Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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
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.
Does that imply there was a contract between you and Verizon? If so you should pursue them for breach.
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.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
"Carrier-grade NAT" is not a solution, it's an oxymoron, and one that has already been rejected by the real world.
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.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
This is my sig.
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.
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.