Comcast To Bring IPv6 To Residential US In 2010 281
darthcamaro writes "We all know that IPv4 address space is almost gone — but we also know that no major US carrier has yet migrated its consumer base, either. Comcast is now upping the ante a bit and has now said that they are seriously gearing up for IPv6 residential broadband deployment soon. 'Comcast plans to enter into broadband IPv6 technical trials later this year and into 2010,' Barry Tishgart, VP of Internet Services for Comcast said. 'Planning for general deployment is underway.'"
What? (Score:4, Informative)
Verizon has IP6.
Re:Are we serious this time? (Score:3, Informative)
Fortunately, we have been conserving them and switching to NAT so the problem has lessened. The industry isn't crying wolf. Also, if you live in the US, then you have less of a problem than in a developing nation who didn't get a great big block allocated to them.
But if you want your cell phone, computer, XBOX, and refrigerator to have a unique IP address, then this is necessary. Of course, you probably DON'T want that, but well... that's another discussion. :-)
Re:Are we serious this time? (Score:5, Informative)
It's an Illuminati conspiracy tied into fusion research (and holographic storage). Just watch the obituaries. You'll eventually see the pattern. By then it will be too late - another 10 years.
(I'm sure I read it somewhere around here).
Re:What's the big deal with IPv6 (Score:2, Informative)
ISPs are still going to charge the same amount for public IPs and people are still going to user routers with NAT to save money on having to pay extra for additional IPs.
That would be quite pointless, given the number of IPs available. Why shouldn't the ISP just hand out a /64? There are plenty of them to go around. The ISPs gave up on the idea of trying to make extra money from multiple devices connected a while ago - and since they know people will just use NAT if they only give out one IP, why bother?
Re:It's Comcastic (Score:4, Informative)
Are you directly on Comcast or are you behind a router?
I have a WRT54G running Tomato and Comcast gives it a IPv4, and Tomato assigns IPv6 to my internal network.
Additional IPs (Score:5, Informative)
There will be no paying extra for additional IPs. Everybody will get a /64. Look at this:
Addresses available in IPv4: 4,294,967,296
Addresses available PER CUSTOMER for IPv6: 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
This enables stateless autoconfiguration (usually based on MAC addresses) that simplifies everybody's lives.
Re:Are we serious this time? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's the big deal with IPv6 (Score:1, Informative)
I thought it was /64, but either way, it's a tiny fraction of the address space. An ISP with a /32 allocation could give billions of customers a /64 each.
ISPs *could* try giving out private space now, on the grounds that there is a shortage and it's good enough for a lot of users, and sell a genuine public IP as a premium option, yet they haven't done.
Re:Good news.. (Score:5, Informative)
If it was just a matter of software updates, but alas there are mountains of sites that are literally hard-coded to store IPv4 addresses and you get a nice PHP error when you attempt to visit them.
I guess I live a sheltered life, because I've been using IPv4 and IPv6 in parallel for about 7 years and I've never had a site break like that.
Re:Proud to be a Comcast customer? (Score:2, Informative)
I hate to say it, but I agree. As bad as all the trash talking on Comcast is, I've never had a problem. Setup was easy. The 15-20 minute call to swap out my modem for a $15 one I found at a thrift store was straight forward and easy.
Don't you consider having to make that phone call in the first place a problem?
How about their "support tools" are IE based that won't work in any browser on any platform?
And my current issue with Comcast right now is being in California and Comast routing the IP network cross country to New Jersey at 1/4 the bandwidth I had when they were routing through San Francisco.
Re:Time Warner is already doing this in Brooklyn/N (Score:4, Informative)
And according to trace, your ISP doesn't have their own 6to4 router deployed, so the traffic gets sent to whoever announces the shortest route to 192.88.99.1 route via BGP.
