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.'"
It's Comcastic (Score:3, Interesting)
I did not RTFA but it seems to me that they have already started with this in 2009.
Re:Asprin (Score:3, Interesting)
Are we serious this time? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's Comcastic (Score:5, Interesting)
By default, Vista and Win7 will automatically allocate a 6to4 address for each non-private IPv4 address configured on the computer.
(since you mentioned ipconfig and not ifconfig, I assume you are using Windows)
Re:I still don't like IPv6 (Score:5, Interesting)
IPv6 is like the phone company saying, hey, we have a (aaa) eee-nnnn system doesn't have enough room, so let's replace it with a system that has 20 digits.
It just sucks to use for consumers, making everyone else's life more complicated just to simplify it for the service providers.
I would prefer an addressing system that simplifies life for me.
What it's supposed to mean is that every computer can have a public address. So if you sign up with one of the dynamic DNS providers (which will probably be integrated with your OS fairly soon) you should be able to share pictures and things from your own computer without having to upload them to somewhere, or be able to log in remotely to look at some file (private) you forgot to bring with you, or any number of other things (fewer firewall errors on p2p networks? true p2p voip, without needing to sign up with a service that lets you punch holes in NAT?). This would also work without the dynamic DNS provider, but the URL would look uglier.
Most likely, this would also lead to relaxing the typical rule ISPs tend to have against running servers on home connections. They can't really forbid something that gets built into the OS like these sorts of features probably will.
Re:REPENT!! (Score:5, Interesting)
My brother in law used to call me up, frequently, to ask me for tech support help. He's a doctor, so I solved it by calling him up every single day to ask him some inane question about medicine.
"Hey, so I'm at the store and I want to buy band-aids. Which ones are best?" ... hello? Helloooo?"
"Hey, it's me again - so when I called up 5 minutes ago to ask about band-aids, I didn't realize they had purple ones. Are those going to work differently than the beige ones?"
"Oh, hi, me again... I was walking by the frozen food section and it was kind of cold there but it's a really hot day outside - can I catch sick from the temperature differential?"
"Yeah, it's... well, this is a bit strange. But I was at work today and one of my co-workers kind of has a limp. Can you tell me what that's from? I don't wanna ask him - let me put him on with you, maybe you can fix him..."
"So I was on a date last night and we went to a used bookstore and I started sneezing. Is that the swine flu? Well, yeah, it was dusty in there, but Oprah was talking about the Swine Flu, and I had bacon the other day so maybe I'm going to
For people who don't have a particular profession, calling them up at odd hours to ask them for tiny favors also works. My next-door neighbor used to ask me for tech support all the time, so I started asking him to pick things up at the store for me, give me rides, loan me odd random items ("Can I borrow one of your bookends?" "Do you have a shoehorn I can use for a couple of days? Mine's in the shop.")
Really? I wonder... (Score:1, Interesting)
This would have NOTHING to do with monitoring and shaping your network traffic. None at all. ISPs don't do that.
And they won't be sending you:
"We have observed an unusual amount of encrypted traffic originating from your IP address" email implying that using encryption will get you disconnected.
Nope never will happen. They won't be injecting packets either to kill you VPN connections because that can't figure out what traffic you are sending. They would never do that, at least until your employers get involved asking why they were tampering with a secure connection to a financial institution. Nope not at all. Hamachi works great when it doesn't mysteriously die...
And they'll never send you a "Friendly Reminder" warning that using Tor to hide software piracy is still illegal, even if you are chatting with people in China on the annaversary of Tieniman.
Because they never inspect your traffic in order to identify what you are doing on their connecition.
They also don't send "friendly reminders" when you use PGP encrypted email that they are simply checking in on "unusual activity on their email server."
Nope, no motivation at all for switching on and using IP6 except perhaps the ability to assign static IP address for better tracking...
I wonder: Anyone out there with a brand new shiney IP6 address try a release\renew to see if you get a new address?
Where is Mark Lottor? IPV4 has plenty left to it! (Score:4, Interesting)
The large telecoms and cable outfits have tons of unused IP space that could be CIDR blocked out, think of the class A 24.X.X.X for instance that used to be @Home and Rodgers, large portions are empty! AT&T moved @Home to 12.X.X.X and then subsequently provides managed space to cable outfits like Mediacomm etc.
Now Mediacomm has just finally got around to getting its own space, is AT&T offering to CIDR out their precious class A?
