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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?"

32 of 438 comments (clear)

  1. bullshit by shentino · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:bullshit by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ...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.

    2. Re:bullshit by NoYob · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

      --
      It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
    3. Re:bullshit by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:bullshit by PNutts · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ...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.

    5. Re:bullshit by QuantumG · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    6. Re:bullshit by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    7. Re:bullshit by Stolovaya · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    8. Re:bullshit by HeronBlademaster · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    9. Re:bullshit by shentino · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

    10. Re:bullshit by rastilin · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      How do you kill that which has no life?
    11. Re:bullshit by rantingkitten · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
    12. Re:bullshit by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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".

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor by mysidia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Order Accepted? by WiiVault · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  4. Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor by conureman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  5. Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor by NNKK · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  6. Obvious answer... by Totenglocke · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Obvious answer... by rockNme2349 · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

      --
      Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
  7. I wonder by DaMattster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:I wonder by Mr2001 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
  8. BGP aggregation policy by chrylis · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  9. Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor by serdagger · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor by paul248 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  11. IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors by Junta · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  12. Re:Yes, but watch for... by shentino · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

  13. Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor by serdagger · · Score: 2, Insightful
    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?

  14. Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor by shentino · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  15. Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor by Opportunist · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
  16. You advocate dictatorship by tjstork · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
  17. Re:Yes, but watch for... by Bruha · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  18. Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor by Kaboom13 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.