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Akamai To Offer IPv6 To All In April
netbuzz writes "Akamai says that it will offer IPv6 services to its entire customer base beginning next month – a long-awaited move that is expected to be a major boon to the adoption rate of the next-generation Internet Protocol. Akamai hoped to release its production-grade IPv6 services by the end of 2011, but the task proved more difficult than originally anticipated. Akamai has been beta testing its IPv6 services with key customers since last fall."
Based on my own company checks for readiness I assume the big hold up feature parody with IP4 and IP6 security software and equipment.
I know many of our security appliances have been able to route IP6 for a long time, but few of them could filter or manage the traffic with any sort of detail close to that of IP4 since the features had not been ported.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
"feature parody"?
How would it be any better? You still would have to replace equipment and software in order to support it. Most high-end equipment uses ASICs for routing, so you wouldn't be able to just do software upgrades to support it.
In addition, re)cent article put driven out by the Learn what mistakes these challenges Something done asshole to others (I always bring my
Mod up +10 insightful.
Best post ever.
We actually ran out of IP's last year, there's been one guy in Virginia running a NAT for the whole U.S. with the last one. But it's on an old lynxsys, he'd really like to free up the plug to vacuum and so we have to all get over to ipv6 pretty soon so he can power it down.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
IANA, the top level of organizations which handle the allocation of IP addresses, has run out of IPv4 addresses more than a year ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orJpEJuZick
The regional registries still have addresses and are going through them at different rates, so they'll run out at different points in the future.
RIPE (Europe) is down to about 40 million addresses, including the last 16 million which will be assigned under a different, more stringent policy: http://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/ipv4-exhaustion/ipv4-available-pool-graph
APNIC (Asia) is already on the last /8 block: http://www.apnic.net/community/ipv4-exhaustion/graphical-information
ARIN (North America): http://www.compusophia.com/en/ipaddrstat/ipv4_arin_pool.html
LACNIC (South America): http://www.lacnic.net/en/registro/espacio-disponible-ipv4.html
AfriNIC (Africa):
http://www.compusophia.com/en/ipaddrstat/ipv4_afrinic_pool.html
When those are depleted, it's going to be NAT all the way down.
Or buy them on the secondary market. The current price is around $12 per IP.
Ah, but it works the other way too. See all those people doing business on the new IPv6 Internet? Shame you can't join them because 'too bad' they don't have IPv4 and you don't want to move to IPv6, because it is just hype.
At a certain point that snow ball will take on speed. You can deny it is coming, but will hit you sooner or later. Better off if you are prepared for it.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Not just theoretically, but this is one of the techniques likely to be used in the long term IPv6 transition. Essentially, the main CDN is IPv6 only, but @ the CPEs, a single IPv6 node address is used to serve several IPv4 nodes, all of which have private IPv4 address. As a result, it completely skirts the issue of IPv4 address exhaustion, and allows legacy IPv4 nodes to operate freely on IPv6 networks. Comcast used this in their trial runs, although for the final customer delivery, they went w/ dual stack. DS-Lite's advantage over DS is that the latter would still be impacted the day IPv4 runs out of addresses. The former won't.
So when will Slashdot be on IPv6? Inquiring minds and nefarious hackers want to know.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
RIPE (Europe) is down to about 40 million addresses, including the last 16 million which will be assigned under a different, more stringent policy
Its worth noting that most (all?) the RIRs have similar /8 policies, which makes the idead of having "run out of IP addresses" slightly confusing. Basically, this means that once they are down to the last /8 (~16.8 million addresses), each LIR is only going to be allocated a single /22, forever. So with such a restrictive policy, it will take many years for the RIRs to actually run out of addresses, but as soon as they hit the last /8, addresses will get very scarce - this is the "crunch point" - by the time they actually run out we probably won't need IPv4 addresses any more.
The idea of this last /8 policy is mainly to allow new LIRs to get a small chunk of IPv4 addresses to allow them to continue to compete with the existing LIRs who already have IPv4 networks - imagine you're shopping around for a datacentre to host some servers in, the existing datacentres say "we can give you IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity" whilst the new datacentre says "we can only give you IPv6 because we have no v4 addresses". In that situation, no one would use the new datacentre, so by allowing them to have a /22 lets them compete on a more level ground. Of course, a /22 is only 1024 addresses, so they are going to have to be very careful with them, and are still at a disadvantage to the existing datacentres, who will be able to reclaim addresses from internal equipment, etc.
So, RIPE is about 26 million addresses away from the last /8 "crunch" and the addresses currently seem to be going at about 5 million a month, so we can probably expect them to run out around August/September, assuming the allocations stay at the same rate. Interestingly, APNIC saw a big increase in demand once they got down to about 7 /8s and this hasn't happened for RIPE yet. It will be interesting to see if there is a last minute demand.
A useful graph of allocations by RIR
When those are depleted, it's going to be NAT all the way down.
I keep hearing ISPs say "we're not implementing IPv6 yet, we've got loads of IPv4 addresses so we're not worried". But at the end of the day, I don't think the ISPs are going to be the driving force - I think they really do have plenty of spare IPv4 addresses, and even when they run out, they can NAT most of their customers and charge a premium to anyone who needs an un-NATted connection. The people who are going to be really hit by the crunch are content providers - at some point, a content provider is going to want to add a new server, a new HTTPS site, etc; and they're going to get the answer "no" when they ask the datacentre for some more IPv4 addresses. Thats when things are going to get messy. Of course, the ISPs saying "we don't need IPv6 since we've got loads of addresses" is totally bogus - it doesn't matter how many v4 addresses they have, if the ISPs' customers want to access content hosted by people who _don't_ have v4 addresses, they are going to need v6 connectivity, and eventually any ISP that doesn't provide it is going to lose out because some content isn't going to work. What ISP wants to tell their customers that they don't allow connections to Facebook's new service, or Google's new product?
One thing that would be nice to see is more v6-only content *before* crunch-time to try and pressure the ISPs to act. This could be done without seriously impacting the bottom-line of content producers: for example, Google always likes to "soft-launch" their new products, often by doing an invitation-only thing. But they could soft-launch them by initially making them v6-only. Same effect for them (no massive influx of new users, whilst getting a steady str
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Akamai are big. Really big. Having them offer IPv6 services to their customers is a big step forward in terms of making IPv6 adoption practical.