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After IPv4, How Will the Internet Function?
An anonymous reader writes "36 countries in the world have over 100% per-capita usage of mobile phones, and this is driving a real crunch on IPv4 addresses as more and more of these devices are data-capable. The mobile network operators are acting fast to deploy IPv6, and T-Mobile USA has had an IPv6-only trial going on for over 9 months now using NAT64 to bridge to IPv4 Internet content. It is interesting to note that the original plan for IPv6 transition, dual-stack, has failed since IPv4 addresses are effectively already exhausted for many people who want them. Dual-stack also causes many other issues and has forced the IETF to generate workarounds for end users called happy eyeballs (implying that eyeballs are not happy with dual-stack), and a big stink around DNS white-listing. How will you ensure that your network, users, and services continue to work in the address-fractured world of the future where some users have only IPv4 (AT&T ), some users have only IPv6 (mobile and machine-to-machine as well as developing countries), and other Internet nodes have both?"
It seems ludicrous to claim that the dual stack idea has failed when more and more devices are suddenly finding themselves with IPv6 addresses and are putting them to use. My home and work LANs are dual stack and everything Just Works. For being a failed experiment, it works amazingly well in everyday usage.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Because a lot of services don't work well through NAT. VPN and voice services are good examples.
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2003/06/what_ever_happened_to_ipv5.html
It was assigned to an interesting, but ultimately not implemented, protocol.
Your smartphone might not need a public IP address but it certainly could benefit by having a unique IP address within the mobile operators network, right?
Do you know China Mobile has hundreds of millions of subscribers. Did you know even T-Mobile has 150 million subscribers globally? Any guess as to how large private IP space is? Hint - it isn't big enough for any of the major operators to supply a unique IP within their networks.
These large operators have had to choose between partitioning their subscribers which makes phone-to-phone applications a mess or using bogons (IPv4 space registered to other people!) which is what T-Mobile had been doing, or they can choose sanity, which for them includes IPv6 as it is large enough to handle these mobile networks address needs without breaking a sweat.
T-Mobile decided that IPv6 only with a NAT64 back to IPv4 is the right way to go for the future. It's doesn't solve all their issues but it's a pretty clean way for them to solve it with the minimum of cost and near maximum usability.
Other vendors are betting on IPv4 partitioning with IPv6 capability. If T-Mobile is successful with their approach it's likely IPv6 only on handsets will become the defacto standard. After all, why should your phone run two IP stacks when one can get the job done?
IPv4 NAT can cause problems for some communications protocols. These include, but are not limited to:
Things will only get worse on IPv4 when the ISPs increasingly move towards carrier NAT as a solution to avoid the perceived complexities if IPv6, when really it's just an excuse to do less work and squeeze more money out of the users.
We aren't out of IPv4 addresses, we are out of IPv4 block allocations. This started back in 1992 when Cisco and Bay Networks decided that forcing new allocations into consolidated routes was easier than building routers that could cope with 2^24 (or even 2^32) unique routes. The original / notation wasn't about talking about /16 or 24 but /36 was a way to describe taking 4 extra bits from the source and destination port range. That system would allow most existing hardware (even from the late 80s) to work without any changes and allow things that know about the newer way to cope with more advanced addressing for things like vhosts.
Thanks to finally embracing NAT64, this becomes easy.
If you are providing 'server' access, you pretty much *have* to get an IPv4 address, and preferably an IPv6, but not absolutely required for now. Short term, don't sweat it, medium term go dual stack at first opportunity that presents itself, long term you may take down the IPv4 network one day, but don't explicitly plan when that day will come. The common strategy may continue to be ignore v6 entirely, however moving dual stack at your pace ensures that in the slim, but real possibility that your next-hop provider stops IPv4 routing or starts penalizing IPv4 use via unreasonable fees won't put you in a tight spot. The scenario of next-hop penalizing/dropping v4 is the only scenario I see as sufficient motivation to get servers to bother with v6 at all. I think even brand new servers will do what it takes to secure IPv4 space, which may free up some given the next point...
If you are setting up a network as 'clients', you can get by with either IPv6 or IPv4 for a while. Giving dual stack when available is nice, but whatever you have would be sufficient. ISPs without IPv4 addresses available for new clients should rapidly pursue IPv6 for residential customers and give them most internet via NAT64 on their end. Doing IPv4 private addresses would doom them to crappy service indefinitely, whilst IPv6 would only be semi-crappy for a more temporary interval. If you *really* want v6 to catch on, then start allowing v4 addresses to be carved up more free-market style. All technical experts agree that this would completely fubar the v4 network performance in aggregate, but you would entice adoption of v6+NAT64 with the profitable opportunity to reclaim addresses and sell them to places that *really* need them. The v6 network would be nice and cleanly routed, and getting on the v6 network just becomes that much more important.
