What About IPv6? How Long Until Widespread Deployment?

Christopher Blood asks: "Over at the register, they talk about the EU adopting IPv6. So what about the USA? When do we get it? IPv6 would solve some and DOS problems and we will need the extra address space. What's the holdup?" While IPv6 may be the cure for all of our IPv4 ills, upgrading the whole internet to the new technology isn't going to happen over night. What has been done to prepare for the jump, and what still needs to happen before it can become a reality?

Backbone

[crumbz]

Given that Lucent's CEO said today that he does not see the telecom equipment market turning around anytime soon, a government initiative to upgrade the core routers to IPv6 would help boost the battered sector of the economy. Granted, Lucent shot themselves in the foot last year (several times) and upgrade to IPv6 might just result in a higher volume of spam.....

What about the major backbone routers?

[kronin]

I would like to know how close the backbone through the US is to being IPv6 ready. Anyone that knows care to respond?

roadrunner

[Maditude]

I emailed RR a while back about their plans for IPv6, and despite several back-and-forth email exchanges, never did find anyone who had even HEARD of IPv6, much less get details on their rollout plans for it. Doesn't look too promising for cable-modem users.

Moving a super-tanker

[iPaul]

IPV6 is better. Autoconfiguration, neighbor discovery, big address space, compatability with IPV4, etc. However, the more hacks we put in to make IPV4 work the harder it is to change. For the most part we're educating people to do "Stupid IPV4 Tricks" rather than moving to IPV6. The more of that we do the harder it is to change. Also, the more ominous the prospect of change, the more people will dread it.

Frankly, I'm thinking we might see another round, like IPV7 (or IPV8 if they make a habit of skipping odd numbers), or it might come very late. Maybe we'll see it on phones and wireless devices before we see wide-spread adoption of IPV6 or general purpose networking.

IP6 might be the death of linux.

[Krapangor]

...unless the development speeds up fast.
My experiences with IP6 and Debian woody:

• inetd is fucked up accepts only connections to ::1, no other addresses supported which makes the box practically unreachable from outside
• netstat/route etc don't support ip6, only ifconfig
• if ip6 is supported then no or only crippled documentation existd

These are only a few issus. Unless these thing get fixed fast then FreeBSD will replace Linux at most professional environments.

In two words: unsold inventory

[mangu]

With purchases of new hardware shrinking along with the economy, wouldn't these equipment makers be in a perfect position to benefit from adaptation of IPv6?

The problem is that shrinking sales has caused a huge amount of hardware to be stockpiled at Cisco warehouses. IIRC, last year they had over 5 Giga$ worth of accumulated unsold hardware. They need technology to stand still for a while, so they can sell part of that obsolete inventory.

An interesting question

[wowbagger]

OK, I am about to say something that will make many of you who are knowledgable about IPV6 cringe, so take a deep breath and get over it now.

When IPV6 is deployed, how do I prevent the machines on the inside of my firewall from being routable?

Right now, my personal computer is on the inside of a NAT firewall. There is no way you can route a packet to it - go ahead, try to telnet to 10.200.120.4, I dare you.

Now, I know there are those who say NAT CONSIDERED HARMFUL, and I agree in the general case it does break the essential peer to peer nature of TCP/IP.

But what if I want to break it?

How well tested are the Linux kernel modules for firewalling IPv6? Can I still protect my internal machines from the slings and arrows of outragous 5|<197 |<!66!3Z?

ISP's are biggest holdbacks...

[kbonin]

They have tons of money invested in hardware they don't want to replace. Sticking to IPv4 makes it easy to keep user bases behind short-lease DHCP, which helps to keep the average user from mounting a public server that'll eat bandwidth the ISP doesn't want to provide.

Also a few Cisco points: 1) While some routers do support IPv6, the cheaper ones don't, and a decent percentage of older high end routers have routing algs implimented in semi-custom silicon - not software upgradable! 2) The enterprise network management software is lagging behind in IPv6 support last I heard (I used to work there), not much demand.

How to transition?

[A nonymous Coward]

Suppose I take my home network (2 computers + 1 firewall), all running some form of highly modded Slackware, and switch the internal local net to IPv6 while leaving the connection from the firewall out as IPv4. Thus the 2 computers would be completely IPv6 while the firewall would have one IPv6 nic and one IPv4 nic. I have to change all dotted quad network addresses (such as in /etc/hosts); what else is there to do? Will existing software go along with the change without recompiling? Or even with a simple recompile?

I bet there's some FAQ somewhere that someone will find using Googole. AIA

Re:When?

[4mn0t1337]

Remember --- M.I.T. has more assigned IP addresses than ALL OF CHINA.

Good! There are already enough spam relays in China (and very few that I am aware of at MIT).

We should make a deal that China doesn't get anymore IPs until they deal with all the spam coming from there. That and finish their dinner...

Re:no, everyone.

[sigwinch]

sk your dialup isp for a static IP account, and they might tell you about another company who will give it to you for $80/month.

That's to squeeze money out of businesses who absolutely need static IPs. At colocation facilities, who are already charging $100+/month, extra static IPs are only a couple of bucks a month each.