No of course not, like some of the others, they get allocations from ARIN and sit on them instead of consolidating. They have scads of CIDR blocks used by all sorts of companies out there. Heck ARIN should just re-map some of those AT&T direct to the customers, let them keep the 12.X.X.X A Space.
Back in the day, Mark Lottor did mapping of all live ping able IP's before firewalls were so common and NAT extremely rare. If he were to make a comparison with whomever does like mapping today to those legacy maps and IP allocations, it would be a fascinating graphic to show the transformations and if by carrier, show how greedily the Worldcom/UUNets Sprints and Baby Bells have asked for space, color to their identity and now look to see many time those scattered CIDR blocks are empty. Sprint, old UUNet and Baby Bell CIDR's if unused, should get back into the pool.
Where is Mark Lottor and these newer guys with the latest IPV4 utilization's mapped out for the comparison analysis.
Enough said.
Re:Asprin (Score:5, Interesting)
Do they make enough painkillers to deal with the headaches this'll cause?
What headaches are those? Have you dealt with IPv6 at all? It's very easy to work with, and co-exists perfectly well with IPv4. I set up IPv6 in my house with a tunnel and it was amazing how smooth it was. I set up the IPv6 tunnel and addresses on my router (that was a little tricky -- but no more than any other router configuration), started up radvd, which periodically broadcasts an announcement about what the local IPv6 router is, and instantly every machine on the network -- Linux, Mac and Windows -- had an IPv6 address in addition to their private IPv4 address (10.x.x.x). Of course, the typical home user couldn't do any of that stuff, but they don't have to if the v6 service comes directly from their ISP.
What's more, I was surprised to note that as soon as all my computers had v6 adresses, they started using them! IPv6 DNS is in place, and all decent applications do an IPv6 name lookup in parallel with the IPv4, and if they get an IPv6 answer, they connect via v6. I know Firefox does because I have a Firefox add-on that shows the IP of the web server in the status bar, and sometimes I come across sites for which it shows a v6 address.
About the only part of the infrastructure that really isn't ready, as far as I can tell, is everyone's home routers. Those ubiquitous Linksys boxes mostly don't support v6 unless you put third-party firmware on them (which I did, but most people obviously wouldn't do). But I'm sure the next generation or two of home routers will come with IPv6 support enabled and it will Just Work. Oh, and they'll also be configured by default to reject externally-originated connections, so that Joe Sixpack will still have the same level of firewalling he has with NAT -- but with lower overhead and fewer limitations. Until those routers are widely available, v6 and v4 can coexist quite nicely.
I predict that this will be relatively painless for Comcast's techs, and completely transparent to their customers.
Re:Where is Mark Lottor? IPV4 has plenty left to i (Score:3, Interesting)
The large telecoms and cable outfits have tons of unused IP space that could be CIDR blocked out
No, they don't. The last I heard, reclaiming all /8 netblocks would return something like 8% of available space back to the pool. When usage is growing exponentially (or would be if it wasn't constrained to a tiny fishbowl), 8% isn't worth the aggravation.
Re:It's Comcastic (Score:3, Interesting)
inet6 addr: fe80::***:****:****:****/64 Scope:Link
No need to redact that. It's a link-local, non-routable address, not usable by any machine not directly connected to your LAN. You don't have IPv6 service.
IPv6 on Tomato firmware? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a WRT54G running Tomato and Comcast gives it a IPv4, and Tomato assigns IPv6 to my internal network.
How did you get IPv6 working on Tomato? I was under the impression that it wasn't supported.
Does anyone have instructions?
tinfoil hat ++ (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because you can't ping something doesn't mean it isn't in use. ARIN and the other RIRs require extensive documentation before they give out more space, and all of the companies you've mentioned have received it. I recommend reading up on how a SWIP works, followed by getting an understanding of rWhois. At that point you might have a better understanding of some of the issues. Heck, NANOG has had some excellent discussions on the subject of IPv4 address reclamation, and the outcome of those discussions is that it's a lot of work for very, very little benefit.
Re:Time Warner is already doing this in Brooklyn/N (Score:4, Interesting)
Lets clear this up.
All you know from this traceroute is that the routers between 2002:185a:90f:1234::1 and ams-core-1.tengige0-0-0-0.swip.net are acting in a transparent manner. It could be because they are not decrementing the TTL on each hop.
