but there is still a lot of entropy in it.

I have this idea for an IPv6 DHCP daemon that randomly assigns addresses and has a scheme for periodically rotating those assignments. That would solve the problem right there.

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[BitZtream]

Which is why my machines disable their builtin firewall when connected to the in office lan or wifi, and automatically enable their firewall to block all incoming remote hosts when not on the office lan.

We resolved that problem like 4 versions of windows ago.

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[amorsen]

Is there really a point in disabling it for the office lan though? Few people file share between clients these days, and pretty much everything else you could use open ports for are frowned on in a corporate environment.

Which again leads to inbound filtering in the corporate firewall being a waste.

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[thejynxed]

I know exactly what I was replying to. You think criminals are going to sit on their asses with this? No. They are going to use botnets to aggressively scan the new ip space for targets, no matter how large that new space is.

Re:Only one thing "wrong" with IPv6 vs. IPv4-NAT

[thejynxed]

Oh, and I almost forgot: Increasing the size of the chess board only make higher priority targets out of the Kings and Queens (those with static IPv6 address space).

Expect to see the prices asked per infected machine to rise, and nothing else to change in the least bit.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[serdagger]

I'm not sure what the rules are on reselling IP-addresses (is it up to the individual IPv4 registries?), but even finite resources never truly run out, they just get more expensive over time (see Hotelling's rule). With a liquid-enough market in IP addresses, it get's even better (Hotelling's rule assumes the resource is used up, like oil, not reusable, like IP addresses). As the price of IP addresses goes up, more and more work will be put into NAT or similar workarounds (like how HTTP 1.1 introduced the host header), as those efforts will suddenly become cost effective. People who really need raw IP addresses will always be able to get them, just for a price. It is kinda similar to oil in that plotting current trends is always going to be misleading, as that will overlook the effect of future innovations. I actually like IPv6. I just highly doubt the dire predictions about what will happen to IPv4 734 days fraom now.

ipv6 is good for voip

[h00manist]

therefore, ipv6 is bad for Verizon?

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[cptdondo]

No it won't. It will be some bandaid solution thought of at the last minute that will patch things together until the current crop of CEOs get their golden parachutes.

Sorry, but I'm very cynical on this. Few businesses are "forward looking"; most look back to the heyday when life was good and want nothing to do with any new invention if they can help it. Look at the entertainment industry, the paper press industry, the telecom industry... They've all been fighting new tech for years.

Heck, if it was up to AT&T we'd all be dialing on our Princess Phones.

Almost all redundant porn

[davidwr]

Since 99.44% of the Interwebs are porn, odds are you aren't missing much unique material.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[paul248]

The boy who cried wolf might have turned out differently if the boy were able to predict the approximate future date at which the wolf would come, and periodically reminded people that the date was getting closer.

Reminds Me of Asimov

[Lord_Jeremy]

You know the whole story surrounding IPv4 and IPv6 really reminds of a cool short story written by Isaac Asimov called The Last Question. It's really an awesome story about how ever-increasing entropy means that human life will someday run out of energy. It entails various people from vastly different periods in future human history posing the question what will happen when entropy reaches maximum, how to reverse it, and then reflecting on a temporary solution. For instance, humanity is running out of coal and whatnot so they turn to the Sun, yet two men discuss how that is only a temporary solution and so on.

Re:Reminds Me of Asimov

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Relying on the sun is a pretty long term solution. If we're still using the sun for energy when the sun is about to expand and burn the planet, we have bigger problems than just energy...

Re:Reminds Me of Asimov

[Romancer]

Just went and read it. Good short story! Thanks.

change of contract

[Eil]

It's hard to tell from the summary, but did you sign a contract with them back in May that included IPv6 support? If yes, and they spent six months building out the line only to tell you in the end, "oh, sorry, we don't want to do IPv6 anymore" then you can get them in court for material change of contract. If there was no contract (hard to believe if there was a 6-month build-out), or if it never specified IPv6 anywhere, then you're hosed and pretty much get what you deserve for taking Verizon's word at face value. :)

Re:change of contract

[Glendale2x]

They very conveniently lost the original order (where I disclosed exactly what I required, down to what networks I will announce) and the circuit was delivered as IPv4-only in August. With a static /29. Without BGP. All of this was a huge shock to the provisioning team on the first call when I started talking BGP for IPv4. It took over a month to get them to change it to dual-stack and re-engineer the endpoint to go to a different city that had IPv6 support after I forwarded them all of my copies. And then they pulled this out of their hat. Oh, don't forget that my account manager was fired in September and the new one won't accept my calls. It's a huge fucked up mess.

I must admit, I never figured that complaining about Verizon sucking would make the front page of slashdot.

Re:change of contract

[shentino]

Well it does qualify as "News for Nerds"

And some company pulling this shit and thus cramping out v6 is IMHO "stuff that matters".

You should get a lawyer, preferably one that specializes in technology, and sue for breach of contract.

You have been officially screwed over, and it's time to stop pussyfooting around and play hardball.

Re:change of contract

[John Hasler]

> They very conveniently lost the original order...

But you have a copy, right?

Re:change of contract

[Glendale2x]

Of course, I sent all of it (including emails between order coordinators and their confirmations back) to them when they turned it up without any IPv6 at all and I said "uh, that's not what I ordered, here look at all this."

Re:change of contract

[TooMuchToDo]

What about using Hurricane Electric for connectivity? Their IPv6 support is top notch. I assume the problem with that is that Verizon is providing the last mile. I'd see if you can document their material breach of the contract and get some dark fiber to a POP/Neutral Colo with HE there.

Re:change of contract

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAL, but this is basically the definition of estoppel. They promised you one thing (IPv6 service), you made a decision based on it (paying for them to build out the line), and when they changed your mind, it caused you material damage.

Re:change of contract

[laci]

> They very conveniently lost the original order (where I disclosed exactly what I required, down to what networks I will announce)

You are in luck then! Take them to court. If you have your copy (you *do*, right?) and they can't produce a copy, then I can't imagine how you could lose. And you can demand lots of compensation. Afterall, this may drive you out of business, so 10 years worth of salary+benefits for all your employees + penalty + lawyer's fees is the minimum.

Re:change of contract

[Anonymous Coward]

I must admit, I never figured that complaining about Verizon sucking would make the front page of slashdot.

You must be new here.

Re:change of contract

[L4t3r4lu5]

Have you forwarded it to a solicitor?

Re:change of contract

[Eil]

Well, regardless of how messy it is or the excuses that Verizon has given you, if they promised IPv6 as part of the original order, and you have documentation to prove it, go talk to your lawyer. Slashdot can't really help you with this.

Re:change of contract

[Anonymous Coward]

Shashdot can't help directly, but trying to work with them on their terms first (they are a big entity, after all) may yield better results. Lawyers should be a last result. This is an issue that needs attention brought to it for the good of IPv6 adoption as a whole.

Re:change of contract

[Glendale2x]

In all honesty suing them and lawyers never crossed my mind. I do want to bring attention to major IPv6 adoption obstacles such as this and try to work with them to change things for the better as long as they are willing to listen.

IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[Junta]

First and perhaps foremost, a lot of the industry has formulated a non-trivial amount of their business plan around the artificial scarcity of IPv4. It is recommended that even residences get /48 prefixes, though some have asked that to be reduced to /56, giving every person up to 255 subnets to route, each subnet being able to host 18 quintillion hosts in a globally unique fashion. Giving a singe IP address just won't cut it since no one has bothered to do NATing on IPv6.

Secondly, no sanctioned way exists for an IPv6 only 'client' to communicate with an IPv4 'server'. I know that the engineers of IPv6 have a pure vision of a peer to peer internet where NAT is evil, but they needed to embrace it to get a very bad problem addressed. If it were baked in, then ISPs would suddenly have an incentive to migrate. As it stands, IPv6 represents only a financial burden, since it requires investment *and* they can't cut off IPv4 due to lack of interoperability. With this, suddenly, the still valuable IPv4 space wouldn't need to be given out to end customers, and IPv6 could carry them through.

One alternative would be for ISPs to start giving out private IPv4 addresses and doing the NATing for IPv4 that way, then assigning IPv6 networks for usage more in the spirit of symmetric peers. However, ISPs aren't particularly incentivized to go beyond the first step of taking away globaly IPv4 addresses. This comes to a third reason, we can still game the system with ISP level NAT a lot more since a vast majority of IP addresses in use are used by people who wouldn't even know they were behind an external NAT gateway if it happened to them one day. Most every modern internet usage is designed to tolerate NATs. Torrent and friends are more impacted than others, but most people still use http for 99% of their internet experience, and do not serve at all.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[chrylis]

Minor clarification: The difficulty isn't so much IPv6 clients talking to IPv4 hosts as it is the other way around. Mapping IPv4 addresses into IPv6 addresses is trivial (take a look at totd/ptrtd for an example), but IPv4 addresses don't map onto IPv6: Legacy hosts can't initiate connections to every address in the IPv6 space.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[mysidia]

Maybe with the right type of gateway they could.

Imagine you reserve a /16 of "private address space" for name mapping.

You have a gateway that provides DNS.

When someone looks up "www.blah.com" and it has an IPv6 address, the DNS server immediately allocates an ephemeral IPv4 address, enters it into a temporary database, and returns it to the client.

Now when the client requests to open a TCP connection to the ephemeral IP address within the TTL period, the gateway will automatically receive the IPv4 packet, re-encapsulate it as an IPv6 packet with the proper destination address. Upon receiving a reply packet, it will find the matching database entry, re-encapsulate it as an IPv4 packet, and return the reply to the client.

The result is a user-transparent conversion from V4 to V6 and from V6 to V4.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[Junta]

By communicate, I was implying a bi-directional link. The reason I said IPv6 client and IPv4 server is to reflect the fact that it *could* be feasible with NAT to do that. IPv4 could never talk to an IPv6 host even in theory without the IPv6 endpoint starting it, but I think that would be ok if the likes of google/yahoo/every major company retained an IPv4 presence and many clients could live happily in IPv6 world since they don't have to worry about business lost because they can't be called up by random IPv4 clients, and could still happily reach IPv4-only companies.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[harryjohnston]

I thought this was solved by technologies like 6to4 and Toredo? Or do you mean hosts running operating systems and/or applications that don't understand IPv6?

As far as I can see, there are two sides to this: legacy client machines need access to the internet, and web sites (and other services) need IPv4 addresses.

Legacy client machines could be provided with internet access via NAT easily enough.

As for web sites, it should be fairly trivial for someone to offer a service which routes a block of IPv4 addresses each to a separate IPv6-connected web server. We wouldn't even need a single standard, the customers (the folks running the web server) might need a bit of hardware or software appropriate to the particular service they used, but that shouldn't be a major problem.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[shentino]

And here we have another reason why ISPs don't hate NAT.

It completely wrecks p2p which is one form of traffic that an ISP is more than happy to do jack shit about...especially an ISP that has the RIAA et. al. breathing down it's neck.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[Ash-Fox]

Sorry, I don't understanding what the problem is with websites?

From a gateway point of view: Intercept all IPv4 packets to port 80, 443. Pass it to a ipv6 enabled squid proxy that then looks up the IPv6 address of a website etc from the "host:" header sent via the client.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[DavidTC]

Except, at this point, there are no legacy hosts to any degree. 99.9% of the computers out there either can already do IPv6, or do it with a minor upgrade. Legacy hosts are not the problem.

The problem is the fact that IPv6 was built in an incredibly fucking stupid way.

It should have been set up as a transparent change, where every person who had an IPv4 address magically had an IPv6 address that worked, and whenever an IPv6 stack, be it either your computer or some router halfway down the road, determined it was talking to IPv4, converted it into IPv4. And no connection should have handled both....you speak IPv6 if the other end understands it, you speak IPv4 otherwise.

Please notice that the link-level protocol of Ethernet can actually specify IPv4 or IPv6, so devices can immediately talk the correct protocol, without even sending out a DHCP packet. And wifi has pseudo-ethernet link level (In addition to the actual wifi link-level), so it works there too. And I bet it wouldn't be too hard to cobble something together for ATM connections and whatnot, if they don't already have such a thing.

So every IPv6 device, when hooked up to whatever, could instantly say 'Can I talk IPv6, or do I need to talk IPv4?' on each plug. It can talk IPv6 in one direction, and IPv4 in the other, and convert. (Or, at least, most devices. Your cheap-ass DSL router, probably not, it might flip into IPv6 mode only if all connections were IPv6 so it didn't have to convert.)

In other words, all packets, as they flowed across the internet, would be IPv4 on legacy networks, and IPv6 on newer ones, and converted back and forth at any (almost) router that went from new to old or old to new. And every router would at least flip to IPv6 when both sides spoke it.

