Verizon Refuses To Provide Complete IPv6 438
Glendale2x writes "I'm a progressive sort of guy and I want to go full dual-stack, IPv6 for the future, etc. However I recently tried to turn up a new Verizon circuit with IPv6 (after a 6-month fiber install process), and to my chagrin the order they accepted back in May they're now saying is against their policy to provide. They're missing around 29% of the IPv6 internet and refuse to carry it. Tell me again how we're supposed to encourage IPv6 adoption in the face of a huge black hole like this?"
maybe AT&T is better(?) (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe AT&T is better; I just came off a two year contract at Verizon, supporting provisioning tools for your very product. For years the big push at Verizon has been to off-shore. I'm not sure they really understand Data they way they run "worldcom/MCI".
If it was my money, I would try AT&T, they are way bigger (I hear) than Verizon in the Data arena.
Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor (Score:5, Interesting)
What's wrong with IPv6 exactly?
I've been running dual stack on test servers just because and it seems to work fine. I've tested Windows Server 2008 and Vista clients with IPv6 and it works fine. I even get IPv6 connections to some internet servers like Mozilla.
Admittedly, I'm not an expert, but I'm looking forward to the end of NAT on every router.
Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor (Score:2, Interesting)
Right, and they have been saying two years for about 12 years now. Just like how we've been 10 years away from running out of oil for close to 40 years, and about 10 years away from commercialized fusion for about the same amount of time.
Yes, but watch for... (Score:4, Interesting)
-Aggressive purchase/selloff of unused IP space (there are companies with class As that come no where near 16.7 million systems).
-ISPs dropping granting an IP to residential customers and phones on the base plans, using NAT upstream
In other words, the world is so IPv6 averse that the IP exhaustion will not really happen in the medium-term future. While it is sad, the fact that 95% of the internet does not care or know about having a globally unique IP address will keep NAT a viable solution for a while. I.e. just as some people pay extra for a single static IP address, in the next few years, expect to have to pay a premium for a single real IP for others to reach you at.
Re:bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
That's some fine internet tough talk, but realistically the best solution open to the common man is to simply vote with your dollars and leave.
I'm sick of this excuse. Voting with your dollar works when your dollar is the only dollar. When millions of other people have dollars and a good chunk of them are ignorant, your dollar won't be missed. I took my dollar away from Verizon years ago, and there's a good chance that many others did the same thing.
There are three methods to dealing with businesses: you can let them do whatever they want to you, you can quietly go elsewhere, or you can speak up loudly and take them to court. The first method makes the business happy, the second makes you feel good about yourself but does very little, and the third lets everyone hear what evils the company did and how they handle it, thus making more people make decisions of their own. Seeing as how all of the duopolies and monopolies and x-opolies are still thriving despite the silent treatment, I would think a more aggressive approach is the only way to fight back.
It's either IPv6 or carrier-grade NAT or ??? (Score:5, Interesting)
IPv4 is a measurable finite resource. There are 2^32 of them. You can plot it on a graph fairly accurately.
Predicting the end of IPv4 addresses is like predicting the end of any other measurable, finite resource:
As we get near the end, if there is demand there will be rationing or an increase in price to drive demand down. Either way, the supply will last longer than a naive prediction would indicate.
IPv4 NAT has already reduced the rate of exhaustion beyond what it would be without it, albeit at the price of reduced inter-connectivity.
If IPv6 isn't rolled out nearly globally soon, I think you'll see a lot more carriers handing out NAT'd addresses for new customers unless those customers are willing to pay extra for a world-visible address. Within a year after that they'll jack up the prices on existing customers who don't "downgrade" to the cheaper NAT'd plan. This will buy more time, but, again, at the cost of decreased connectivity.
Of course, I could be wrong, there could be something new and easier to implement coming down the pike, in which case all bets are off.
Re:bullshit (Score:1, Interesting)
Furthermore, taking your dollar elsewhere assumes that dollar can be used on an alternative. Here in the US, broadband generally means two or three options, cable or DSL, and if you're really lucky, FiOS. Although the latter being Verizon is already suffering from greed, now that they've ramped up in price, plus added extra fees to the service, especially if you don't use them as your telco.
ipv6 is good for voip (Score:4, Interesting)
Reminds Me of Asimov (Score:1, Interesting)
change of contract (Score:4, Interesting)
It's hard to tell from the summary, but did you sign a contract with them back in May that included IPv6 support? If yes, and they spent six months building out the line only to tell you in the end, "oh, sorry, we don't want to do IPv6 anymore" then you can get them in court for material change of contract. If there was no contract (hard to believe if there was a 6-month build-out), or if it never specified IPv6 anywhere, then you're hosed and pretty much get what you deserve for taking Verizon's word at face value. :)
Re:BGP aggregation policy (Score:5, Interesting)
If the problem is that they won't route traffic from your address (inside Verizon's /32) to another direct-allocation network that is in fact a legitimate BGP peer for IPv6 services, I'd complain to ARIN directly that their traffic is being dropped.
