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Sale of IPv4 Addresses Hindering IPv6 Adoption
hal9000(jr) writes "While IPv6 day was a successful marketing campaign, is anyone really moving to IPv6? On World Launch Day, Arbor Networks noted a peak of only .2% of IPv6 network traffic. It appears that IPv4 addresses are still valuable and are driving hosting acquisitions. Windows 8 will actually prefer IPv6 over IPv4. If you want IPv6, here's what to do about it."
From the article:
"Transitioning to IPv6 will take much, much longer than anyone expects, mostly because there is no clear reason to move to IPv6 anytime soon."
Not everything works with IPv6 yet. Most stuff does, but most organizations still have some stuff that doesn't quite yet. It'd be great if it was all just transparent, but it's now.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Businesses will switch when IPv4 addresses get so expensive that there is no other option, and the ugly hack on ugly hack to maximize the use for them gets to a point where it isn't worth doing.
Call me crazy, but NAT, ugly as it is, may still be a useful tool. It isolates the internal fabric, so that regardless of what the external routers are talking to, packets get out. Does it improve security? NAT by itself doesn't, but that is what SPF, a good IDS/IPS, and proper segmenting is for.
IPv6 has been around for a long time now. You can't buy an IPv4 only device pretty much, as almost anything that has Net capabilities has at least a dual stack.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Vista and Windows 7 "prefer" IPv6 too... Heck even Windows XP with its crappy IPv6 stack turned on prefers IPv6.
If you read the whole cnet article what has changed is network awareness sending an IPv6 only HTTP request periodically to a Microsoft server using this to judge if IPv6 connectivity is actually available.
In other words the behavior of all windows 8 systems on the planet with regards to IPv6 usage is dictated by the availability by a single Microsoft URL. What could possibly go wrong with that? Is it not also wonderful MS having their system ping out to MS servers by default periodically without anyone knowing or providing a user choice to turn it off not involving registry hacks?
With regards to IPv6 usage I just checked the interface stats on my gateway with an HE tunnel configured. Very interesting...IPv6 Internet traffic is a full 25% of overall Internet usage over the last 145 day period. This predates the June 6th IPv6 go live day by several months.
IPv6 = 32GB
IPv4 = 129GB
ISPs are still dragging their feet lighting up IPv6.. I fear we will have to wait another two years before most large ISPs get their act together on full production deployment.
The most interesting thing seems to be the "long tail" effect reflected in my actual usage.
Given current environment where just a handful of megasites are responsible for the majority of all Internet traffic by volume huge changes in traffic patterns can tip the scales on IPv6 usage rapidly while the countless millions of other sites run by the rest take just as long to switch over as the IPv6 naysayers say it will.