As devices were slowly replaced, more and more of the entire path would be IPv6, and eventually people would be talking to the backbone entirely using IPv6. You could even include a bit in the IPv6 packet that meant 'originated as IPv6', which packet senders would set, but would be dropped during conversion and back, and then could statistically determine, at any point on the internet, how much of the traffic had reached there entirely via IPv6, and ARIN could have some sort of percentage trigger to start making IPv6-only addresses via beyond beta testing.

And eventually, everyone would switch, and 95% of the people would return their IPv4, leaving they few remaining IPs for actual non-upgradable devices, which would mainly be embedded systems, along those sites that said devices need to contact to, which they would do unknowingly over mostly IPv6.

Instead, we have this stupid-ass situation where we're facing incompatibility as we upgrade.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[Daniel Phillips]

The problem is the fact that IPv6 was built in an incredibly fucking stupid way.

Those responsible should be hanging their heads in shame. Instead they seem to be living on another planet.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[Anonymous Coward]

18 quintillion hosts should be enough for anybody.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[chrylis]

It should have been set up as a transparent change, where every person who had an IPv4 address magically had an IPv6 address that worked, and whenever an IPv6 stack, be it either your computer or some router halfway down the road, determined it was talking to IPv4, converted it into IPv4.

This is actually the way that IPv4-mapped addresses (::ffff:0:0/96) were originally envisioned, and it's the way that Linux and [^Open]BSD handle it internally. You'll notice a conspicuous absence in that list of OSs, though.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[amorsen]

You'd have to fake DNS in the first place, to get the client to connect at all. Unless you're talking about doing it at the Google/Yahoo/whatever end, in which case there isn't much point.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[RichiH]

> When someone looks up "www.blah.com" and it has an IPv6 address, the DNS server immediately allocates an ephemeral IPv4 address, enters it into a temporary database, and returns it to the client.

Not happening.

I could state almost half a dozen reasons off the top of my head, but the first and foremost is:
You are keeping state. The one thing you want to get rid of in any high-rate system is state.

PS: If that does not tell you anything, google around for state-less systems. They explain it better than I have time to.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop encouraging the downfall of ISP's! ISP's are INTERNET service providers, not web service providers(WSP)! I fear the day will come when my local cable modem service will only sell me a WSP solution, labeling anything that is non-web based as "suspicious activity" or "malicious".

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[Ash-Fox]

You'd have to fake DNS in the first place, to get the client to connect at all.

I don't see ISPs having a problem with that.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[DavidTC]

Well, it's not so much the Microsoft absence as the router absence that's the problem, and the total lack of anything converting back and forth midtransmission.

But, anyway, I'm not sure you're right. Last time I played around with IPv6 on Linux, you could run services on an IPv4 address but not the 'same' IPv6 address, and vis versa.

You even needed to upgrade an application to IPv6 to make it listen on an IPv6 that was mapped to a as an IPv4 one, instead of it just magically doing both like it should have.

They aren't treated the same, internally, but as two separate addresses. Obviously, there are API differences for programmers, and applications needed to upgrade if they wanted to specify the entire IPv6 range as opposed to the IPv4 subset. And you might need some weird NATing if an address outside the IPv4 range connected to a service that thought it was still speaking IPv4, but that's easily doable. (It's much easier than a lot of the NATing that's in Linux. Hell, it's easier than FTP NATing!)

But the upgrade path could have been smoother if the IPv4 applications could have said 'I want to listen on 10.0.0.1', and also ended up listening on ::ffff:10.0.0.1, and that was actually, you know, routed in some manner.

Except 'also' is the wrong word, because those two addresses should have been indistinguishable. You say it one way in IPv6, or the other way in IPv4, and you're free to convert it back and forth at any time, because they should literally be the same address. IPv4 systems would just need it 'dumbed down'.

Instead, we have this nonsense, where 'mapped' IPv4 address in IPv6 are not the same thing as actual IPv4 addresses, and nothing converts back and forth. So if at any point of your journey doesn't support IPv6, you can't use it at all, even to connect to supposed IPv4 addresses over it.

Basically, all the mapped range did was give everyone at least one IPv6 address...which doesn't work because to reach the internet, it has to travel over some IPv4 network. Yeah, thanks for that, that was useful.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[mysidia]

Nonsense.

In the IPv4 world NAT is very common, and NAT keeps just as much state information as this would have to.

This is something that would be implemented on edge devices primarily. It can be implemented on the edge, there's no reason for this gateway scheme to be implemented on the core.

The ephemeral IPv4 addresses created can also be specific to the client just like NAT translations are.

But in case you haven't noticed: memory is cheap now, and stateful designs such as NAT setups are now being used even in high-rate systems, and carrier grade NAT definitely requires storing a lot of state info.

Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors

[RichiH]

With carrier-grade NAT, the one who profits pays.

As to the rest, it boils down to scale. And once you have scale (you won't), you need stability. Once you have that (you won't), you need security. etc pp.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

IPv4 is already a problem for certain industries.

Take mobile networks for example. How many cell phones are out there? How many smartphones with web browsers? How much private IP space is available? These technologies use IP, and it is becoming a serious network deployment issue. I guarantee you that there is no way in hell that Verizon would be able to get themselves a /6 (64 million ips) of ipv4 space in order to solve their problems - and that might not quite do it either. It's not just the phones, its every GSM/UTMS network device in between as well.

The average person in the first world is already probably using 2-3 IP addresses themselves, and it's only going to get worse. Just wait another 5 years until most (currently) second world countries, say another 2.5 billion people, start moving into that range.

NAT saved us a lot of time. That is why life has continued. But it's starting to reach the end of its use - we've consolidated and masked things too much. Some industries of which I have involvement are already duplicating 10/8 multiple times in order to be able to continue. IPv6 MUST happen, and preferably not too far from now.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[mysidia]

Reselling IP addresses is exceedingly difficult unless you do it under the table.

Strictly speaking, it's explicitly not allowed in most regions.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Darkness404]

Yeah, except for I've been hearing the "two more years" stuff for at least the last 5 if not the last 10 years. Always 2 more years. And those years have passed and we haven't run out yet.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[paul248]

Citation needed. The only predictions I ever recall hearing were "Sometime around 2010-2012".

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure Comcast will find it very interesting to know that their impending deployment of IPv6 to millions of devices will have all been a bad dream.

If you don't know what's actually going on behind the scenes with IPv6, I suggest you stop talking. You just make yourself look silly.

You know what else makes one look silly? When you complain about someone else's ignorance without enlightening us all as to how that person is mistaken and what the truth of the matter might be. And no, saying "Comcast is using IPV6" doesn't tell us anything about the other providers and how quickly those others are exhausting IPV4 addresses. If you're going to be this much of a dick about it, you should back it up with something more than a one-liner.

And yes, we know you're the supreme master of superior IP knowledge, your shit doesn't stink, and you can walk on water. You're just a better human being than anyone who doesn't hvave all the facts about IPV6, so your blatantly condescending reply is completely justfied. Feel better now? Good. Now quit putting down the GP and answer my request, please.

Load the big guns

[mhollis]

Get in touch with your state's Attorney General, saying that they only notified you about their non-compliance after you had all ready committed to them. CourtesyCopy the FCC, which seems actually interested in regulating monopolistic corporations on the Internet.

Attach as much material support of your trials and tribulations as possible. The paper trail will provide these lawyers with the material support to begin the attack.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Junta]

How much private IP space is available?

Hypothetically, assuming only one tier of NAT, could be around 4 quadrillion or so. Beyond what is reasonable, but suffice to say, even the fanciest phones can get by without a universally addressable IP for 99.9% of their users, and I anticipate the cellular carriers to take full advantage of that before putting users on IPv6, effectively 'breaking' most of the 'real' internet as far as their customers would observe and think of it. A lot would be easier with managing their network with globally unique addresses, but as it stands they could segregate management of phones such that 16 million are in one 10. namespace, another 16 million are in a distinct 10. namespace, etc etc.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[peragrin]

Not sure about him but I was told 2050 for oil reserves 15 years ago. Not ten years. Cold fusion research is random about every 10 years a major break through happens with a media saying that we will have it in another 10 years.

Of course listening to the media is like listening to fox news. you don't get anything useful if your an open minded intelligent person. the rhetoric and misdirection is just too much.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm assuming you don't have much experience in the real world. I am an architect on a fairly large network. 100,000 active unique DHCP's per day. We use PAT EXTENSIVELY. Unless you have a very specific reason to have a real world external IP, you don't get one. And very few people get externals. We usually give 1:1 NAT's before externals.

"I'll take my business elsewhere" Means Nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Why...? The average American consumer does not comparison shop for price or quality or some other logical value - they shop for convenience.
 
That means that most businesses advertise and emphasize products for those buyers who have been educated by advertising, lifestyle, convention, popularity, and so on since the end of WW2 to be consumers. They know full well that while some dissatisfied buyers will complain, ask for rebates or refunds, etc., the more difficult it is to get satisfaction the more likely it is disgruntled buyers will opt for the convenience of not pursuing their complain and just go away. That's why they make it more convenient to just go away.
 
The businesses also know that with an increasing number of buyers, maintaining popularity by branding and constant advertising to make the product's name very familiar, and a cycle of planned obsolescence that promotes replacement by incompatibility, they will always have enough business to keep going and satisfy their investors who want a positive, increasing ROI.
 
The common response of "I'll take my business elsewhere" means nothing - unless it's a twittered cause or class action suit or patently illegal or there are bodily injuries that the news media can use to fuel its own promotional fires. There are too many average consumers - IT /. geek techies included - who do NOT shop around, read reviews, care about prices, actually know if what they're buying will do what they need or want it to do, or cannot make good logical reasoned timely decisions out here buying things for most businesses to care much about anything except selling the product.
 
And the bigger the company (think telco, think monopoly or near-monopoly, think what you want) the more emphasis there is on balancing income and expenses to turn a profit - which means that the expense of a certain number of problems with the product like warranty issues, replacements or repairs, or servicing customers has already been built into the price. If problems are fewer than planned for, profits are higher. And vice versa. Which is why businesses make it difficult for problems to cost them money (non-responsive customer service, denying claims, short or limited warranties, minimal product support, and so on and so on).
 
  keywords: planned obsolescence, minimal customer service, consumer mentality, the power of a group, investor mentality

By public addresses..

[Junta]

I assume he refers to the ability to realistically have more than one public address in your house, whether it be static or dynamic in nature. I personally have one public IPv4 address and maybe half a dozen devices to share it.

And to extend on his point, I will bet in the next year or so ISPs will start issuing addresses to residences that are in a private subnet range and charge people extra for not being behind a NAT gateway (if they haven't already).

Re:By public addresses..

[amorsen]

(if they haven't already).

Around here a lot of 3G is done with NAT, as is (surprisingly) a lot of fiber to the home. DSL and cable customers still seem to get public addresses.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[HiThere]

That's like the claim that species never go extinct.

While it's true that THIS finite resource will never run out, because there will always be the same number if addresses, that's not what you said. And this sloppy thinking infects the rest of your argument.

E.g., NAT is already used in a large fraction of the cases where it is a satisfactory solution. This means that it will increasingly be used in cases where it's not a satisfactory solution, because there isn't any alternative.

OTOH, I agree that 734 days is too precise a prediction. I'd have said somewhere in the range of 600-1000 days. And there will be a continued dribble of a supply as entities drop their IP that will last for at least years. But it will be just a trickle supply.

However, I haven't heard of any technical problem with IPv6...though I admit I haven't been paying attention. To me it looks as if the only problem is lack of adoption by the nets. And I'm not sure if there's any reason for that beyond inertia.

Real service providers

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be really cool if someone out there were to run a REAL service provider. You know, someone who provided a certain amount of access for a specific price, but otherwise didn't meddle with the traffic. No blocking of VOIP, no intereference with P2P, no other "service related" shenanigans. Just a stinking COMMON CARRIER with a neutral communications platform based on open standards. WTF?!

COMMON CARRIER for the ISPs out there, since they apparently have NFIWTF they are supposed to be doing, means that you don't muck with stuff that is none of your business. I don't care if you want to provide all kinds of additional services for the customers that want them. That's fine. Just leave the rest of your customers traffic alone and provide a baseline level of service. Sell users their 1MB, 100MB, or GB of bandwidth with a specific latency expectation, then back off.

Your meddling is the equivalent of a telecom introducing static to phone calls that continue longer than you would like, or blocking certain phone numbers from being called. It is uncalled for, it is stupid, and sooner or later you will pay the price. Good business is good for business, morons.

Go Get Stuffed Hippy

[brainchill]

take your ipv6 and get stuffed hippy! .... you probably drive a prius too!!!! The widespread use of 1918 space has virtually eliminated any need for ipv6 on the public internet .... if you NEED ipv6 its either because you just got your ccna and you're trying to prove something or you just read network computing from 1900 and found out that it's the next big thing. ... it's adoption far outweighs that of elective colonoscopy but really who want's something shoved in their arse ;)

I've used dual-stack IPv6 with IPv4 NAT for 2 yrs!