Yes, this is the problem. Unfortunately then you'll hit the "well, just because ARIN says so doesn't mean we have to route it" excuse, which is what I'm waiting for them to come back with on Monday.
Re:bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Obvious answer... (Score:3, Interesting)
That sounds great on paper. But in the real world you often don't have a choice between providers. Even if there isn't an official monopoly the carriers hate laying redundant cabling and won't service an area covered by someone else and would rather invest in areas where they don't have to compete for customers.
Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor (Score:3, Interesting)
Not sure about him but I was told 2050 for oil reserves 15 years ago. Not ten years. Cold fusion research is random about every 10 years a major break through happens with a media saying that we will have it in another 10 years.
Of course listening to the media is like listening to fox news. you don't get anything useful if your an open minded intelligent person. the rhetoric and misdirection is just too much.
By public addresses.. (Score:3, Interesting)
I assume he refers to the ability to realistically have more than one public address in your house, whether it be static or dynamic in nature. I personally have one public IPv4 address and maybe half a dozen devices to share it.
And to extend on his point, I will bet in the next year or so ISPs will start issuing addresses to residences that are in a private subnet range and charge people extra for not being behind a NAT gateway (if they haven't already).
I've used dual-stack IPv6 with IPv4 NAT for 2 yrs! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Reminds Me of Asimov (Score:3, Interesting)
Relying on the sun is a pretty long term solution. If we're still using the sun for energy when the sun is about to expand and burn the planet, we have bigger problems than just energy...
Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe with the right type of gateway they could.
Imagine you reserve a /16 of "private address space" for name mapping.
You have a gateway that provides DNS.
When someone looks up "www.blah.com" and it has an IPv6 address, the DNS server immediately allocates an ephemeral IPv4 address, enters it into a temporary database, and returns it to the client.
Now when the client requests to open a TCP connection to the ephemeral IP address within the TTL period, the gateway will automatically receive the IPv4 packet, re-encapsulate it as an IPv6 packet with the proper destination address. Upon receiving a reply packet, it will find the matching database entry, re-encapsulate it as an IPv4 packet, and return the reply to the client.
The result is a user-transparent conversion from V4 to V6 and from V6 to V4.
Re:bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly.
In particular because a lot of the money that they use to put up the lines (for their business) comes from public tax dollars. And also because they have a near monopoly in many areas. The courts have already decided that cable companies don't have to share their lines (I assume that this translates to Verizon too if they're not exactly specified by the ruling) so they have a public obligation to provide full services if it's on the public's tab.
It's okay that we live in a country where our government gives so much to business - but not that the businesses give nothing back.
And I'd like a pony (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm afraid that while IPv6 has many features, the upstream roll-out is hindered by necessary hardware and configuration upgrades, and interoperability with IPv4 for at least another decade. And frankly, with the effective use of NAT and staggered layers of NAT around the world, the overwhelming need of IPv6 has also evaporated for another decade.
Can you show me a single feature of IPv6 that Verizon's customers actually need? One that isn't also manageable with NAT and reasonably intelligent load balancers?
Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor (Score:1, Interesting)
So what exactly is wrong with IPv6 that it needs to be replaced by 'better technology'? I've always been under the impression there is nothing (major) technically wrong with IPv6 and that its lack-luster adoption is simply because there is no urgent need for it, and so no business willing to update their infrastructure for it yet.
Re:change of contract (Score:1, Interesting)
IANAL, but this is basically the definition of estoppel [wikipedia.org]. They promised you one thing (IPv6 service), you made a decision based on it (paying for them to build out the line), and when they changed your mind, it caused you material damage.
Re:bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
Honest business has no room in mass markets. Simple reason: People want cheap goods and services and don't care about quality, simply because they don't know just what quality they may expect.
Since there are rarely "secret" ways to save money in business, the only way to offer cheaper products is to let quality slide. Usually in areas where only few of your customers will notice it. In this case, this means that v6 service will be limited if existing. Why? Because 99% of their customers won't notice it since they don't even know whether IPv6 is some protocol or some new program to download more porn.
