IPv6 Traffic Remains Minuscule 406
judgecorp writes "Even though we are running out of IPv4 addresses, IPv6 traffic is still not taking off. In fact it is less than one percent and falling, according to a report from Arbor Networks."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
IPv6 Traffic Remains Minuscule
Related Links Top of the: day, week, month.
I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.
home routers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:home routers (Score:2, Interesting)
Colour TV problem. There was no colour programming because there were no colour sets, so there were no colour sets because there was no colour programming yet.
Re:home routers (Score:4, Interesting)
Just a thought (Score:2, Interesting)
IMHO, if the IPv6 spec drops the Interface ID requirement, then IPv6 use may change. I don't think that anyone is particularly jumping for joy to have their machine uniquely identified on the net.
Re:What do you expect (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Something I've been wondering... (Score:2, Interesting)
Carrier-grade NAT. Yep it exists and yep some places are using it to get around the IPv4 address shortage already, particularly in certain countries.
Re:what is... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is actually a really good example of what they should be doing.
Make the tech available first.. let people develop a desire for it. ISPs should be handing out IPv6 addresses to anyone who wants them. Let people play with them optionally... eventually more and more people will... and demand for it will increase. It would be a slow, gradual adoption devoide of excessive headaches...
way too rational to actually happen given the current track record though.
Re:Something I've been wondering... (Score:2, Interesting)
that's ironic. We've just DISABLED (mid-Nov 2010) ipv4 traffic on our corporate borders because we don't need "normal" web browsing or v4 email. It's isolationist, we know, but we now get way more time in our national NOC and less desktop hassle. We are unusual in that we don't need v4 web or email, but we're not unusual in that we expect workers to work, not spend 50% of the time infecting our few remaining windows machines.
No nat is good nat. v6 saves us loads of time for our techs.
What the world needs is dual stacking, and for Windows to stop these 20-30 seconds timeouts. grrrr
Re:what is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Totally agreed.
Another component of the problem is that IPv6 is quite different from IPv4. Arguably better... but people don't like different.
I understand why it happened, the internet _is_ the legacy problem. You can't just roll out a patch to the internet every few years... once it's running it has to work for a long time. I think a lot of people saw this as a good opportunity to fix some other problems ... and the result is people are going to have to change the way they think about certain things, which is going to lead to resistance.
Even myself, who enjoys change. I am comfortable with how NAT works. It makes sense to me. I hear things like "every device gets a public IP" and freak out. Now that I understand how it works (read: gateways suddenly became a lot more important) it's not so bad... but I can see why a lot of people, especially who don't work with networks as a career... are just saying "screw that, I'll deal when something actually happens to cause _me_ grief".
And there is no benifit to the ISP either. They can't charge more money to upgrade people to IPv6 because as you said, there is no benifit to the consumer. It just costs them money.. _and_ is going to generate more user issues which is more money and maybe some lost business.
Ultimately, until shit actually starts failing in a big way.. nothing is going to happen.
IPv6 is too hard to control (Score:5, Interesting)
That is the key reason we will never see IPv6: the entities that have to do something to make it happen have no incentive to do it, and a significant disincentive. IPv4 can be controlled by a few large organizations -- large telcos, governments, large technology corporations. IPv4 addresses are scarce and it is impossible for any new entity to come along and start challenging Verizon or Bell. Things like RFC 1918 addresses, NAT and tunneling make is possible for users to get stuff done in the face of IPv4 limits, so there is little subscriber-driven requirement to upgrade. End subscribers -- even very large ones -- essentially depend on the connectivity providers to lead the way in this sort of upgrade transition, and the large telcos have nothing to gain by giving up their de-facto oligopoly power in the market. Why should any guy with a couple of microwave dishes be able to go into business up against AT&T? That would be bad for business. As long as he does all that with RFC 1918 addresses, that's fine. But if IPv6 came to town, a guy like that would be selling fully routable connectivity, and that's no good at all.
IPv6 is the stupidest possible extension of IPv4 (Score:2, Interesting)
The good news is that they skipped 5. Here, I'll do a better job of inventing the next Internet protocol. IPv5:
48 bit addresses (add two bytes to the left of existing IPv4 addresses, otherwise use precisely the same packet header, four whole bytes longer, six if somebody wants to add more checksumming or the like while we're at it).
Oh, wait, I'm done. That gives us 65,536 IPv4 address spaces, which is enough for every country on earth to have one, bigger countries to have 2 or even 3. It's enough to trivially provision every human on the planet with their own block of 256 addresses, with enough left over for gorillas, chimps, cetaceans, and dogs to get their own as well after we're done uplifting them, and that is without NAT.
Existing routers can probably be damn near hacked in firmware to manage the longer addresses. Existing route tables continue to function with a similarly trivial hack. The US gets the block 0.0.x.x.x.x, so all existing addresses in the US don't need to change, they just need a script to be run to prepend a couple of zeros (sorry Europe and China, but we invented the Internet and have the most addresses already assigned so by either measure this must be so). After that, we can just give countries their own block and encourage migration to the same IPv4 address(es) their hosts have now, but with their very own country code prepended. They can make up their own internet authority to manage their own internal addresses.
Naturally, this extension should come with plenty of room for NAT. We can establish one half of the space for NAT. In fact, we can make the first bit the NAT bit. No packet with the leading bit set is externally routed. Sure, we sacrifice 32,278 4-billion-address IPv4 subnets that way, but we make it REALLY EASY to make a home network address normal humans (or small business admins) can remember: 128.x.x.x.x.x, fill in whatever you like for the x's and we're done. We can either make: 255.0.0.0.0.1, loopback or make loopback x.x.127.0.0.1 at block 4 (for any address blocks), just as it is now, or both. I like both. Why not?
See how easy? See how extensible? Everybody does fine managing four byte addresses already, and basically in IPv5 one will now manage the same four byte addresses plus a country code. We can PROBABLY even make the country codes for IPv4 address spaces and the country codes for countries MATCH! What an idea! That will make them REALLY easy to look up!
Of course, that means the US starts out with both 0.0.x.x.x.x and 0.1.x.x.x.x, but that's fine, we invented the telephone too and we're most likely to exhaust the whole IPv4 space on our own even after other countries get their own and move out, so we probably will need two from the very beginning anyway, and why not 0.1.x.x.x.x? It even makes sense there.
Why only 48 bit addresses? Given NAT, it is actually very unlikely that we will really need more than two extra bytes -- truthfully we could probably make things work forever with only one. And y'know, if we ever do need another byte or two beyond this, in a century or so we can add it then and just as painlessly extend to 64 bit addresses. But honestly, I doubt that we ever will.
rgb
Re:what is... (Score:4, Interesting)
> Truth is, I don't expect IPv6 to be widespread for about 10 years.
I don't know, 10 years are a long time. But the obstacles are clearly commercial in nature: all the big players have lots of IPv4 address, and these can become valuable capital. The transition to IPv6 would lower it in value. Therefore all existing players have a vested interest in delaying or even sabotaging IPv6. Plus the shortage of IPv4 creates a perfect market entry barrier for new competitors.
So I have come to the conclusion that the solution is legislation. We have left the transition so late that it is bound to be very very painful already. Any further delay and it may kill the internet as we know it, or at least parts of it.