[cwolfsheep]

I'm getting rather sick of reading posts along the lines of "it doesn't work," "it'll never work," and "you need to have one work for the other." In 2006-2007, I tried deploying an IPv4-based TINC setup on my office computers. However, to maintain this, you needed a computer at each of the bigger sites, and smaller systems tied to a common system: I had over 100 nodes chained together like this. By summer 2007, it was unsustainable: I had already been researching IPv6, and decided to start implementing it as a solution for accessing things like Intranet, VNC, and remote file systems. By the end of 2007, I had more or less eliminated the IPv4 chains with a setup of our sites using NAT'd IPv4 in the 192.168-whatever range, and individual IPv6 subnets for each site, tied together by an ethernet-based TINC install on OpenWRT routers. It has worked above and beyond my expectations: we can use regular Internet; we can use IPv6 global and internal resources. If it doesn't support v6 out of the box, chances are it works with "portproxy" fine. With a transition to newer Linux systems and Vista/2008 Windows systems, it becomes more streamlined. You can't avoid v6: its all around you. I believe in it and I've made it work.

Basically Verizon is providing IPv6

[mysidia]

The service they promise (sort of)... but they're being *******'es about it. If I understand correctly they provide article author two options (1) Use Verizon IP addresses, or (2) Use their ARIN assignment and peer with Verizon AS 701.

Where Verizon blocks announcements of prefixes longer than /32. This is a long-standing (braindead) policy on Verizon's part, that doesn't even account for the fact that RIRs are handing out /48 PI assignments in some cases, and there can be multi-homed sites with /56s.

In other words, a third of the V6 internet. You can think of this as the IPv4 equivallent of only accepting announcement of a /19 or larger block of IP addresses.

Specifically, they are completely blocking all of ARINâ(TM)s 2620:0::/23, so even by following their policies theyâ(TM)re still providing an incomplete view of the internet. It is their position that this is âoecorrect"

âoeIf you wish your /48 to be visible globally, youâ(TM)ll need to return your direct /48 allocation to ARIN and obtain a Verizon /48 from our network pool. Since our /48 assignment would be part of a /32 that we are announcing, your network would be globally routable. Otherwise, you are limited to AS701.â

Verizon isn't well known for having complete IPv6 connectivity, a lot of "IPv6 providers" don't. If you are serious about V6 connectivity, you definitely want to get multiple providers.

In the V6 world, connectivity is sparse, and filtering is overly aggressive from the likes of Verizon and other big V4 players, almost as if they're not really all that serious about ensuring global V6 reachability. I would say 2 or 3 transit providers is needed for bare minimum connectivity. And naturally it's better if you can peer with others...

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Junta]

IPv6 itself isn't a premature technology. If suddenly adopted every where, the world would ultimately not have the NAT problem anymore. The problem is that no solution that would extend the address space can exist and be perfectly inter-operable with IPv4 during a transitional period.

Have some blessed strategy to have IPv6->IPv4 NAT in place at the ISP level, and it's feasible. Problem is, that would have to compete with the more straightforward case of IPv4->IPv4 NAT that is much cheaper to strategize around. Sadly, it looks more and more like the 'real' solution is the NAT we have today, as it fits the needs of 95% of the internet users even if you took their one public IP address away.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[lucifuge31337]

IPv6 is a very mature solution.

No. No it is not. Speaking of only things off the top of my head that affect my business: IPv6 at an aggregation router level that can handle complex ACLs only exists in the highest end hardware (meaning MUCH more expensive gear than what I need for IPv4 - as in 3x the cost or more). Most SIP hardware vendors simply don't support IPv6 (think session border controllers and RTP proxies), client side software is no better, and I'm not away of a single major termination carrier that supports it, nor any origination. So, if it doesn't even work for one narrow case (VoIP wholesale/retail blend), just how many others do you think are out there where it's simply not ready? I'm going to guess A LOT, because my business is just not all that out of the ordinary.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Darinbob]

The problem is that any known solutions are incompatible with existing IPv4 infrastructures. Utilities don't want to replace their old IPv4 only routers, and instead are waiting for a magical holy grail that will fix all the problems without costing any money. The _real_ solution is here today, it's called IPv6 and it is not a space filler, and hardware exists today that can make use of it unlike any hypothetical"better technologies".

It's probably going to be like digital TV

[HangingChad]

Until the government steps in and mandates the complete IPv6 spec, it's not going to happen. It's been dragging along for years. Someone...and I'm not sure who...is going to have to declare an end to older standards and set a transition date. There's a lot of good reasons to do it, just no looming cliff to force the issue.

Then we can look forward to old network engineers standing up at public meetings and screaming to keep the government out of their internets. ;)

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[mysidia]

Ok... what's the band-aid solution the CEOs use when the Enterprise SQL server has less than 10GB of disk space remaining on its data drive, and business requirements demand that approximately 1GB of new data be stored every day (transaction records) ?

Are you suggesting the businesspeople won't authorize the storage system be upgraded or changed to allow more storage capacity?

There's really no inexpensive band-aid solution that effectively lets you get around IP exhaustion.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[ekhben]

I hadn't heard anything on oil reserves; 2050 is interesting, seems like the time is right to be experimenting with alternate energy sources, kind of like we are :-) I kinda guessed cutting edge research would be generating sensationalist stories, but big media's only out to expose more viewers to attached advertising anyway.

Try another ISP

[cryfreedomlove]

Can you try another ISP? If they fully support IPV6 then they should attract customers away from Verizon. The free market will solve this problem if there is real value to IPV6.

And I'd like a pony

[Antique Geekmeister]

I'm afraid that while IPv6 has many features, the upstream roll-out is hindered by necessary hardware and configuration upgrades, and interoperability with IPv4 for at least another decade. And frankly, with the effective use of NAT and staggered layers of NAT around the world, the overwhelming need of IPv6 has also evaporated for another decade.

Can you show me a single feature of IPv6 that Verizon's customers actually need? One that isn't also manageable with NAT and reasonably intelligent load balancers?

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[shentino]

That won't be a problem.

Since when have companies ever followed the rules?

Especially corproations that have the government in their pockets.

It's sorta how bribing the ref can make sure you win the game.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[shentino]

The trouble is using a linear formula to predict a negatively exponential event.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[JWSmythe]

You know, that "sky is falling" prediction has been coming and going for years now. It's always just a couple years away. Things get reallocated, and then it's "oh a couple years away". Someone always "discovers" IPv6, because they were just taught about it and suddenly it's the most important thing to them since storing rations for Y2K.

Sept 1998
In many ways, the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 marks the period of the Internet's adolescence. Within the user community, there's angst over ... IPv4's 4.2 billion addresses will run out in about 10 years-by 2010 at the latest.

July 1999 - Wired
The Internet on Thursday began moving from its old addressing system to a radically new one, though no one is likely to notice.

After four years of testing, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority on Thursday rolled out Version 6 of the Internet Protocol (IPv6), the next-generation numeric addressing system for the global network.

March 2002, screen digest

Under present conditions, Internet protocol (IP) addresses will run out by 2005, according to report by European Commission. Old IP version four (IPv4) cannot provide each person around the world with one address, especially since greater proportion of addresses have been assigned to North America.

May 2007, internetnews.com

The IPv4 Address Report lists two possible dates for when the number of IPv4 dates will run out: April 17, 2010 or December 2, 2010, depending on the source.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

So what exactly is wrong with IPv6 that it needs to be replaced by 'better technology'? I've always been under the impression there is nothing (major) technically wrong with IPv6 and that its lack-luster adoption is simply because there is no urgent need for it, and so no business willing to update their infrastructure for it yet.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

So that must mean we will never run out of IP's or oil then...?

Just because the estimates may be off doesn't negate the reality of the situation.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[serdagger]

That's unfortunate. I never like hearing about free market solutions to real-life problems that are blocked through misguided attempts to increase "fairness." This only benefits the large ISPs who already have both large blocks of IP addresses and a legal mechanism for leasing them (leasing is effectively a form of reselling).

Still, those ISPs can start offering cheaper plans to those willing to take a NAT'd IP address (read: charging more if you want a raw IP. This is already happening in the commercial space). The logic still works. Those who really need IP addresses will be able to pay to get them. And those who don't will work with improved NAT and related technologies.

In 734 days, you will be able to get an IPv4 address if you really want one. Still, as I said, I like IPv6. Who wants to pay a premium when the "scarcity" is artificially created by a limited number of bits?

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

"listening to the media is like listening to fox news"

What? So, you're saying they're *all* as bad as Fox News? I would agree, just seems funny that Fox News ends up as the example.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Midnight Thunder]

I think IPv6 is going to end up as another VCD (Video CD). That is, a pre-mature solution that won't ever actually see wide-scale adoption, but will merely fill the space until the _real_ solution is invented (out of genuine necessity).. which will probably be widely adopted quite quickly.

It will only be another VCD if another technology comes in and trumps it. In the case of VCD it was trumped by DVD, because which ever way you look at it there was always a need for something better than VHS. In the case of IPv6 it provides solutions to the problems we have today. The problem we have are people trying to implement IPv6 solution using approaches designed for IPv4, such as NAT or DHCPv6, or just aren't waking up and smelling the coffee. Its not happening faster because many people don't want to put the time or effort into it. If you are upgrading hardware, why not make sure that IPv6 is basic functionality that you can activate when your upstream provider provides it.

If you look around implementing IPv6 is not complicated, but it is complicated while important parties are playing their part.

I have been using IPv6 for the past two years and have learnt about it. What I have learnt is that in North America we are dragging out feet big time and the only workaround is using IPv6 tunnels. I have used a mixture of Teredo, SixXS, Freenet6 and the Apple Airport Extreme, depending on where I am. One thing that surprised me is that IPSec was originally an IPv6 technology 'back ported' to IPv4. In France Free.fr already provides IPv6 to its customers and apparently used this technology to make it happen:

http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-despres-sam-03.txt

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Mashiki]

Right, and they have been saying two years for about 12 years now. Just like how we've been 10 years away from running out of oil for close to 40 years, and about 10 years away from commercialized fusion for about the same amount of time.

Oh sure. That was back when companies used to get piles of addresses and then they realized they didn't need them. However, now you can actually plot out the max number of IP4 addresses and see almost to the day when we're going to run out. It's a moot point, this is coming, it will be here, and in 2yrs give or take a couple of weeks shy of more address blocks being released back into the public domain; that'll be it.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

IPv4 Exhaustion is expected approximately 734 days from today's date. That is just about 2 years.

It's not 734 days... It's 1173 days. Mayan predicted the end of IPv4 on Dec 21 2012.

Re:A comparison to oil in this context is absurd.

[Dare nMc]

I agree, I personally have rented the use of 1000's of IPv4 addresses, I have also rented the use of 100's of gallons of beer, and a few hundred barrels of oil.
I am now done using 99% of all of the above and have returned it, although only the IP addresses were returned in the same condition as before I rented them (although some of the uses were pretty darn disgusting.)
Since IPv4 addresses are never used up, and infinitely re-assignable I am guessing you would always be able to purchase those, much like the beer I purchased. Not sure how that will be true of the oil though, I guess it should replenish in a few million years.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Rantastic]

Wow, you clearly know nothing of the history of the VCD. HINT: VCDs, while never very popular in the USA, continue to enjoy great popularity in other parts of the world, especially most parts of Asia (with the exception of Japan).

Didn't we just get...

[joocemann]

... a big public statement from the FCC saying that this kind of action is not to be upheld?

I hope EFF knows what to do here.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Jessta]

There are two solutions on the table: IPv6 and IPv4 with carrier grade NAT.

It's going to be one of those things, in two years.

Carrier grade NAT would be fine for a lot of users. Just make cheaper plans with NAT for the facebook,myspace,email crowd.
Mobile phones don't need public IP addresses and there are only a handful of things that most users do that requires incoming connections.
P2P, VOIP, IM file transfers all of which the ISP could proxy in some way.

2 years is also not long enough to deploy IPv6 for a lot of ISPs. I imagine it's just going to get more and more hacky until they can't hack it anymore, which will probably be in 10 years.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[mysidia]

It's a bit like suggesting you can sell parts of your land (real-estate) under the table, without notifying the county records office of the sale..

The problem is... there's a registered owner (or deed holder). And having someone tell you that you can use some IP addresses is useless unless you can get traffic to them.

The action required to get traffic to go to an IP address is very public, you have to announce the IP address space using an AS number.

The only way for you to do it without setting off alarm bells is to pretend that you ARE the person you "bought" the IPs from under the table, using their AS number.

Your announcement will probably be filtered, since your IP block is a portion of theirs (it's smaller than the assignment)

So the traffic goes to them... unless they happen to be an ISP connected to you, you are now in a sticky situation.

So the difficulty in simply 'acquiring IPs' under the table, is the need to get connectivity to them. Controlling that connectivity is harder, and if the company that sold you the IPs goes bankrupt, you're screwed.