Some would argue that any sort of NAT at the carrier plays right into the hands of those who hate P2P networks, including NAT64 as those behind NAT64 are unreachable by peers who are v4 only. However, the reality is there are two possible outcomes, residences getting 10/8, 172.16/12, or 192.168/16 which *completely* breaks P2P (and probably many wireless routers presuming those prefixes won't come from the WAN), or NAT64 where the P2P graph may not be as connected, but all v6 peers can reach each other. Since P2P designs are inherently tolerant of unreliable ability to reach peers, this should suffice for a while.
Major architects in v6 world advocated the dual-stack method as the way to theoretically move on with no thought to the practical motivations to move forward. They hated NAT in every way as it breaks the peering model they hold dear. They hated accepting the practical view that most of the internet are clients and few are servers. If they had embraced it from the beginning, then I suspect most residences would be v6 by now.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Just because 'most news sites' report it, doesn't make it true. IPv5 didn't become mainstream because of what it was designed for, NOT because it had an odd number.
Maybe you should Google what IPv5 was for. Here, I'll help. Read this.
Geeks should know better. The way it is talked about, you'd think in a couple days someone will plug in a device and there'll be no more IPs. Not hardly. We are approaching the first milestone in an eventual crunch. That is that there will be no more addresses not assigned to a registrar. The remaining class-As will be handed out to the regional registrars. While that means at the highest level we are "out" that doesn't mean we are out on a user level.
I'm not saying that we don't need to move to IPv6 but people on /. keep talking like we are going to be out of every single IP address real soon. No, rather we will be starting a process of scarcity. So far there's been no real scarcity of IP addresses. That will change. However all that means is that costs will change.
That will actually probably be a good thing for IPv6 adoption. If you are a company and want some static IPs and your ISP says "Sure, you can have IPv4 addresses at $30/month each, or as many IPv6 addresses as you want for free," well maybe you decide there's good reason to go with IPv6 and upgrade your stuff.
Skype relies on other people running Skype with a public IP address acting as a proxy. When everybody goes NAT, Skype breaks down as well.
The problem is the asshats that came up with IPV6. It should be scrapped here and now. IPV6 is just plain and simple flat out stupid.
Using a hexadecimal address was pure stupidity. All you needed to do was turn each segment of an IP address into a word sized ( 64 bit addressing ) or a long sized ( the magic 128 bit ) value instead of a byte sized value since:
2600000.35.1254.1785
Is one hell of a lot easier to remember then
2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334.
And using the colon for address separation is equally as stupid since that is how we designate port numbers. Ohh wait I know don't forget to surround the unrememberable POS with square brackets!
To make IPV6 useful it requires anything and everything to have a DNS entry since it is pretty much unrememberable and quite frankly I have devices that I never want in the DNS system yet I will be pretyy much forced to since trying to remember an IPV6 address will give me a fucking stroke.
And lets not forget you omit parts of the address eg: 2001:0db8:85a3::0000:8a2e:0370:7334 but ONLY once! I mean why did they even bother with this crap, is that supposed to make it easier?
IPV6 was written by a bunch of head up their ass academics, and even if the members of the committee were not academics their head was still firmly planted in their ass.
The guys who came up with IPV4 new they would have to work with it and made it pretty damn simple in most respects, but these clowns have turned something that should have just made the address space bigger into to something that will require massive kludges to transition since it will pretty much cause a mandatory replacement of pretty much 90% of the hardware out there.
Never ever let an academic design anything. They will fuck it up every time.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
it is standing in the way of a real and workable solution to the problem.
So no, IPv6 is not the solution. IPv6 has simply become part of the problem.
So let me guess the solution ... "AOL keywords"?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Foreigners sometimes have service, too. I've got prepaid AT&T and T-Mobile accounts for my US trips (each has different advantages), so I count toward 2 Americans having service, even though I'm not American and don't live in the country. 100% saturation merely means there are as many active lines as there are people, but it says nothing of how those lines are distributed.
Explain to me why all that stuff needs to be upgraded, but other stuff - your stuff and my stuff - doesn't?