This could be because they are transparent routers, it could be an IPv6 tunnel over IPv4 or something else, you really don't know and are making silly assumptions.
What bothers me however is that either your Windows Vista/7 PC (as noted by the C:\Users in the command prompt and your use of windows tracert instead of traceroute) is directly connected to the Internet, while it is possible that you are doing that, it would be utterly stupid and I'm going to make an assumption of my own, that you are not directly connected to the Internet. Why do I make this assumption? Well partially because its a rather quick way to get exploited, theres always SOMETHING you can exploit in an MS OS and that it means you only have one PC, being that this is slashdot I can guess that those are not the case, so you aren't directly connected to the Internet and the first hop you're talking to is a DLink or Linksys router or something.
Now this makes sense, as it simply means your router is connected to swip.net using an IPv6 over IPv4 tunnel. Since this is a free service and several consumer grade devices support it, this is more likely the case. I'm not real sure how you end up with IPv6 enabled on your router and not have any clue about it, but perhaps it was done by a roommate or something like that.
Eitherway, me thinks it might be better for you to learn wtf is going on with your own internet connection than talk about how Time Warner handlers theirs.
Finally, since you're obviously new to IPv6 and networking. SWIP sells connections, they are a backbone provider which is why you see a direct connect from them to Google. They also provide IPv6 tunnel endpoints so you can tunnel it over IPv4, which appears to be exactly whats going on in your case. This tunnels are free to anyone who signed up. With that in mind and the fact that tunnels have to generally be setup on both ends in advance its likely that if Time Warner IS involved in this, they are simply working a deal with SWIP, not robbing service from them. I would have to say that SWIP.net is fully aware of the tunnel route and has authorized it, that is after all one of their core businesses.
I suggested you learn a little more about the current state of IPv6, the existing providers with IPv6 support, and most importantly, what your little Linksys or DLink router is doing that you are completely unaware of. At least go turn off your tunnel to swip.net before claiming that TWC supports IPv6 in your area.
Re:Where is Mark Lottor? IPV4 has plenty left to i (Score:3, Interesting)
Uhm, reclaiming ALL /8 netblocks would return 100% of the network.
You people really need to get over this classful idea of routing and assignment, its hasn't been that way for years, we use subnet masks now, you heard of them?
But back to the errors in your statement, each /8 assignment accounts for approximately 3.125% of the total network address space (not usable space, TOTAL space). So about 2 and a half of these assignments now account for your 'random, pulled out of your ass 8%'.
Well, since I know that it is impossible to get anything close to 8% of the address space using only /8s I can immediately assume you don't have a clue at all.
What else? Well, there are 128 /8 blocks in classful routing. That is half the address space total, or 50% if you recalled them all and ignored other classful networks. Again, we're not seeing your 8%.
So, if it isn't possible to get 8% of the address space using /8 allocations, perhaps you should consider that the source of said information is most likely incorrect. If they can't do simple math, its going to be hard to take anything else seriously. When you start a statement, as if it were fact, by saying 'last I heard' its generally a sign that you are wrong and someone is going to point it out to you shortly.
For more clues about classful, classless and the Internet back when EVERY assignment was a /8 by design, please checkout the following Wikipedia articles, they make great starting points to get a clue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classful_network [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address_shortage [wikipedia.org]
Is reclaiming the /8s worth it? Yes, far more so than reclaiming the smaller wasted blocks. But thats the problem, blocks were allocated poorly from day one and now its a freaking mess thats a bitch to clean up. So we have two choices, clean it up or move to IPv6.
In case you haven't noticed, the current trend is to just clean it up, much to the disappointment of many slashdotters who want IPv6 so bad it made them forget why exactly they wanted it in the first place. :)
Re:Where is Mark Lottor? IPV4 has plenty left to i (Score:3, Interesting)
Uhm, reclaiming ALL /8 netblocks would return 100% of the network. You people really need to get over this classful idea of routing and assignment, its hasn't been that way for years, we use subnet masks now, you heard of them?
That's what we call "irony". You see, there aren't that many /8 netblocks, and you don't hear people clamoring for the subnetting of anything smaller. I mean, what are you going to do with a /20? Break it up and route two /21s?
But back to the errors in your statement, each /8 assignment accounts for approximately 3.125% of the total network address space (not usable space, TOTAL space).
There are 256 /8 netblocks, each accounting for about .4% of the TOTAL space. If you somehow missed that, then you're not really qualified to argue either side of the debate.