You're better off just getting your ISP to allocate you the IPs. Either that... or buying/merging with other companies for the sole purpose of acquiring their IP addresses, and throwing away all else.

(Depending on how scarce IPs get)

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

I think IPv6 is going to end up as another VCD (Video CD). That is, a pre-mature solution that won't ever actually see wide-scale adoption, but will merely fill the space until the _real_ solution is invented (out of genuine necessity)

Wasn't that what IPv5 was?

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[shentino]

Actually, if the hierarchy really is that deep it would sure make filtering out bad sites damned easy. Since only the top level routers can see outside, only one door to lock.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[perlchild]

You're right, and that's not even counting the fact that human actors might alter the prediction. That industry boards have put stopgaps and an alternate standard ready for deployment in place, and that the monetary value of some of what's "scarce" now might affect it's supply.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[shentino]

Contrived scarcity should be especially condemned when "going without" is not an option.

This is why water hoarders back in the west got rich...the only choices were pay or die.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Opportunist]

It has been rejected by the customers. That means essentially jack.

ISPs will implement it and offer their customers the choice of a NATed solution or real IP for premium price. Expect to pay more for your IP address in the future, they can charge for it, so they will. You don't like it, try finding an ISP that offers you one for free. You won't find one.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[mysidia]

Yes, there was a serious IP shortage looming 10 years ago. The issue was a boneheaded allocation strategy that provided most users more IPs than they needed. Everything was either a number of /24s, a /16, or a /8.

The introduction of CIDR bought some time, because it made allocation as efficient as it can be in IPv4.

The EU Commission's report was not credible.

The IPv4 Address Report is.

This is not the sky falling, this is the big fat meteor inching down bit by bit. It finally hits, and causes epic cataclysm, sometime in 2011.

The simple answer is you can't

[Eskarel]

IPv6 is not required yet, it may not be required for another 5-10 years, and even then it can probably be postponed by forcibly splitting up a few more class A's. Yes, it would be better and cheaper for everyone involved if we did IP6 slowly and in a planned and measured approach, but that's not going to happen. We'll get IPv6 when it's required either for a very good business reason, or because the central servers stop supporting IPv4 and there's no choice.

The plus side is that most hardware can now support it out of the box, and most likely nearly all hardware in production will by the time the switch happens. This means we'll have a couple of weeks of very hectic configuration at worst and not the end of the internet as we know it. It may not even be that bad.

What you're not going to see is mass adoption of IPv6 any time before it's necessary, it's a huge waste of resources to configure and support it at the moment.

Re:The simple answer is you can't

[petermgreen]

Sad but true

Forciblly splitting up a few class A's won't buy us much (maybe an extra year or so). What will free up space for more profitable uses is making home users either go behind ISP level NAT or pay extra.

Re:The simple answer is you can't

[Anonymous Coward]

Putting home users behind NAT isn't really very functional. NAT has serious scaling limitations if you're actually trying to make it work that way. A lot of corporations use NAT, but they also don't really want the vast majority of their systems to be externally reachable so it isn't that big a deal.

The reality of the situation is that internet address growth just isn't as fast as some folks expected. The IPv6 proponents have been claiming that we're going to run out of addressable space for years and we haven't even come close. There are a number of companies and institutions who got onto the internet early and were granted multiple Class A's they aren't using which could buy us a few more years(probably more than that).

IPv6 will probably be rolled out eventually(presuming we don't end up with IPv7 before that), but the pressure on address space which its proponents have been touting as the reason we have to go now just hasn't really eventuated. It will at some point, either because a large number of new devices come onto the net(some new device or large internet penetration into the third world) or if some killer service arrives which can't requires direct IP connections) or just due to continued growth, but it's not going to happen tomorrow, and it may very well not happen within the next decade.

Rolling out a new technology like this piece meal just isn't really going to happen. There needs to be a business driver for it, either necessity or some functionality that will give you a leg up on your competitors. Additional address space people don't really need yet isn't enough of a driver for such a significant change, especially while hardware and Operating systems that don't support the protocol still exist. Supporting two systems is always more difficult and expensive than supporting one, so most companies and providers won't switch until they can essentially turn of IPv4.

We'll get there, but today is not the day.

Re:The simple answer is you can't

[petermgreen]

Putting home users behind NAT isn't really very functional.
The bottom line is most lusers don't know how to set up port forwarding through thier routers anyway so they won't miss much. I'm sure those who do want to accept incoming connections will be given the option for an extra fee.

NAT has serious scaling limitations if you're actually trying to make it work that way.
Scaling is not a huge issue, just deal with users in moderate sized blocks.

A lot of corporations use NAT, but they also don't really want the vast majority of their systems to be externally reachable so it isn't that big a deal.
Are you really saying that you believe big ISPs wouldn't love to kill off things like bittorrent and make VOIP less reliable.

The IPv6 proponents have been claiming that we're going to run out of addressable space for years and we haven't even come close.
The runout was delayed a few years by CIDR and the rise of NAT for corporate internet access but that doesn't mean it's going away.

According to the latest stats i've seen if current trends continue the IANA will run out in 2011 and the RIRs will run out in 2013.

Your trying to contact IPv6 PI!

[slack_justyb]

I know it is a bummer but ARIN should not have issued PI addresses. Verizon is simply taking a stand on this issue. It's like blaming AT&T for not having DNS entries from OpenDNS. It's not AT&T's job to continuously keep up to snuff on every Tom, Dick, and Harry who puts up a DNS server or make's an independent entry. Likewise, it's not Verizon's job to get BGP information from independent routes. Yeah' it sucks big time and Verizon should be shunned for it, but really do you blame them? 2620:0/23 is a black hole on a lot of ISP's, why is Verizon special?

Re:Your trying to contact IPv6 PI!

[Glendale2x]

I know it is a bummer but ARIN should not have issued PI addresses.

Don't forget that RIPE allows PI /48's too, so we aren't talking about just the ARIN region.

Re:Your trying to contact IPv6 PI!

[BitZtream]

It's like blaming AT&T for not having DNS entries from OpenDNS.

No its more like AT&T saying:

When someone tries to lookup www.yourdomain.com, we're going to send an NXDOMAIN rather than forwarding the request to the root servers ... or if the rootservers say the authoritive for yourdomain.com has an IP we don't like, we're going to return NXDOMAIN

Verizon has to go out of their way to block other routable addresses in the BGP tables from being usable on their network. BGP is designed to relay the information by default, you have to add on restrictions to what gets shared after the fact.

In this case, Verizon (and anyone else doing this) 'taking a stand' translates DIRECTLY to 'Verizon is acting like a bunch of douchebags'

Re:Your trying to contact IPv6 PI!

[Glendale2x]

Addendum to my previous response: APNIC and AFRINIC also issue PI IPv6.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[mysidia]

In this case, freely allowing the purchase and sale of parts of IP blocks piecemeal would be an internet routing table disaster.

The routing table has already gone over 300,000 entries. Filtering is already a reality for many sites, and many ISPs, common equipment already can't handle the full routing table much longer at the current rate of expansion.

Equipment that can do better in hw is extremely expensive, and out of reach of much of the market.

Now, the registries today allocate blocks of IP addresses in a manner that allows filtering.

For example, if you get a /22 for multi-homing, that block gets allocated from a block from which only /22's are allocated. That way, everyone can filter to the /22, you advertise one /22 route, if you try to break up that /22 and advertise 4 /24 routes, for traffic engineering, you can do it, but many sites will filter it.

The same applies to organizations who get a /20 direct assignment, they can chop up their /20 into 16 /24s and also advertise each one with different values or from different places for traffic engineering, and it's common to chop that up a bit, but most sites will filter those, and only their /20 announcement is propagated.

Now, imagine if policies were different, and you got a /19 you later didn't need half it. You are supposed to return the /20 you don't need to the registry and exchange keep only the smaller block if this happens.

But imagine you didn't... you sold 16 /24s (256 IPs each) to 16 different entities.

Now they each want to announce them (they're not connected to you)... that's 16 more entries in the routing table.

Ok, that matters but is not massive.

What is HUGE is the fact that when people apply their filtering rules (accepting only /20 or larger) advertisements from your block allocated from a block from which only /20s are allocated.....

Suddenly those networks you 'sold' those blocks to aren't reachable by networks in the DFZ that do this filtering.

And they'll be complaining to them, demanding they relax their filtering, which ultimately causes costs to be massively increased for everyone, or their equipment blows up, or they tell the people you sold IPs to to go get a proper block... in any case, the result is bad for the community

Even though you benefit from selling IPs, and they benefit from being able to get them from you, the community as a whole incurs a massive expense, it's basically an abuse of the commons.

Actually, Verizon is right

[louarnkoz]

IPv6 was designed to solve not just one problem, but two. Not just address exhaustion, but also routing table explosion.

Thought experiment: assume we start to carry all possible /48 prefixes in the BGP routing table. You end up with 2^48 entries in the tables. Guess what: if we tried that, even if routers did somehow manage to get enough memory, they would just choke under the weight of routing updates. So there is a limit to what can be absorbed.

The solution is aggregation. With proper aggregation, all Verizon customers appear in BGP under a small set of short prefixes, instead of millions of /48 prefixes. With fewer routing entries, BGP tables are smaller, routing more efficient, and the whole Internet more stable. This is exactly what IPv6 address allocations were designed to accumplish.

You got a unique /48 number from ARIN. That's fine, but that is just that, a number. It does not provide you with any particular right to spam the BGP routers with your entries.

-- Louarnkoz.

Re:Actually, Verizon is right

[Glendale2x]

IPv6 was designed to solve not just one problem, but two. Not just address exhaustion, but also routing table explosion.

But it created a problem: no multihoming. I'm not just a Verizon customer: I'm a Sprint customer, I'm a SAVVIS customer. How would it be efficient to only be able to route via Verizon (especially if it were down)?

Re:Actually, Verizon is right

[louarnkoz]

Ah, multi-homing. There is an IETF working group busily trying to address that. They have been at work for some time, so I don't hold my breadth.

The least bad solution with the current standards is to give to each IPv6 multiple addresses, e.g. one with the Verizon prefix, one with the Sprint prefix, one with SAVVIS. Of course, that solution assumes that the exit routers are capable of choosing the exit route based on the source address picked by the host, which is a *big* assumption. I suppose that if there is enough demand, Cisco, Juniper et al will come up with such routers.

If that works, you get the equivalent of each host having multiple "virtual network cards", one for each provider. Of course, they do not in fact have multiple cards, just multiple addresses.

Failing that, the big organizations will pay their providers large sums and get a short prefix (/32, probably) that will be routed. The small folks will be left hanging.

Re:Actually, Verizon is right

[amorsen]

Of course, that solution assumes that the exit routers are capable of choosing the exit route based on the source address picked by the host, which is a *big* assumption.

It isn't THAT big an assumption. It's just policy routing, and has been available for ages.

Re:Actually, Verizon is right

[Anonymous Coward]

NetOps thought that IPv6 would solve routing table explosion problems. However, their "solution" was really unworkable as even a medium-term solution. They thought that the multihoming problem would be solved by people having multiple provider-dependent addresses and letting the endpoints worry about selecting the right source address and so forth. However, this was going to require several fundamental changes to protocols like TCP, and so wouldn't really be feasible. At the end of the day, ARIN decided just to let /48's happen and be done with it. If it's too much horse to swallow to solve addresses exhaustion and DFZ routing explosion at the same time, then simply worry about the DFZ later, especially since there's no reason that routing hardware improvements will always mitigate route explosions without decreasing performance or features (NAT zaps features), and the DFZ prefixes will cover a lot more ground for the foreesable future anyways. (At work, we're advertising a /24 and a /21 in IPv4, and a /48 in IPv6. We've already cut our DFZ slots in half in IPv6 without even trying, and the /48 is so big that we would never have to advertise any more space than that, unless our company goes super-critical).

Re:Actually, Verizon is right

[petermgreen]

Ah, multi-homing. There is an IETF working group busily trying to address that. They have been at work for some time, so I don't hold my breadth.
And it seems the RIRs are also giving up on it hence arin and ripe starting to offer provider independent allocations.

The least bad solution with the current standards is to give to each IPv6 multiple addresses, e.g. one with the Verizon prefix, one with the Sprint prefix, one with SAVVIS.
Unfortunately that soloution has a couple major problems.

1: it means end hosts have to make routing descisions which is not something they really have enough information to do properly. This means that unless apps get very clever about falling back (coming sometime arround when hell freezes over) you are going to lose the reliability and efficiancy advantages of multihoming.
2: it is a nightmare for network admins who will have to readdress everything whenever an ISP comes or gos (A6 records were supposed to partially fix this but IIRC it was considered too complicated and fragile and deprecated)

If I was a largeish organisation faced with the choice of putting multiple V6 addresses on every machine and dealing with the above problems or simply not adopting IPV6 at all I know what I would be doing. Especially as there isn't exactly much incentive to adopt IPV6 in the first place.

