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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?"

28 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 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.

      --
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    2. Re:bullshit by nacturation · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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    3. Re:bullshit by ZekoMal · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:bullshit by kimvette · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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    5. Re:bullshit by paul248 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    6. Re:bullshit by c0d3g33k · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    7. 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.

    8. Re:bullshit by witherstaff · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    9. 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.

    10. 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.

      --
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    11. Re:bullshit by ShakaUVM · · Score: 4, Funny

      >>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.

    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".

      --
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  2. Verizon are just protecting you by sakdoctor · · Score: 4, Funny

    From the EVIL 29% of the internet.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

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

    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.

  6. 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.

  7. Re:Google Cache link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  8. Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor by ekhben · · Score: 4, Informative

    [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 :-)

  9. You aren't seeing the whole picture by davidwr · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
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    1. Re:You aren't seeing the whole picture by mysidia · · Score: 5, Funny

      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?

  10. It's either IPv6 or carrier-grade NAT or ??? by davidwr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
  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.

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  12. Re:BGP aggregation policy by Glendale2x · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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  13. Re:change of contract by Glendale2x · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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  14. I've used dual-stack IPv6 with IPv4 NAT for 2 yrs! by cwolfsheep · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  15. 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.