Re:Why "first" world?

[Julian352]

The US is not the only country in the world. As can be seen on many different websites there are other countries that use it, they are just much less globally noticed than US.

In 1990, there were only three nations that had not converted to metric: Burma, Liberia, and the United States. (source: here [vnet.net])

It is however in US best interest to convert, as many of the other countries require all products to be manufactured to the metric system. If you would go to your local grocery store, you'd notice that some products are already done that way, especially if they have global nature. A good example of that would be the 2 Liter bottle of soda that is sold at the store. As that item is sold both in US and abroad, the manufacturing costs are lower if same measurement system is used. That's why the Liter is used. (to conform to requirements of other countries)

The cycle keeping IPv4 right where it is

[Guppy06]

The way I see it, there's a four phase cycle keeping IPv4 the standard for the internet for a long time to come.

1.) ISPs want to charge more for sharing a connection and a smaller address space gives ISPs justification to charge more for corporate users than home users. They already heavily frown upon the use of NAT (unless you pay more for them to set up your LAN for you). So why don't the ISP's just separate the concepts of bandwitdth and addressing?

2.) The backbone is overtaxed as it is. Currently the home user's connection speed is limited more by intermediate links than by their connection, even if the user is just using a 33.6 modem. A small address space provides an easy method of limiting bandwidth use. So why don't they just upgrade the backbone?

3.) IP address space is the primary driving factor in connection costs, more so than bandwidth. Most tier 1's more or less own their address blocks and stand to make money hand over fist as the price of using a single address skyrockets. If a tier 1 wants to make more money, it makes better economic sense to buy more address space than to put in faster connections. So why not jump to IPv6 to increase the address space by an order of magnitude squared so the big guys can focus on the bandwidth trouble? Tier 1 folks will make money no matter what, right?

4.) A larger address space opens up the ISP industry to small competitors. While most ISPs are owned or operated by large corporations that can afford the pricey IPv4 addresses, IPv6 stands to give every man, woman and child on the planet a bigger address space than many tier 1's currently have in IPv4. The low-level ISP scene under IPv6 could very well look a lot like the BBS/internet scene of ten years ago. Not to mention all the private little portals that could end up competing with MSN and Yahoo (with or without a DNS name). But still, the little guys could probably make a stab at making that happen with IPv4, using NAT to drive down the cost of a small IP address block. Why don't they do that?

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Re:When Cisco decides to...

[Arandir]

In my case, there's only one thing holding back IPv6: my ISP doesn't support it. IPv6 is already completely integrated into my OS (FreeBSD), and effortless to set up. But it's useless until my ISP switches over.

IPv6 :: OSI

[igb]

The problem IPv6 has, confirmed by its enthusiastic reception by the EU, is that is
the OSI of the 21st century (following on from
ATM, the OSI of the 1990s). IPv6 solves a
problem of 1992 --- proliferation of subnets,
exhaustion of v4 space --- while other, incremental, changes did the job just as well.
NAT and DHCP mean that huge ISPs don't need
huge blocks, and the falling price of RAM means
that large routing tables just aren't the problem
they were. The Internet simply isn't a bunch
of LSI-11s linked by 56K lines anymore, and I
recall ``look, doing that will mean every router
has to have a megabyte of RAM'' being used as
an argument-ender.

To compound things, IPv6 suffered from feature
creep (see also: ATM, X.400, Modula 2 standards)
and tried to solve a bunch of other problems as
well, such as QoS. But _those_ were being
solved in v4 land, too, with RSVP, and it's
compatible and interworking with existing
code. Those over 35 should compare the complex
``look, we need multi-part mail'' solution
proposed by the X.400 lobby, which requires MTA
support all the way, with MIME, which will pass
transparently through any MTA.

The final nail in v6's coffin is that, largely,
it's not had the attention of the A team inside
vendors, and has been seen as another add-on
protocol, like OSI, ATM, etc.

I think Vernon Shryver said a few years ago that
he didn't expect universal IPv6 in his working
lifetime. I don't (I'm 37), anymore than I ever
expected my email address to because /O=...

ian

Marx win through IP V6

[alephnull42]

Some info gleaned from a conference i attended recently:

- U.S. military is completely on IP V6

- Big japanese government funding for "pushing" IP V6

- 900 Trial customers in Japan, including 3 cars (all this for just ~$20 Million in Public money)

- The same body received approx $9 Million from European Comission to push IP V6

- Less that 20 commercial broadband IP V6 customers worldwide...

Two scenarios: Like with UMTS, governments pushing a standard they don't understand will result in failure. IP's success was based on market success, and theres nothing like 10^7 dollars for turning a good concept into a bloated Frankenstein monster

OR

The governments are pushing this because it will give them the infrastructure they need to come out with true "big brother" scenarios... Unified protocol with full control

Paradoxically, in this day of "global liberalization of markets", this major infrastructure development is not being driven by market forces, but by centralized government bodies like in the best days of Communism... weird

Just a note: As long as they were nationalized, not a single telegraph, telephone or telecoms company made any profit. Strangely, the same industries started blasting out profits almost immediately after privatization