Long term I think the only reasonable soloution is to extend BGP with something lookup based so that routers don't need to carry an effective map of the internet with them all the time.

Failing that, the big organizations will pay their providers large sums and get a short prefix (/32, probably) that will be routed. The small folks will be left hanging.
It's not about paying your provider it's about convincing the RIR that you are an ISP and deserve an ISP sized block.

If this continues I expect to see some big organisations setting up some form of ISP/colo/whatever service to try and convince the RIRs that they are an ISP.

Re:Actually, Verizon is right

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that Verizon has a clue and knows that Provider Independent address will cause the global routing tables to explode.

So they do the intelligent thing and don't route them.

The multihoming problem is easily solvable with DNS. Get 3 different providers, put one primary DNS on each *provider dependent* address prefix, and away you go.

Now every server has three address prefixes... one for Sprint's connection, one for SAVVIS, one for Verizon. Now the webserver has direct knowledge of every upstream provider, and can respond on a connection with fewer hops, or lower latency, instead of having to pass it off to an upstream router which knows nothing about the traffic type.

If one connection goes down, you can update the DNS within 30 seconds if you want. Hell, you can traffic engineer by adjusting DNS records, on a per-service basis, instead of having to pass it all off to what should be a dumb router.

Verizon's approach keeps the intelligence at the edge of the network, where it should be.

-- Troy Benjegerdes (hozer@hozed.org)

Mod parent funny

[laing]

We've been 'about to run out' of IPV4 addresses for over 10 years. Somehow the Internet continues to survive and it's just as easy now to get a static block as it was 15 years ago. IPV6 is interesting but it is not mainstream and It will not become so in the near future. I posted this comment six months ago and it was modded troll. If you look at my followup justifications here you will see that there is a legitimate technical basis for my position.

If you want a world routable IPV6 address on Verizon's network, just set up a tunnel and don't depend upon them for your IPV6 routing. I used to hate everything about Verizon. They never seemed to get anything right; and when they did, it would usually break shortly thereafter. I've changed my opinion since I've had FiOS installed. It has been reliable and fast (and I still have a tunnel so I don't depend upon them for routing).

-- This space for rent

Re:Mod parent funny

[mysidia]

The run out date for the RIR IP address pools has not been continuously changing to 'about to run out'. It changed exactly once, due to the adoption of a new technology and an entirely new addressing scheme (CIDR).

The 2011 run-out date was forecast by the folks who compiled the IPv4 address report work back in 2005, and the expected year of run-out has not changed. In fact, so far the model and the predictions have shown to be fairly accurate.

There has not been inconsistency or divergence between the reports and reality.

The reports are certainly more compelling than an anecdotal claim that "We've been 'about to run out' of IPV4 addresses for over 10 years."

To be fair...

[fahrbot-bot]

They're missing around 29% of the IPv6 internet and refuse to carry it.

...they do carry full IPv5 access.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Kral_Blbec]

Unless there is a significant manufacturing difference between IP4 and IP6 then that cost is irrevalent to how mature IP6 is. Currently there is less demand for IP6, meaning less supply, meaning higher prices. If demand rose, Id wager that venders would start producing a lot more IP6 gear and the costs would go down drasticly.

Mature only refers to stuff like stability and our ability to produce, not the end user costs. Blue-ray is mature, but it is still hidiously expensive.

Why would Verizon "block" this IPv6 space?

[dethblud]

From the article it's not clear if Verizon is actively blackholing those prefixes, filtering them from their peers, or if they lack transit to the ASes from which the prefixes come.

I find it hard to believe that even Verizon is so disorganized that they would blackhole or filter that large a chunk of IPv6-land. My guess is that the situation is that not all of the Tier 1s have their IPv6 peering agreements in place yet. As we've learned from the various "depeering" events over the years, if a Tier 1 isn't hearing another Tier 1's route from that AS, they're not going to get it from their other peers, because that would cause the other peers to act like transit providers, and Tier 1s really don't like providing transit for eachother.

In other words, traffic for those prefixes probably doesn't leave 701 because 701 doesn't know where to send it.

The way the Internet is built it's not possible for any network to guarantee transit between you and a specific AS or prefix. There are so many factors external to a provider's network that could cause them to not know the route, or other issues that I don't even want to try to list 'em all. Simple little things like the owner of the prefix deciding not to advertise it to your network can look like this. This is also why the FCC or other government agencies don't have a hope of regulating peering agreements.

I can't believe I'm coming to Verizon's defense here...

Re:Why would Verizon "block" this IPv6 space?

[rekoil]

More specifically, they refuse to listen to any prefixes from peers that are smaller than a /32, which directly conflicts with ARIN policy regarding the intended routability of prefixes down to /48. This breaks multihoming badly - if you want to multihome (that is, connect to more than one provider via BGP), you'd have to qualify for your own /32 from your local IRR in order for Verizon to accept the prefix.

Some may remember back in the 90s/early 2000s, several providers, most notably Sprint and Verio, had similar policies against accepting IPv4 prefixes smaller than /20, with similar results that frustrated network administrators everywhere who were allocated /24 networks for multihoming. Eventually they were forced by market pressure to abandon those policies.

So, yep, looks like history is repeating itself.

Re:Why would Verizon "block" this IPv6 space?

[petermgreen]

Simple little things like the owner of the prefix deciding not to advertise it to your network can look like this. This is also why the FCC or other government agencies don't have a hope of regulating peering agreements.
It's also why if you are single homed and want good reliability you should ideally be buying from a tier 2 provider who in turn buys from multiple tier 1 providers.

You advocate dictatorship

[tjstork]

I'm sick of this excuse. Voting with your dollar works when your dollar is the only dollar.

Let's see. You pick up your marbles from the big bad company, and nobody else leaves with you. So... your answer is to try and impose your will on everyone else. Maybe all those other people simply didn't care about the same issue as you. Like, maybe your opinion doesn't matter.

Re:You advocate dictatorship

[shentino]

Sadly, for some, the "pick up your marbles from the big bad company" step never comes to pass because the company swallowed the marbles.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Drinking Bleach]

Virtually everybody with a standard DVD player has a VCD players as well (they're not strictly required to support it, but it's such a simple thing to support, practically all of them do)

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[lucifuge31337]

No one is arguing that the cost of gear that has already been produced that is IPv6 capable will go down when/if there is more demand.

Mature only refers to stuff like stability and our ability to produce, not the end user costs. Blue-ray is mature, but it is still hidiously expensive.

Exactly my point. Maybe you aren't familiar with the technology I mentioned, but most of it is a software issue, not hardware. Since the software doesn't exist in production with any major carrier, or even out of beta for any major commercial product I'm aware of, I don't think it can be said that it meets your definition of "mature." Right now, it's vaporware, at best.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Xtravar]

Admittedly, I'm not an expert, but I'm looking forward to the end of NAT on every router.

Assuming ISPs allowed regular customers to get a handful of IPv6 addresses-
1. I don't think it would technically be a 'router' anymore if all you're doing is internet connection sharing, since all you'd need is a switch.
2. That would be the end of automatic firewalling, which we all curse, but it prevents probably millions of people from getting infected computers.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[DigiShaman]

That would explain the fucked up routing issues I've dealt with in Shanghai.

Six levels of NAT?? That's really bad!

That particular prefix...

[perlchild]

Do they just say why they won't route to it?
I realize it's assigned to arin, but why is it so special?

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[glennpratt]

No, that's not how it will work. It will work just like IPv4 blocks you get today, they just cost too much for the home user.

You'll have a router that talks to an upstream router just like they do now (and for a long time, it will also be doing IPv4/NAT).

Your subnet will only be able to address your router, and your router should block all unsolicited connections by default, just like they do now.

Re:how do you think they manage to "have the netwo

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon's FIOS service has lacked any sort of 'restrictions' that you're talking about. I don't personally have it, but I have a friend/co-worker that does and he maxes out his connection all the time, and he's had FIOS for over a year without issue.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[sjames]

How many times has the predicted date come and gone? None. That's how many.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Bruha]

It's being implemented by 2 tier 1 carriers in the US that I know of. Though it's not really going to be geared towards computers. It's all more or less smartphones and other non PC end devices.

Some ISP's will just do the IPV4-6 conversion in your modem and everything at the home will be IPV4. I'm sure for 99% of the people out there it will be fine. The rest of us are going to be pulling their hair out.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Bruha]

There is no requirement for handling the entire IPv4 routing table on edge devices. If you're a small network using BGP you ignore the internet and just advertise default routes OUT of your network. If you're a big network, MPLS + BGP free core is the way to go. In general vacating traffic to the nearest edge connection (when cost is not a factor) is the best policy.

Where cost comes into play there are numerous ways around carrying the routing tables again. The only reason you would carry full tables is if you provide BGP connectivity to your downstream customers. In that case you segment that portion of the network and provide for it in a small controlled manner to avoid unnecessary complexity of your "dumb" network.

Summary is misleading.

[BitterOak]

If you read the summary, it sounds like Verizon is dropping a bunch of traffic from non-Verizon customers, but if you read the actual article, this isn't the case. To quote from TFA, "If you wish your /48 to be visible globally, you'll need to return your direct /48 allocation to ARIN and obtain a Verizon /48 from our network pool. Since our /48 assignment would be part of a /32 that we are announcing, your network would be globally routable. Otherwise, you are limited to AS701."

What this basically says is that if Verizon is your ISP, you must use IP addresses assigned to you by Verizon if you want your network to be globally visible. That makes sense to me, and it is certainly how things work in the IPv4 world. I don't see what all the fuss is about.

Re:Summary is misleading.

[Trolan]

No, it's not how it works in the IPv4 world. You come to a provider with your own PI /24 and up of IPv4 space, and they'll take your announcements, or likely even announce it for you if you're not doing BGP, depending on the arrangement. /48s are the v6 version of v4 /24s at this point in time. We also don't have mass deaggregation in the IPv6 table so far, and we certainly won't see 75k v6 prefixes (~same size as 300k v4 prefixes) for a while. Currently, v6 tables are about 2000 prefixes, ~1500 ASNs announcing v6 space.

Re:Summary is misleading.

[Glendale2x]

For those interested:

Neighbor V AS MsgRcvd MsgSent TblVer InQ OutQ Up/Down State/PfxRcd
2600:80A:60F::1 4 701 18685 7401 44868 0 0 1d09h 1516
2620:0:950::242:130
                                4 11170 28462 14090 44869 0 0 1d00h 2140

Verizon carries 1516 routes, the combination of Sprint and HE are 2140 routes.

Re:Summary is misleading.

[Glendale2x]

Someone already covered the "no that's now how IPv4 works" (unless you're talking about your residential service), so I'll just add that if you keep reading, I outlined how even if one were to use their address, you still can't get global access. Some of the advertisements in 2620:: are from universities, HP, and IBM in addition to regular multihomed sites. The fact that my IPv6 network is already more reachable than not on a global scale already flies in the face of their argument.

Please feel free to send test results for ipv6.rollernet.us (2620:0:950:f140:2d0:b7ff:fee6:574) on reachability if you have IPv6 access.

Re:Summary is misleading.

[BitterOak]

No, it's not how it works in the IPv4 world. You come to a provider with your own PI /24 and up of IPv4 space, and they'll take your announcements, or likely even announce it for you if you're not doing BGP, depending on the arrangement. /48s are the v6 version of v4 /24s at this point in time.

Just because some ISPs are allowing customers to use their own IP addresses doesn't mean that all should be required to. Imagine how complicated routing tables would become if each customer had their own personal IP address which they used with any ISP they like. I believe my point still stands. If you are a Verizon customer, there is no reason you shouldn't use the block of IP addresses that is assigned to you by Verizon. They even said they'll assign you a /48 block in exchange for the one you return.

Re:Summary is misleading.

[rekoil]

Allowing customers to route their own IRR-allocated IP blocks is part and parcel for business-class ISPs like Verizon Business (some of you may remember them as UUNet). It's one of the many things that differentiate business network services from consumer services. And it's absolutely necessary if your business needs to be truly multihomed with the ability to add or remove providers at will.

Good news is, Verizon is more or less standing alone in this refusal; there are plenty of other business-class internet providers that would be happy to accept and route the submitter's /48 IPv6 prefix. I hope Verizon is forced by market pressure to abandon this policy and get in line with the rest of the world in this regard, and the sooner the better.

P.S. One of those blocks Verizon won't route - specifically, 2620:0000:1B00:/48 - is Apple's IPv6 allocation, which means MobileMe or iTunes (or hell, Apple Software Update) would be impossible to deploy over IPv6 today thanks to these clowns.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Bruha]

Unfortunately the way I have heard it is that this time the wolf is there.

DOD is moving to IPV6, Comcast and other ISP's are planning public deployments next year. By 2012 companies will begin vacating IPV4 spaces, most of that will not be re-allocated so as to pressure remaining networks to get off the IPv4 address space in favor of IPv6.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[JWSmythe]

    I'm still not all that convinced.