Now, you COULD of course open your own ISP and offer better service. Less oversold bandwidth. A newsserver that carries more than your own ad-filled newsgroups. Unshaped traffic that can't only be used sensibly for http traffic (where it doesn't matter whether every other connection dies within 5 minutes, making ssh connections a PITA). You would have to charge more, though, simply because your cost will be higher. How many people are going to pay for it? Again, 99% of the users that could sign up with you won't know or care about what you offer, or at least not enough to pay the higher fee. Of that last percent, how many will even know that your service is really better?
Saying "make it better" is usually not going to cut it. Market won't allow it.
Re:bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would Verizon "block" this IPv6 space? (Score:2, Interesting)
From the article it's not clear if Verizon is actively blackholing those prefixes, filtering them from their peers, or if they lack transit to the ASes from which the prefixes come.
I find it hard to believe that even Verizon is so disorganized that they would blackhole or filter that large a chunk of IPv6-land. My guess is that the situation is that not all of the Tier 1s have their IPv6 peering agreements in place yet. As we've learned from the various "depeering" events over the years, if a Tier 1 isn't hearing another Tier 1's route from that AS, they're not going to get it from their other peers, because that would cause the other peers to act like transit providers, and Tier 1s really don't like providing transit for eachother.
In other words, traffic for those prefixes probably doesn't leave 701 because 701 doesn't know where to send it.
The way the Internet is built it's not possible for any network to guarantee transit between you and a specific AS or prefix. There are so many factors external to a provider's network that could cause them to not know the route, or other issues that I don't even want to try to list 'em all. Simple little things like the owner of the prefix deciding not to advertise it to your network can look like this. This is also why the FCC or other government agencies don't have a hope of regulating peering agreements.
I can't believe I'm coming to Verizon's defense here...
Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors (Score:3, Interesting)
Except, at this point, there are no legacy hosts to any degree. 99.9% of the computers out there either can already do IPv6, or do it with a minor upgrade. Legacy hosts are not the problem.
The problem is the fact that IPv6 was built in an incredibly fucking stupid way.
It should have been set up as a transparent change, where every person who had an IPv4 address magically had an IPv6 address that worked, and whenever an IPv6 stack, be it either your computer or some router halfway down the road, determined it was talking to IPv4, converted it into IPv4. And no connection should have handled both....you speak IPv6 if the other end understands it, you speak IPv4 otherwise.
Please notice that the link-level protocol of Ethernet can actually specify IPv4 or IPv6, so devices can immediately talk the correct protocol, without even sending out a DHCP packet. And wifi has pseudo-ethernet link level (In addition to the actual wifi link-level), so it works there too. And I bet it wouldn't be too hard to cobble something together for ATM connections and whatnot, if they don't already have such a thing.
So every IPv6 device, when hooked up to whatever, could instantly say 'Can I talk IPv6, or do I need to talk IPv4?' on each plug. It can talk IPv6 in one direction, and IPv4 in the other, and convert. (Or, at least, most devices. Your cheap-ass DSL router, probably not, it might flip into IPv6 mode only if all connections were IPv6 so it didn't have to convert.)
In other words, all packets, as they flowed across the internet, would be IPv4 on legacy networks, and IPv6 on newer ones, and converted back and forth at any (almost) router that went from new to old or old to new. And every router would at least flip to IPv6 when both sides spoke it.
As devices were slowly replaced, more and more of the entire path would be IPv6, and eventually people would be talking to the backbone entirely using IPv6. You could even include a bit in the IPv6 packet that meant 'originated as IPv6', which packet senders would set, but would be dropped during conversion and back, and then could statistically determine, at any point on the internet, how much of the traffic had reached there entirely via IPv6, and ARIN could have some sort of percentage trigger to start making IPv6-only addresses via beyond beta testing.
And eventually, everyone would switch, and 95% of the people would return their IPv4, leaving they few remaining IPs for actual non-upgradable devices, which would mainly be embedded systems, along those sites that said devices need to contact to, which they would do unknowingly over mostly IPv6.
Instead, we have this stupid-ass situation where we're facing incompatibility as we upgrade.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Mod parent funny (Score:2, Interesting)
The run out date for the RIR IP address pools has not been continuously changing to 'about to run out'. It changed exactly once, due to the adoption of a new technology and an entirely new addressing scheme (CIDR).
The 2011 run-out date was forecast by the folks who compiled the IPv4 address report work back in 2005, and the expected year of run-out has not changed. In fact, so far the model and the predictions have shown to be fairly accurate.