(192.88.99.1 is a special IP which means 'any 6to4 router')
Re:Proud to be a Comcast customer? (Score:4, Informative)
Because there's no such thing as IPv4 multicast... Oh, wait. That's exactly what cable companies have already been doing with switched digital. Multicast isn't the main reason a cable company would go with IPv6. The biggest problem Comcast (and other cable companies) has is that your cable modem gets two, and sometimes three IP addresses, let alone all those set-top boxes doing that switched digital. One to manage it, one to give you your "public" IP, and perhaps a third for your phone. 24 bits (10.0.0.0/8) only gives you 16 million addresses, and that's assuming you're utilizing them rather effectively. They're probably using the 172.16.0.0/12 for their internal network, but even so, that only gets you an extra million addresses. Look at the number of customers Comcast has, and you begin to see the problem they have just with addressing all those cable modems and set-top boxes.
Don't expect to be getting your own IPv6 address any time soon. Most likely, they're going to roll it out for managing all those devices first, and you'll still be assigned an IPv4 address for your Internet connectivity.
Re:Proud to be a Comcast customer? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:REPENT!! (Score:3, Informative)
Heres the thing.... I'm a mac user, use linux and osx at work, and haven't touched windows in years- and even when I did it was just a company pc for email and such.
I converted a few relatives to Macs, before I realized... these people don't understand computers of any kind. They'll always hassle 24/7 no matter what. They may have fewer questions if they have a Mac, but if they stick to windows I can honestly tell them I have no idea and they should try calling Dell or MS for answers. If I'm the one that convinced them to switch- I'm on the hook for the rest of eternity when they go into walmart and buy the crapware of the day and it doesn't work.
Re:It's Comcastic (Score:4, Informative)
That's a link-local address. It doesn't do anything for you in the wider world.
Re:Proud to be a Comcast customer? (Score:4, Informative)
That's because the line going to your house from the Telco is unique; it only goes to one place. It's the same reason you can add a jack for POTS and plug in any old phone and expect it to work.
Re:Proud to be a Comcast customer? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes there is a fundamental difference. In DSL you have an individual line to the the phone company owned equipment (the DSLAM). Thus any data on that line is either data from you or data intended for you. On cable, your neighborhood shares a line. That is to say, that on the cable line that comes into your house is not only your data, but the data of the people next door (if they use the same cable internet service.) To prevent you from seeing the neigbors data, and to determine who sent anything in the other direction, the data is encoded (I would not dare call it encrpyted) with a modem specific identifier.
Re:It's Comcastic (Score:1, Informative)
Tomato doesn't support IPv6 yet, genius.
Re:Proud to be a Comcast customer? (Score:2, Informative)
The 15-20 minute call to swap out my modem for a $15 one I found at a thrift store was straight forward and easy.
Don't you consider having to make that phone call in the first place a problem?
What's the alternative? I don't think they can just tell whose house a particular modem on their network is located in. I'd imagine they have to tie the MAC back to your account somehow, and the phone call is how they do that.
Yup, exactly correct. (I work at a cable-modem based ISP) The other replies below are also correct in the difference between the dedicated DSL line and the "shared" coax lines for cable modem plant.
I will throw one other thing in the mix- if a cable modem is provisioned, it can actually be used at any hot outlet which runs off the same headend or CMTS equipment. So as long as the cable modem's MAC is active in their system, you can actually unhook it, and take it to a buddy's house, for example.
There are a lot more details that I won't go into, but the answer is that when using a cable modem technology, the ISP has to have the MAC address of each device on the system registered. When the modem connects, it downloads a config file that sets up your speeds and a few other things, so your MAC is tied in with what speed package you pay for, and that's how the system knows which one to send to your modem. In addition, the specific config file often has to have make & model specific information, so for example the binfile for a motorola isn't necessarily the same as one for a linksys, etc.
And no, this is not unique to Comcast in case you hadn't figured that out yet, this is true for any ISP that uses cable modems.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Informative)
Err, I might be wrong. . . but while it's possible (may even be the default - if that's true, that's unfortunate) for your IPv6 address to use the Mac address as the last 48(?) or whatever bits of the IP address, I don't believe you *must* do that. I believe you can just use ::1, ::2, ::3, ::4, etc as the 'host' portion of the IPv6 address, can't you?
It's my understanding that IPv6 really doesn't care what the last 48 or 64 bits (I don't remember the exact number of bits for the host portion - just that it's a very large number of em) of the address is, so long as it's unique? I think the use of Mac addresses was just an 'easy' way to get a unique bitmask for that part of the IP address, isn't it?