    The allocations are still seriously screwy.

    1.0.0.0/8 is still reserved
    2.0.0.0/8 is still RIPE testing
    5.0.0.0/8 is still reserved
    14.0.0.0/8 is still reserved

    I just bounced through the /8's to 20.0.0.0

    A while back, I worked for a company who had millions of people hitting their main web site every day. I had the luxury of parsing the logs when I felt like it. That was more of an exercise in insanity, as a week was very easily 1,120,000,000 log lines. (8 million per day with 20 requests each as very very conservative numbers). Needless to say, it wasn't handled with a cat | cut | uniq

    For my own entertainment, I used that as a decent sampling of what IP blocks were actually allocated. The odds were in my favor that if IP's in a /8 were being used, one would hit. :) There were huge glaring holes where those IP's had been allocated to somewhere, but weren't actually being used for anything.

    We were pretty conservative with our IP utilization, but I've known plenty of places that aren't. For example, I've known places that had so many IP's on a single machine, you'd get a headache trying to comprehend it. For example, over a dozen /24 hosted on a half dozen machines, for the simple idea that search engines didn't like seeing web sites on the same IP. This was insanity, since virtually hosted domains had been in popular use for over a decade. Silly me, I always felt a little guilty having two IP's on the same box that could use up 100Mb/s on an average day. :)

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Bruha]

Suuuuurrre..

CEO "hey Cisco we invented a fix so we dont have to go to IPV6"
Cisco: "Yeah so what?, you expect us to switch to your untested solution, vacate billions in research development and manufacturing and try to convince the world it's the way to go"
CEO: "Yes!" *click* "Hello?"

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Xipher]

You can read the report for yourself here
http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Gudeldar]

So your proof that IPv4 address exhaustion isn't going to happen is to provide a bunch of sources that say (except the EC) that it is going to happen next year and current predictions are that it will be 2 years from now. Only a year off in trying to predict something 10 years in the future sounds like pretty good accuracy to me.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Pentium100]

I am using 2 IP addresses, but only because my ISP does not want to link my two connection at their end (so I would have two physical connections, but only one IP). Actually this dual IP setup is worse for me.
My cell phone provider gives a private IP (10.x.y.z) for cell phone internet and with their cap of 500MB/month I have no need for a public IP.

what were we talking about

[davidwr]

OverLoad of acronyms Per Comments, I think

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

Hypothetically, assuming only one tier of NAT, could be around 4 quadrillion or so.

Not quite that much, even for short scale.
Anyway, my Nokia (N82) seems to support IPv6 just fine. I don't see why cellular carriers would "take full advantage of" the opportunity to have a massive clusterfuck for a network configuration when they probably are among the best prepared for IPv6 both in network structure and endpoint devices. They've been feeling the limits of IPv4 for some time, seeing the fastest growth in internet connected devices, much of it areas like Asia and Africa that got in late to the IP allocation party. I suspect a lot of (non-US) cell phone networks are already running largely IPv6, but I don't have the hard data.

Oh, lookie what I found: http://www.circleid.com/posts/20090609_verizon_mandates_ipv6_support_for_next_gen_cell_phones/
Looks like the iPhone is still a bit behind, but we'll have to cut it some slack; I hear they just got support for this new-fangled MMS stuff.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[mysidia]

Let's say you're a Tier1 or a Tier2 transit provider.

There's no such thing as "segmenting that portion of your network", your customer networks are separate, period.

And you still have to filter, or fork over billions$$$ for massive upgrades...

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[JWSmythe]

    Well, the "proof" ranges from 2005 to 2010 as the outside date. There were plenty of others that I have read in the past that dated it all the way from the late 1990's through early 2000's, but I unfortunately couldn't find them in a quick search, and haven't bothered to keep them as proof of anything, other than my own little mental note that predictions are frequently inaccurate.

    I'm not going to argue against IPv6, other than the fact that I don't believe it will ever be fully implemented. I've tried on and off over the years to get an IPv6 address that could be appropriately routed for normal use, and it simply doesn't happen. Oddly enough, I've tried with both big and small lines, and pesky things like making web sites work with it. No IPv6 gateway wanted to take on multiple Gb/s of traffic when I worked with a large site. The providers couldn't provide IPv6 natively. Now that I don't even have the pull of a multimillion dollar contract (for the bandwidth, not my paycheck), I've been having a bastard of a time doing it with my own relatively small sites. I did get a routed IPv6 IP from a gateway, but it wasn't static, and the gateway was slow for the few things that did do IPv6. It's far from being prime time, and will remain there long after the again tragic death of IPv4, which I'm sure will loom right through to Dec 21, 2012. :)

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

The IPv4 Address Report lists two possible dates for when the number of IPv4 dates will run out: April 17, 2010 or December 2, 2010, depending on the source.

How about December 21, 2012 ???

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[mysidia]

Not all /8s are used for client networks that you'd see web browsers from.

The 1.0.0.0/8 was been widely used by many organizations as their own "private internal address range" (before RFC1918), and still the case, that IANA would be unlikely to ever allocate this.

Nowadays 1.0.0.0/8 is used also for anoNet, and 5.0.0.0/8 for zero-configuration of certain internet apps.

It's not like the addresses can be allocated without major caveats.

14.0.0.0/8 is allocated to to the international system of public Data Networks (X. 25 gateways), these IPs map to their X.121 addresses, as indicated by rfc 1356, see RFC1700, page 181.

That's not very many IP addresses, anyways.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[XDirtypunkX]

What makes you think it was an attempt at fairness? If they had tried to make things *fair* there wouldn't be class A in the first place. The whole allocation system was pretty much designed so the early players (defense/government, certain universities and certain large corporations) were guaranteed absurdly large chunks of continuous address range.

IPv6 + carrier-grade NAT = transition

[Xylantiel]

Just add a no-additional-cost ipv6 option to carrier-level NAT and this seems to me like a good description of how to kick-start a transition to ipv6. I think this is the intent: that we will go dual-stack for a while, but the NAT'ed masses will eventually start demanding services via ipv6 simply because it will be less flaky. This whole process will take years, but will probably be marked by only sporadic and minor headaches. I think that is the whole idea.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[fluffy99]

No the DOD is not moving to IPv6 at any great speed. They are actually pushing towards RFC private IPv4 addressing on their larger networks and reassigning or returning address space. A good example would be NMCI which uses 10.x.x.x RFC private addresses internally. One large reason for this is the distinct lack of security and auditting tools for IPv6. It's much easier to police IPv4 traffic at their internet gateways.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[fluffy99]

I was under the impression that Comcast's deployment did not extend to the end user, and that they would be Natting at the cablemodem. In essence, the carrier-grade NAT that has been discussed previously. So really the IPv6 is just internal to Comcast and transparent to the end user.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[philspear]

Disclaimer: I'm trying to read the wiki page on IPv6, but I'm so ignorant that I can't even understand that... so maybe answering this question will be pointless. I'm not following why verizon is not allowing IPv6?

The final line in TFA is

And based on their position, theyâ(TM)re probably (although we have not confirmed, but based on the 29% figure we came up with it is extremely likely) blocking similar ranges from the other regional registries in the name of global routability.

So it isn't that it will cost them more money to provide the full internet, it's that it's easier for their organization purposes? They just really want IPv4 exhaustion because then it will be harder to criticize Verizon? Or is it more likely someone at Verizon knew about as much about IPv6 as I do and decided they didn't like the sound of it at all?

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[norm1153]

So... Fox News isn't the media?

Touched his eggs...

[shmlco]

"You don't have to be an ass about it, but politely and firmly letting them know you are unhappy..."

Better politely and PLEASENTLY letting them know that there's a problem. Mistakes and accidents happen, and most businesses (as well as the restaurant in your wine example) will do what they can to set things right... if, as you say, you're not being a jerk about it.

Was at a Wendy's last week and a well-dressed woman came storming in, demanding to see the manager. Turns out she go extra tomato instead of lettuce and she went ballistic over it. The manager was exceedingly polite, asked what she wanted and what he could do to fix the problem, and did so. Bombastic female grabbed the bag, loosed a few final parting shots, and stormed out of the restaurant in a huff.

Have no idea how he kept his cool like that. Me, I would have shot the *****, as I can't stand people so self-important that they think the world must stop in it's tracks and accede to their every whim....

"...and are willing take measures to get what you paid for..."

By all means, but try the above first. Too many people wheel out the canons at the first hint of trouble. Usually, however, they're not needed and the sight of them will only serve to escalate the issue and destroy any goodwill the person on the other side may have had or felt regarding your problem.

This is ESPECIALLY true if you're dealing with someone who fields complaints or sevice calls all day long. Be polite and pleasant, discuss the problem calmly and rationally, and you'll stand out like a breath of freash air. And even better, they'll usually go out of their way to help you out.

Be rude and obnoxious out of the gate, and you'll be in voice mail hell so fast it will make your head spin.

Or as Paula Poundstone said when she was waitressing long ago at IHOP, "He made me so mad that, in the back... I touched his eggs!"

Re:Touched his eggs...

[plague3106]

Well, the flip side is that a stupid fast food restraunt STILL can't get orders right in 2009, and it becomes quite irrating when 99% of businesses are run in a way that indicates they simply don't care about their customers. Given that situtation, and that sometimes you just can't avoid dealing with these busineses, I can see why people go from 0 to 60 so quickly.

I've tried both being nice and being nasty... being nasty works much more often then not.

Re:Touched his eggs...

[digitalunity]

Sometimes polite doesn't work. I had a problem with Qwest refusing to unbundle my DirecTV. I tried to work it out nicely and amicably, but they refused. So I filed a fraudulent billing FCC complaint. Gave them about 3 weeks to think about it and called back.

After letting the CS rep know that this was already in the hands of the FCC and I intended to see it through, he was more than happy to unbundle my DirecTV and cancel the debt they falsely claimed I owed them.

If nice doesn't work, sometimes being the ass is effective.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[JWSmythe]

    That was a far from an all inclusive list. It was only using the /8's as examples anyways. I'm frequently amazed at how many /24's aren't being used for whatever reason.

    Really, within a /24 that a customer may have requested and gotten, they may only be using half or more, and they are only required to say that they will be using 80% within x days to request more. If more of this allocated but unused address space was utilized, things would change drastically. While it's good in theory, how do you request the last 18 IP's off a /24 without really screwing with their netmask? No provider does. It's not worth fixing.

    I think what we miss a lot of is that allocation does not equal utilization. We'll run for an awful long time at 100% allocation, until it actually becomes 100% utilization.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Hal_Porter]

An static IP4 address differs from water in some rather important ways though, don't you think?

I've got a static IP address with my Demon Internet account in the UK. Everywhere else it was dynamic. All the dynamic IP addresses I've seen look like real ones assigned to the ISP. Still it seems like there is nothing to stop the ISP giving me a private IP address and putting me behind a layer of address translation.

Now, like most people, I don't run any servers at home so I wouldn't notice if this was the case. In fact the router I got with my current DSL connection has NAT turned on and they don't give you the password for the administrator account, so there's no way to set up port forwarding now.

What I think will happen as IP4 addresses run out is that the ISP will use NAT inside the network so normal consumers have a private IP address assigned to their router. Of course that means no torrents and no servers. Business users will pay extra and get a public IP address, though of course there not the ones doing the torrenting.

Now my guess is that there's nothing in any contract you've signed in the last few years that commits the ISP to give you a statically allocated public IP address, so legally there's nothing to stop this.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

We're not 10 years away from running out of oil. We're some number of years from global peak oil.

Not the same thing.

In all the cases you cite, these are real, finite, and measurable resources. They will run out. It's a matter of time. And you only know for certain when it occurs *after* it occurs.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Kaboom13]

IPv4 dates back to 1981. At the time, I'm sure handing out Class A's did not seem such a bad idea. Noone at the time expected IPv4 to be the be all end all of network addressing, they expected it to be used for awhile and then replaced by something else. Back in 1980, did you think there would be a personal computer (or several) on every desk and in every home, all connected to a global internet tying every on of them together? This is a good 10 years before most people ever heard of the "Information superhighway". The people participating and building the network, getting it off the ground, got large chunks of addresses to use as they saw fit. That sounds fair to me. Is it fair for people to wait until others made a massive investment in the network, and after it becomes wildly successful, to then demand they byproduct of their investment?

Noone could have expected IPv4 would achieve the status it has today, noone predicted address scarcity being a problem before a better protocol could be designed and implemented. Presumably the designers, being intelligent, reasonable men, expected other intelligent, reasonable men to follow them, capable of implementing upgrades to add new address space as the demand required and the technology was available. Unfortunately the internet devolved into being led by squabbling, political maneuvering, corrupt fuckheads. I don't think it's fair to blame the original designers for that.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[TheThiefMaster]

We're getting laughably close to IPv4 address exhaustion without IPv6 support on nearly any home routers...

