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How Ready Is IPv6 To Succeed IPv4?
New submitter unixisc writes: Over the last 2 years, June 6th had been observed as IPv6 day. The first time, IPv6 connections were turned on by participants just for a day, and last year, it was turned on for good. A year later, how successful is the global transition to IPv6? According to Cisco 6labs, adoption rates vary from 50% in Belgium to 6% in China, with the U.S. coming somewhere in the middle at 37%. A lot of issues around IPv6, such as the absence of NAT, have apparently been resolved (NAPT is now available and recognized by the IETF). So what are the remaining issues holding people up — be it ISPs, businesses, consumers or anybody else? When could we be near a year when we could turn off all IPv4 connectivity worldwide on an IPv6 only day and nobody would notice?
Right now - quite a bit - there are all sorts of mechanism that have to be worked around. Every spend any time troubleshooting SIP? Do you know why nobody does direct media?
Ever wonder why file transfers in instant messaging apps either work intermittently or perform slowly?
Ever see the layers of complexity we've built to do our best to work around such issues: STUN, UPNP, NAT-PT, ICE, ALGs... It's layers upon layers of cruft. ...and we haven't even gotten to the real horror of so called "carrier-grade" NAT yet... Eg) NAT behind NAT.
The prospects are awful.
The fact anything works at all is a testament to... something... ...but it is not a solid solution. It was a stop-gap measure that should have been discarded long away.
What a brilliant argument. "This works well for the easiest, most common case, so obviously it's awesome and there are no problems." I hope you're not working on anything important.
NAT constrains the web in ways that aren't immediately obvious. Applications haven't been built, ideas haven't been implemented, because of the way it chokes the client endpoints of the Internet.
Why did it take so long for us to have Skype-like services? Because, despite the best efforts of the best network engineers, we can't get two home computers behind NATs to reliably talk to each other. Skype can't always do it with its shitty proprietary protocol, either, but, when it fails, the Skype client falls back to routing the traffic through Skype's own servers. This doubles the traffic necessary for communication, so it's shitty, and it also means Skype has to have hugely deep pockets to pay for and run this otherwise completely unnecessary server infrastructure.
So, instead of peer-to-peer VoIP communication, which would make sense, we have to have a huge company proxying traffic for everyone because we can't make two endpoints talk to each other. This is hugely wasteful, a single point of failure, a single point for mass surveillance, and a single point for corporate asshattery. And this is just one example of the type of wart we have because of widespread NAT.
Do your hypothetical true Scotsmen like to use Skype in addition to watching cat videos? Then they're negatively affected by NAT. They probably don't realize it, but they are.
The sooner NAT dies, the better for everyone.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.