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Comcast Activates IPv6 Trial Users
Spacecase writes "Comcast announced the first group of trial users have been activated on their IPv6 Native Dual Stack solution. Considering the recent news about IPv4 addresses becoming scarce, this looks to be one of the better solutions to get out of the IPv4 problems."
Each user has been delegated a /64 block of approximately 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (18 quintillion) unique IPv6 addresses.
"18 quintillion unique IPv6 addresses should be enough for anybody." -me
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Uhh, the entire reason they're moving to IPv6 is because IPv4 internally no longer works for them. They've exhausted 10.0.0.0 (it's only 16M IPs, after all), so moving to v6 is the only way they can keep their network manageable, without going to crazy, multi-layered NAT solutions.
I have been a comcast customer for 8 straight years now (give or take a few months)
Had the announcement broken 3 years ago, I would have agreed with you, but Comcast is on a long, upward trend in technical competitiveness.
They were the first major ISP to go DNSSEC, I believe, and have done DOCSIS 3.0 rollouts in most of their markets (we get cheap 20/4 service here, with a 50 down option available. Some parts of the service area have 100mbps down.) They also rolled out a bunch of 6to4 servers recently. While 6to4 is not a great technology, it is useful to have ISP servers, since my IPv6 traffic (auto tunneled via an Airport Extreme) goes through my local NOC and not first to wisconsin and then back to silicon valley as was the case before.
They still lag when it comes to technical support via phone, as they assume all of their customers are techno-illiterate, but I have to give them a lot of credit for being on the leading edge when it comes to their network and network technologies.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
Comcast has a slightly unusual situation. They are so massive that their "control plane" network has exhausted 10.0.0.0/8. That means afaict they are now using public IPs not just for customers but for internal use as well. The space that most ISPs would use to put their customers on ISP level NAT is ALREADY TAKEN for their "control plane" network.
http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog37/presentations/alain-durand.pdf
Given that they have little choice but to go IPv6 for thier internal networks (or "federate" the network but that is a large management headache) before IPV4 addresses run out it is not that surprising that they are proposing to offer it to customers as well.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Give rfc3177 a read, especially section 4. That RFC is obsolete now, but the math hasn't changed.
These numbers are ridiculously huge, and it is intended in the design that subnets would normally be sized at /64. Thinking of that as 18 quintillion addresses is thinking like IPv4. IPv6 is different, and you think in terms of subnets. There are also (since an address is 128 bits) 18 quintillion /64 networks. If we give each person on the planet 65536 /64s (that's a /48) then we have enough for 5000 times the current world population in the current pool of addresses, which is 1/8th the full IPv6 address space. If you use the whole space, then it's 40,200 times the world population.
4096R/EF7BAFA6 79E1 DF98 D09D 898F 9A11 F6F0 DDDC 23FA EF7B AFA6