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[mysidia]

Being under 100% utilization is small comfort for the new organization that wants to get some internet connectivity, or the organization that's opening an additional facility and needs full internet connectivity for their new web farm...

The few currently unused IPs in Customer A's /24 are quite unavailable to Customer B.

v6?

[rs79]

Why would you actually want v6? What is it you cant do right now with v4?

Re:v6?

[shentino]

For starters, bittorrent.

Which will be absolutely crippled if NAT becomes commonplace enough.

And, while ISPs and the MAFIAA may be tickled pink about this, folks like redhat and canonical are going to be miffed that their low BW distribution channels over bittorrent get broken.

Not to mention WoW using p2p methods to send patches.

Right now there are no problems, however, in the time it will take to develop v6, there WILL eventually be problems with v4.

Re:v6?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're bittorrenting RHEL, but can't open a port in your NAT box? That's not enough for me to bother switching yet....

Re:v6?

[shentino]

Not *my* NAT box, the one belonging to the ISP that my connection is stuck behind.

Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally!!!!! A company with some sense in to it. IPv6 sucks. IPv4 should continue to exist(and no i don't care about address depletion, other resources have depleted as well and the world is still running despite what all kinds of destructionologist said) until a better replacement than this crappy, incomplete protocol shows up. What worries me is that lobbyists already managed to make it a law for public agencies to have IPv6. Not that i am surpised .... In a world where you can manipulate an entire nation to think that weapons of mass destruction exist in a country that barely can feed itself everything is possible....

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[amorsen]

Equipment that can do better in hw is extremely expensive, and out of reach of much of the market.

It's kind of the other way around than expected. Small ISP's have no problems, a full-table-capable Juniper J-series is quite cheap and a Mikrotik RB1000 is $695. A full table in a software router just isn't a problem anymore.

Once you need a lot of packet forwarding capacity you'll need hardware forwarding, and then you can hit problems. It isn't THAT hard (or costly) to double the CAM table size though, as long as you don't do it faster than Moore's law. Routing table growth is almost linear, and the last doubling in size has taken 4 or 5 years.

The growth of the IPv6 table is more uncertain, of course. Right now it's extremely small.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[amorsen]

Mobile phones don't need public IP addresses

Mobile phones were originally invented for peer-to-peer communication...

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

What's wrong with IPv6 exactly?

As near as I can tell, aside from its absurdly incomprehensible addresses, the only real(and significant) problem with IPv6 is that it essentially requires everyone to upgrade to it at once. If I have an IPv6 address, I can't talk to the majority of the internet, which means I simultaneously need an IPv4 address, which means the rest of the internet has precious little reason to follow my example or even join an IPv6 network at all.

The essential problem here is the disconnected nature of IPv4 and IPv6. There really is no way to establish two way connections between these
networks. You can't get Aunt Tilly's or anyone elses IPv4 network card to talk to an IPv6 network card without a significant upgrade, and there is general apathy and unwillingness to install such upgrades at all levels of the network. If a backbone ISP won't do it, why should a webhost, company, or regular user.

I've seen various comments suggesting that IPv4 scarcity will spur people to make the switch or that a "market based" solution will deliver us. You'd think people would figure out by now that the market cannot find its ass with both hands. If this situation is allowed to continue we will face indefinite IPv4 rationing and price gouging, increasingly more convoluted and disruptive NAT, and a general decline in the usefulness and global communications potential of the internet.

There is only one solution. The Law. Governments worldwide need to cut this Gordian knot by mandating that you cannot sell, provide, service or even eventually own any network connected device or OS that cannot use, by default, IPv6. We have the technology. The move needs to start with ISPs, retailers, hosting companies and business; These all need to be using, selling and servicing only IPv6 capable devices in three years. That's a realistic timespan. After this, home users and others will simply be told that after, say, 2015, IPv4 devices will no longer be permitted by law to connect to an ISPs network without a permit or the like.

Harsh. Possibly extremely disruptive and expensive. But if such steps are not taken then we will be stuck forever with expensive IPv4 address and the unholy scourge of NAT, three layers deep or more. It will be expensive. It will be painful. But it will be worth it. We need to get Y2K on this problem before the coming quagmire gums up and possibly fragments the internet.

Admittedly, I'm not an expert, but I'm looking forward to the end of NAT on every router.

Amen.

Support

[mistralol]

I assume you have some sort of support. I would suggest raising a support ticket for each unrouted block.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

What is wrong? Some committee designed it, and to keep the number of global routes under control, they decided to make IP address allocation 'hierarchical'. So if you are a DSL consumer or a big company, there is no problem (you get a /64 or a /32). But if you are a medium sized company, you must get your IP addresses from a bigger company. And if you want to multihome (for redundancy), you are pretty f#cked, because you cannot get the same /48 from two different upstreams. So all your servers need 2 public IPs, and your DNS needs two records per name. Which basically means you can only use DNS for failover, and are limited to 15min failover time (global DNS propagation time).

That is reason enough for a lot of small/medium companies to just keep using IPv4. Or to lie through their teeth to RIPE/ARIN/APNIC about their allocation sizes in hope of getting a /32.

--Blerik

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[js_sebastian]

IPv4 Exhaustion is expected approximately 734 days from today's date. That is just about 2 years.

Right, and they have been saying two years for about 12 years now. Just like how we've been 10 years away from running out of oil for close to 40 years, and about 10 years away from commercialized fusion for about the same amount of time.

So your point of view can be summed up as: "people have cried wold before and been wrong, so resources are never going to run out?". I won't speak on cold fusion, but for both oil and IPv4 addresses, the debate is just on when. Maybe instead of hiding your head in the sand you should try to do the math, or check someone else's math. For IPv4 you may want to check out this link http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/. It currently reads: "Projected IANA Unallocated Address Pool Exhaustion: 13-Oct-2011". And as far as oil is concerned, the prediction from Hubbert in 1956 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._King_Hubbert was not that we would run out of oil in the seventies, but that the US oil extraction would reach a peak in the seventies. Time has proven him right already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_US_high.svg.

IPv4 is already exhausted

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd argue that the whole existence of NAT means that the addresses have already been effectively exhausted. Maybe there are still some left, but the scarcity has made the price go up in a way that makes it impossible for normal people to get their own IP address. My own carrier has to rotate IP addresses because they've simply got more customers than addresses, and all the other carriers are the same. It's simply impossible to provide normal people with even one IP address. The end of IPv4 addresses has been with us for quite some time now. Everyone hates the situation, and we have a fix, but no one applies it. Normally when that happens the government would step in and mandate the fix, why doesn't it do that now?

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[jimicus]

You'd better tell British Telecom this. They don't seem to see a problem in RFC-1918 addresses appearing in the middle of traceroutes.

I'd like to think this is simply a router which is misconfigured and is replying with the IP address of a management port. But I have my doubts.

sue for fraud, breach of contract, etc etc

[Anonymous Coward]

voting with your dollars means you LOSE money, not a smart business decision

Scramble his eggs...

[TapeCutter]

"Better politely and PLEASENTLY letting them know that there's a problem."

Visiting in person and spitting the dummy can be deeply satisfying...

I came back to a busy mobile phone store for the fourth time regarding enabling a AU-$30 sim chip, I had also had several lengthy conversations with the phone company over that time. I went through the story (again) with a disinterested "manager" who said it was the phone companies fault, however I used to work for the telco so at this point I knew he was making excuses to brush me off and get back to earning comissions from the 30-40 people milling round the store. I had also just been watching him successfully use the same routine on the woman he served before me.

My blood started simmering but I kept a lid on it and said I no longer cared who's fault it was I just wanted my money back, he replied that the phone company had my money, I said (with a raised voice) "I don't care about the fucking phone company, I gave the money to you". He forcefully refused again claiming he no longer had the money. I replied with some loud random abuse and then picked up a display box of leaflets from the counter and threw them in the air along with the sim chip and paperwork. The "manger" was now tripping over a printer trying to back away into his office - I am at heart a "gental giant", realising I had already scared the shit out of the guy I calmed down.

I quietly turned around to leave and to my surprised delight the previously packed shop was now completely deserted, even his staff had run off! Most memorable $30 I ever spent, my kids still rib me about it 10yrs after the fact.

Re:Scramble his eggs...

[L4t3r4lu5]

I find a very good way to get a manager's attention in a similar situation is to make sure other customers can hear you. "So, you took my money for this SIM card a week ago, it's still not working, you're not going to help me get it working, and you're not going to refund my money? Are you going to do the same to these other customers?"

Much like the explanations they give in CSI / Star Trek, you need to spell it out sometimes, especially to PHBs. Make sure he's aware you're happy to stay in the shop until your issue is resolved, or the busy hour lunch-break period is over.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[TapeCutter]

"Just like how we've been 10 years away from running out of oil for close to 40 years, and about 10 years away from commercialized fusion for about the same amount of time."

Are you absolutely sure you have not been watching the same documentries over and over again for the last 40yrs?

Wow didn't see this coming a mile away

[Atrox666]

Gee you mean the IPv4 addresses are running out? So there is going to be a shortage of something. I guess a business could A) Provide an easy alternative B) Fleece the fuck out of the customer over the dwindling supplies. Now kids, does Verizon seem like an A company or a B company?

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Tony Hoyle]

Now my guess is that there's nothing in any contract you've signed in the last few years that commits the ISP to give you a statically allocated public IP address

Dynamic IPs solve nothing when DSL is connected 24/7 - it was a good solution for dialup but is increasingly anachronistic these days. I agree carrier grade NAT *will* happen - first on the cheapest ISPs (the £4.99/mo ones that are only good for browsing and email anyway), but there's no reason for that to be dynamic either (Mobile Broadband already uses carrier grade NAT... My dongle gives me a 10.x.x.x address).

Now currently my ISP will give me any number of IPs that I can justify (by justify I mean 'I want more IPs' is a valid justification, but RIPE rules mean you have to say that on the application). If they become scarce then that policy may change, but there's no sign of that yet... the ISP already provides fully routed IPV6 to anyone that asks so they're setup for the future.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[XDirtypunkX]

But that doesn't change the fact that the system for allocating addresses wasn't designed with "fairness" in mind (misguided or otherwise) as the original poster indicated. The system was designed as an oligopoly benefiting the initial investors. Which is fair (as you indicated), because it was their network.

Certain members of that same oligopoly have a vested interest in people continuing to use IPv4 and that's one of the things that is standing in the way of a market driven solution (and IPv6 for that matter). Of course the original designers couldn't have foreseen this problem, but that doesn't mean it isn't one.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Tony Hoyle]

That potaroo site is hopeless. It's now at 738 days. That's two days *more* than the last time this came up on slashdot a month or so ago. It's also roughly the same as it was last year, and the year before that. It predicts nothing. Their baseline assumptions are wrong, otherwise they'd at least have a figure that would go down at some rate approximating 1 day per day.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Tony Hoyle]

That's because they keep pushing it back.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[js_sebastian]

That potaroo site is hopeless. It's now at 738 days. That's two days *more* than the last time this came up on slashdot a month or so ago. It's also roughly the same as it was last year, and the year before that. It predicts nothing. Their baseline assumptions are wrong, otherwise they'd at least have a figure that would go down at some rate approximating 1 day per day.

I think you misunderstand what they are trying to do. They are making predictions based on the assumption that ip assignment practices remain the same as they are now. Not because they believe there will be no changes, but because that is a meaningful prediction to make. If practices are changing, it is because scarcity is inducing the changes, and some of these changes may well have a cost.

They are not trying to be an oracle, and they adjust over time to changing practices. For instance see the comment from may 11th:

I've made a couple of changes to the prediction model to align with current RIR practices and my understanding of the manner in which the legacy B and C blocks will be managed by the RIRs.

The RIPE NCC has commenced allocations from 188.0.0.0/8 in February 2009. This is a legacy Class B block that is marked as "various". I've moved this block into the RIPE-managed address pool and used the recent allocations from this block as part of RIPE's total set of allocation in terms of demand modelling RIPE's future needs.

Also, scarcity basically increases the price of an IP address, therefore reducing the number of new addresses assigned. If you do a prediction based on current trends, the date may move forward as price increases reduce demand. But that only means that the scarcity already has a cost TODAY, not just 2 years in the future.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[dyfet]

"Carrier Grade NAT" is a brilliant way to gain control over net neutrality and "consumers" who "publish" services even on asymetrical DSL, such as VoIP, and hence by "enabling" a crisis that requires a carrier "managed" Internet solution that effectively can make these services impossible for people to use or external providers to offer in the future. Ultimately, the carriers I think would love walled gardens, little AOL's if you will, all their own, with tollbridges everywhere, including for companies that wish to offer hosted services to users, whether by bandwidth throttling that has run into regulatory problems, or by access control offered through carrier NAT instituted as a "solution" to a problem they deliberately refuse to resolve by other means.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Larryish]

It's a bit like suggesting you can sell parts of your land (real-estate) under the table, without notifying the county records office of the sale.. The problem is... there's a registered owner (or deed holder). And having someone tell you that you can use some IP addresses is useless unless you can get traffic to them.