There has not been inconsistency or divergence between the reports and reality.
The reports are certainly more compelling than an anecdotal claim that "We've been 'about to run out' of IPV4 addresses for over 10 years."
Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor (Score:3, Interesting)
It's being implemented by 2 tier 1 carriers in the US that I know of. Though it's not really going to be geared towards computers. It's all more or less smartphones and other non PC end devices.
Some ISP's will just do the IPV4-6 conversion in your modem and everything at the home will be IPV4. I'm sure for 99% of the people out there it will be fine. The rest of us are going to be pulling their hair out.
Re:I don't think IPv6 is really the future any mor (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no requirement for handling the entire IPv4 routing table on edge devices. If you're a small network using BGP you ignore the internet and just advertise default routes OUT of your network. If you're a big network, MPLS + BGP free core is the way to go. In general vacating traffic to the nearest edge connection (when cost is not a factor) is the best policy.
Where cost comes into play there are numerous ways around carrying the routing tables again. The only reason you would carry full tables is if you provide BGP connectivity to your downstream customers. In that case you segment that portion of the network and provide for it in a small controlled manner to avoid unnecessary complexity of your "dumb" network.
Re:change of contract (Score:2, Interesting)
> They very conveniently lost the original order (where I disclosed exactly what I required, down to what networks I will announce)
You are in luck then! Take them to court. If you have your copy (you *do*, right?) and they can't produce a copy, then I can't imagine how you could lose. And you can demand lots of compensation. Afterall, this may drive you out of business, so 10 years worth of salary+benefits for all your employees + penalty + lawyer's fees is the minimum.
Re:Summary is misleading. (Score:4, Interesting)
For those interested:
Neighbor V AS MsgRcvd MsgSent TblVer InQ OutQ Up/Down State/PfxRcd
2600:80A:60F::1 4 701 18685 7401 44868 0 0 1d09h 1516
2620:0:950::242:130
4 11170 28462 14090 44869 0 0 1d00h 2140
Verizon carries 1516 routes, the combination of Sprint and HE are 2140 routes.
Re:bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it's time for the public to use eminent domain to seize the cables.
Eminent domain is the gov'ts ability to force a private party to sell something at fair market cost. So, what you're suggesting is that the gov't give verizon MORE money for their network.
The power you're looking for is "anti-trust" or, if you prefer, "nationalization."
Re:IPv6 adoption screwed by a few major factors (Score:3, Interesting)
It should have been set up as a transparent change, where every person who had an IPv4 address magically had an IPv6 address that worked, and whenever an IPv6 stack, be it either your computer or some router halfway down the road, determined it was talking to IPv4, converted it into IPv4.
This is actually the way that IPv4-mapped addresses (::ffff:0:0/96) were originally envisioned, and it's the way that Linux and [^Open]BSD handle it internally. You'll notice a conspicuous absence in that list of OSs, though.
Re:bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
Too bad you can't file for a restraining order against a corporation to get you out of your contract when they buy out whoever you are with
Re:bullshit (Score:1, Interesting)
How true this is! I recently went through the painful procedure of purchasing a foreclosed property. The bank's lawyers and title company proved to be entirely incompetent. Never using the title company again doesn't do anything... after all, title companies are a dime a dozen and most folks don't really care who they use. When I filed a formal complaint with the BBB with them though, you'd better believe that got their attention. The owner actually contacted me... she later proved her own horrible ignorance - but that's beside the point.
It's sad we live in a world where, to speak to anyone in charge, we have to file a formal complaint with a third party... and I largely blame that on the "sue them for all they're worth" mentality that seems to be running rampant in the U.S. That's why healthcare costs are so high as well (coincidentally). Life would be so much easier if folks could just be honest in their business dealings. Such honesty and up-front-ness with the customer tends to make everything go more smoothly. I can't for the life of me figure out why big business hasn't figured that one out yet. Mind-boggling really...
Re:You aren't seeing the whole picture (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and though it may be a matter of debate, some folks swear that it's incorrect to call those NAT.
Well the RFCs on the subject clearly use the term "basic NAT" for a device that just changes IPs, "NAPT" for a device that changes both IPs and ports and "NAT" as a catchall term convering both.
"PAT" appears to be a ciscoism
Re:BGP aggregation policy (Score:3, Interesting)
Fascinating. Is there a corresponding document somewhere explaining how this is supposed to be implemented? It seems to defeat one of the design criteria of IPv6, i.e., keeping routing tables simple.
Regardless, I still think it would be a good start to identify one or more ISPs that are serving some of those blocks and talk to them about it.