I lease my business space from a person who has the entire parcel under a 99-year lease from the family estate that actually holds deed on the property.

Why not sublet IP address space?

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, that "sky is falling" prediction has been coming and going for years now. It's always just a couple years away. Things get reallocated, and then it's "oh a couple years away".

Are you trying to argue that being in a state where everything needs to be reallocated every year in order to fit into our ancient addressing system is a good thing?

I personally would prefer to cure the disease rather than reduce/delay the symptoms.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with IPv6 exactly?

I've been running dual stack on test servers just because and it seems to work fine. I've tested Windows Server 2008 and Vista clients with IPv6 and it works fine. I even get IPv6 connections to some internet servers like Mozilla.

It's got too many fools claiming that is sucks, and many more fools believing them, resulting in that it still hasn't jumped the adoption chicken and egg problem, except for a very small amount of isp's and users.

Admittedly, I'm not an expert, but I'm looking forward to the end of NAT on every router.

Hear Hear. I have been looking forward to that for quite a few years now. Unfortunately it seems the rest of the world doesn't agree, and will do anything in its power to 'solve' the problem by adding even more levels of NAT...

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[geminidomino]

There is only one solution. The Law.

Then we are already doomed.

IPv6 needs carrier grade 6to4 nat

[Nicolas MONNET]

That's the main thing hampering it. IPv6 hosts need to be able to connect to IPv4 servers.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, homeless, wearing a sandwich-board saying "Hark! The wolf is NIGH!", and yelling at people on a busy street corner?

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[sjames]

Not actually. I've been seeing the estimate of some time around 2012 for YEARS now with the confidence level steadily rising and the error bars shrinking steadily, exactly as would be expected as the prediction goes from long to short term.

Observing ARIN certainly bears it out. They've gone from handing out ranges like candy with no more than the assurance that you want them, to steadily more detailed justifications being scrutinized more and more carefully

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[JWSmythe]

    But when your upstream provider has 2 /8's allocated, that leaves plenty of unutilized /24's to be handed off to their clients.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[JWSmythe]

You know, that last line makes me think of the swine flu nonsense going around now. Hurry up and push out a possible cure, and worry about what will happen later. Raise the allowable mercury levels, so we can get it out, and hopefully there won't be too many toxic side effects. It will be a great epitaph for humanity. "In their fear of one disease, they wiped themselves out with another toxin"

Re: So... Fox News isn't the media?

[mccabem]

Exactly!

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

IPv4 Exhaustion is expected approximately 734 days from today's date. That is just about 2 years.

Remember the story about the boy who cried wolf? Yah. This is that.

Except this time the boy is 32 bits , and the wolf is a roll royce.

Crap. That didn't work at all.

Or maybe not so obvious?

[mccabem]

Captain Obvious:

Both incorrect in substance as well as rating - it's not insightful. (Though no offense intended!)

While it's a near-certainty at this point that the world would be a better place without Verizon, they are a (sanctioned) monopoly in most markets where they operate. Also, many non-monopolies are operating well outside the "do what the customer wants, or else" version of Capitalism. They do more or less what they want, within the comfy dictates of the FCC.

This is why the poster has a problem with Verizon offering this "flavor" of IPv6.

Your argument would hold water (e.g.) if this were the old days of IPv4 Internet and you or I were complaining about getting a "full connection" from our local mom and pop ISP. In that scenario one could (in most towns) walk up the street and get the better connection you were looking for from another mom and pop.

(No concidence that in those days the likes of Verizon - or what would become them - was fully regulated, were much, much smaller. There was no room for the "Verizon flavor" of the Internet.)

-Matt

Re:Or maybe not so obvious?

[Totenglocke]

I'd love to see a coverage map to see where "most markets" that Verizon operates in, they're the only provider. In some backwater areas, sure. But when you choose to live in one of those areas where you have to drive an hour just to get to a grocery store, you're choosing to have crap service from pretty much everything.

Re:Or maybe not so obvious?

[mccabem]

Sounds like you're talking only about cell service then? The only sanctioned monopoly there is on RF spectrum. Not really what we're talking about all the way around though.

It is one of the few markets they "compete" in. Even that's a bizarre form of competition designed around lock-in though.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[petermgreen]

"Carrier-grade NAT" is not a solution, it's an oxymoron,
Many big companies have all thier users behind NAT, it's really no stretch that ISPs could do it as well. Yes there is state but it's perfectly managable as long as you do things in reasonable sized blocks (say 256 users behind a nat with 16 extenal IPs).

and one that has already been rejected by the real world.
Only an idiot would do it at the moment. It's much better buisness wise for them to grab as many of the (soon to be scarce) IP addresses as they can while allocations are still availible. When the addresses run out they can then gradually recover them from home users to use for more profitable purposes (buisness customers, hosting customers, the internet side of the new NAT boxes etc)

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[NNKK]

Comcast's IPv6 strategy has absolutely nothing to do with NAT. A simple google search would reveal the mass ignorance being displayed in this thread.

Their initial deployment is for device management. Every device (set-top box, cable modem, etc.) on a DOCSIS network needs an IP address (most actually need two or more). Switching them to IPv6 has become an immediate necessity, as there simply are not enough IPv4 addresses left to deal with it.

Once the switch happens, they'll have freed up several million IPv4 addresses for use on end-user PCs, which will make the need for IPv6 on customer PCs less of a crisis for Comcast, but it's not going to put it off forever.

The reality is that most of Comcast's network is already capable of deploying IPv6 to everything, including end-user internet connections (and the parts that aren't are being actively upgraded). They've been preparing for this for years. Turning it on for end-user connections is primarily a business and customer service problem, not a technical one.

File with the FCC right away

[msoftsucks]

The FCC is currently doing a full review of the telecomminications policy for Internet neutrality. I caught some of these sessions on CSPAN with Verizon coming up roses. I'm sure the FCC would be quite interested in knowing that Verizon is not the good network citizen that it claims it is. Here's the FCC link to file.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[mysidia]

In North America, at least, an organization applying to receive IP addresses has to sign a contract with the registry (ARIN), before any IP addresses will be assigned. Some of the terms of this agreement are designed to prevent "selling" or "sublet'ing" ip space.

Also, guess what... if the registrant of record fails to pay the bill, ARIN permanently revokes the IP address resources after a certain period of time. This is like leasing a property for 99 years from someone who doesn't own the property.

Some of the provisions of the contract include:

9. NO PROPERTY RIGHTS
Applicant acknowledges and agrees that the number resources are not property (real, personal, or intellectual) and that Applicant does not acquire any property rights in or to any number resources by virtue of this Agreement or otherwise. Applicant further agrees that it will not attempt, directly or indirectly, to obtain or assert any trademark, service mark, copyright, or any other form of property rights in any number resources in the United States or any other country.

(i) Except as provided in 15(a)(ii), Applicant may not assign or delegate this Agreement or any of its rights or obligations under it, including without limitation the exclusive right to use the number resources allocated or assigned to it, without ARINâ(TM)s express written permission,

(ii) The event of any transaction (whether a merger, acquisition, or sale) in which Applicantâ(TM)s controlling managerial and/or voting interest changes during the term of this Agreement shall be considered an assignment, so long as the Applicant provides ARIN with written notification within thirty (30) days of such assignment.

(iii) Any attempt by Applicant to assign this Agreement or any rights or obligations under it, other than as provided in this Section 15(a), will be of no force or effect.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[mysidia]

It's true, but the registries, and ARIN particular has not handed out /8s liberally, not in the past 10 years they haven't.

The policy is to provide an ISP up to a year's supply of IP addresses maximum (after they've been an ARIN member for long enough), based on their network design, and justified need.

Unless the ISPs committed blatant fraud and massive overexageration on their IP applications, they don't have more than a year's supply of unutilized /24s laying around.

Maybe they indeed have.. This is no consolation to the ISPs who have followed the rules...

Or providers with multiple upstreams... as you can't just take an assigned unutilized /24 from your upstream's PA space and expect to reliably multi-home with it (even when your link to the primary provider that issued the IP block goes down), due to aforementioned filtering.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[mysidia]

Many SPs will only use the particular manufacturer of network gear whose name starts with a 'C'. Because, for one thing, they're not trained in the management and unique characteristics of the MicroTik or Juni products, and so few people use them, getting help is harder, consultants are more expensive, and the support organizations behind those platforms are less trusted.

Software forwarding is just fine for end users, but not for SPs who are transit providers.

Anyways, suffice to say, they have reasons that taking larger tables incurs additional expenses

They have two options: (1) use all their money to buy better equipment, raise prices on their customers, or (2) Filter.

Number (2) filter is better for the health and efficiency of their networks.

They save money from avoiding premature upgrades they may now be able to use for other things, like IPv6 migrations :)

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Larryish]

Wow, that's rough.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[Kral_Blbec]

Ehhh, I think that is actually the opposite of what you originally posted

handle complex ACLs only exists in the highest end hardware

Most SIP hardware vendors

True, I really dont follow the whole ip4 vs ip6 at all, but your posts are a bit inconsisted. The first is talking about the hardware costs, which I said and you agreed will go down, then you said its a software problem. Im not following you somewhere :P

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[lucifuge31337]

I understand how that is confusing....I was talking about two different things and didn't really differentiate. As you said, the routers will come down in price. They are the bits and pieces that need hardware differences (ASICs, RAM, etc) to be IPv6 ready with handling ACLs outside of the base chassis CPU. I use mostly Cisco gear. IOS has handled IPv6 just fine for some time. Try to toss too many IPv6 ACLs at it and run lots of IPv6 traffic, and your CPU will melt down unless the hardware directly supports it. The SIP gear is typically sold as a "Box". Most of these boxes are not specialazed (they are rackmount PCs running Linux or very dumb boxes full of transcoder chips that netboot some minimal OS to bring up a SIP stack and shove RTP through their specialized hardware). They do not need any hardware changes, but they do need software that will handle IPv6. That is the software that is lacking in mature form, and in many cases, in many cases at all. Example: Dialogic (formerly Cantatta) IMG 1010 transcoder.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[amorsen]

Cisco 7600, ASR-1000, ASR-9000, and CRS-1 all have sufficient space for the next 5 years, with the 7600 being the first to hit the wall.

It really is a solved problem, as long as you can afford to replace your supervisor modules every 5 years.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[mysidia]

Yes, and the prices of that gear are high, eg

7600 - >$30,000
ASR-1000 - >$50,000
ASR-9000 - >$80,000
CRS-1 - >$500,000

I never said it was impossible, only that it gets expensive. Replacing your sups every 5 years with the shiny newest model isn't cheap either.

Think of how rapidly the tables would grow if masses of deaggregated /24s started appearing due to "IP sales". There are already some ASes that announce every /24... imagine how messy it would be for a much larger percentage of /24s to be individually announced.

And ye who want to be able to sell random /24s out of your IP space... really have no right to force all the providers in the world to give you those routing slots, they don't want to, and to an extent, policies and common practice reflects the desire to keep costs low.

If costs are high, ISP services and internet connectivity gets more expensive for all..

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[amorsen]

Well if you want to be cheap, just go for the 7200. With those platforms you're paying for the hardware forwarding, not for the ability to route the full Internet. Ok, the RSP720CXL is marginally more expensive than the RSP720C, but that really is in the noise. (And the ASR-1000 is technically a software router, it's just damn fast.)

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[petermgreen]

IIRC while you can't directly sell them you can transfer them to a parent company or subsidary and you can sell a subsidary complete with it's IP addresses.

So time to set up a shell company, maybe with some token assets.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[petermgreen]

No it won't. It will be some bandaid solution thought of at the last minute that will patch things together until the current crop of CEOs get their golden parachutes.
ISP level nat *IS* the bandaid soloution. By forcing home lusers behind ISP level NAT there will be enough IP addresses left for those who really need them for a while. The cost will be able to be spread out by migrating users to NAT in groups as thier IPs are needed.

Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor

[mysidia]

Sure, but you can only dispose of a complete allocation in this way, such as a /20, not a small number of IPs such as a single /24. And you can only get lots of IPs with some good justification and some proof of your need for the IPs (including adequate utilization of a block allocated to you by an upstream provider).

Verizon blocking psrts of the Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

As of this morning Verizon is blocking The Pirate Bay too. Of course we've all learned how the Chinese get by the Great Firewall and guess what ... these same techniques also get around the Great Verizon firewall too.

Take that you corporate assholes!

Ok...

[Meor]

You get one of the few ISPs that'll actually give you a full IPV6 stack to your house and suddenly *they* owe *you* for not routing part of the IPV6 network to you? How quickly people gain an undeserved sense of entitlement.