Level of IPv6 Usage Is Vanishingly Small

An anonymous reader writes "The impending IPv4 address allocation shortage has led to a lot of speculation on the future of IPv6 (including here). A new study says that Internet IPv6 migration is not just going slowly — it has basically not even begun. After spending a year measuring IPv6 traffic across 87 ISPs around the world, the study concludes 'less than one hundredth of 1% of Internet traffic is IPv6... equivalent to the allowed parts of contaminants in drinking water.'"

Why it doesn't matter

Because it impacts the other guys, not me. It's the people in China and India and everywhere else that need addresses. Me? I've got a whole block right here.

Re:Why it doesn't matter

That, and IPv4 is just more convenient because you can actually remember the addresses without writing them down. I can say "Hey, ping 10.10.1.12" and people will do it. Try that with an ipv6...

I think people who can will continue to use ipv4 for that reason, and those that just need a lot of cheap address space will start using ipv6 as ipv4 gets harder to get and/or more expensive.

Should have gone to A.B.C.D.E.F.G format.

We could have even just added a 3 more positions in the address and assumed a default of 1.1.1. as the default prefix if none was given. That would have given us 16 million * the current 4 billion addresses - 64 quadrillion addresses.

At the risk of repeating the 'no one needs more 640k', I'd have to say that I think 64 quadrillion is more than usable for the next several years. The upshot is that it would have been much easier to deal with that. From a pragamatic viewpoint, there's a whole lot of software out there invested in the dotted quad format. Modifying that to deal with a few more X.X.X places wouldn't have been as hard (think GUIs that check IP validity, for example) as moving to IPv6.

Lame excuses, perhaps, but I think we'd have seen much faster adoption to a format like X.X.X.X.X.X.X because it's an incremental, not radically different.
 

Re:Why it doesn't matter

it impacts the other guys

It affects the other guys. This is Slashdot, not a marketing department or a boardroom. Let's use English instead of Marketese. Further reading. [mtholyoke.edu]

Stupid arbitrary units of measurements

'less than one hundredth of 1% of Internet traffic is IPv6... equivalent to the allowed parts of contaminants in drinking water.'

Like that means anything to me. Can they compare that percentage in terms of the number of pages per Library of Congress?

Re:Stupid arbitrary units of measurements

No, because it's IPv6, you have to compare against the number of grains of sand on the planet.

Re:Stupid arbitrary units of measurements

Like that means anything to me. Can they compare that percentage in terms of the number of pages per Library of Congress?

Sure.

'That's like less than one hundredth of 1% of the number of pages in the library of congress.'

Re:Stupid arbitrary units of measurements

Well, if this sentence was in a book in the Library of Congress, IPv6 usage would represent its adoption lev

You know what would help?

If people could actually get IPv6 service from their providers instead of having to route everything through congested tunnels, THAT would help.

Re:You know what would help?

I'm kind of suprised that my ISP in Hungary is switching over it's infrastructure to IPv6 and making IPv6 available for the users by the end of this year. I consider it a huge step forward, plus the free porn here [ipv6experiment.com] is a welcome bonus.

Reasons.

The biggest reasons:

1. Many consumer-grade routers do not support IPv6 out of the box.
2. Some (most?) consumer ISPs do not yet support IPV6
3. For both enterprises and individuals, there doesn't seem to be any cost justification for upgrading to IPv6. What's the benefit? It works now, right?

And probably many others. The bottom line is that right now today, there isn't a 'killer app' for IPv6.

Re:Reasons.

Interestingly, Apple's AirPort Extreme/Time Capsule firmware does support IPv6 as local-link only, an IPv6 node, or tunnel to IPv6. It also includes an IPv6 firewall supporting incoming IPSec authentication and Teredo tunnels (to get through NAT).

Apple owns more than 10% of the retail WiFi N router market according to NPD [roughlydrafted.com].

Mac OS X, XP and Vista all support IPv6, but having support in the router is the important part. Enabling a significant percentage of users to flip on IPv6 and tunnel right through their legacy ISP is already possible. IPv6 just needs a killer app.

How about authenticated web apps? IPv6 secures traffic from the user to the cloud. That's something Apple has reason to push with MobileMe: "look at us, we have IPv6 security."

Look at what Apple's doing with Back To My Mac to support authenticated connections using Wide-Area Bonjour Dynamic DNS lookups. This could be done via IPv6 using direct addressing. Apple will end up selling more routers, MM subscriptions and IPv6 will get its foot in the door for others to use.

Will the iPhone Meet its Match from a Modern Day DOS? [roughlydrafted.com]

Re:Reasons.

There is a killer app, It's called

news.ipv6.eweka.nl

It has 120 (!) days retention, and comes to you at gigabit speed.

All for FREE if you use ipv6.

Re:Reasons.

The Y2K issue was known and discussed in the media as far back as 1984, yet did not hit the awareness horizon of most big businesses until late 1998. That's fourteen years of "It works now, right?"

So if IPv6 is a water contaminant....

The the water is internet. Which comes into our houses view pipes.... OMG THAT PROVES IT. The internet IS a series of tubes! We were all sooo wrong ;\

Makes me happy

It may be just me, but I always felt IPv6 is a solution looking for the problem.

There is a reason IPv4 is so well entrenched. Other than availability of software, hardware and services, it is convenience of handling IPv4 in all those things. This is what permits developers to create all those wonderful products, administrators to effectively administer them and users to enjoy them. A primary reason to that is IPv4 address size - it is 32 bit which is natively handled by all current hardware, and easily remembered by humans (short term) in its quad decimal form.

IPv6 has neither of these features. It is difficult to deal with in software (I know, I do this for a living), does not fit into any native data type (and won't until we move to 128 bit architectures - which does not seem to be very soon), cannot be remembered or used by a human (so effective administration requires magic automatic tools), does not give itself with any convenience to routing related data structures (like radix trees). All this for dubious benefit of addressing directly (in non-hierarchical manner) of every toaster in the world. This is directly opposite to the way the Real World operates (i.e. your home has an address, but noone gets to talk to your toaster directly without going through you first.

If I were solving this, I'd suggest separate and non-directly routable IPv4 address spaces for separate countries (and, perhaps, for other entities). And lots and lots of NAT or proxying. Of course that is kind of what is happening anyway.

China would be happier that way too. In case of cross-border cyberattack, just cut external links and your country is self-sufficient and interconnected :)

Anyway, I am ready to bet some cash that IPv6 will never become a major transport protocol.
I know I will do whatever I can to keep it far far away.

Re:Makes me happy

It may be just me, but I always felt IPv6 is a solution looking for the problem. [..] And lots and lots of NAT or proxying.

And NAT is a problem masquerading as a solution.

Anyway, I am ready to bet some cash that IPv6 will never become a major transport protocol.
I know I will do whatever I can to keep it far far away.

And I'll keep on enjoying all the free services people provide for IPv6 enabled hosts.

Re:Makes me happy

If I were solving this, I'd suggest separate and non-directly routable IPv4 address spaces for separate countries (and, perhaps, for other entities). And lots and lots of NAT or proxying. Of course that is kind of what is happening anyway.

Eww. Lots of room for bugs and weird feature interaction in the design of protocols that have to punch through NATs, either that or everyone has to role out new helper modules / ALGs each time some wizzy new app is invented.

IPv6 is really a clean-up job. Combing the complexity back out of the network has got to be a win for reliability, ease of administration, and perhaps even security. I'm in favour, though I have to say I'm doubtful about it happening any time soon.

I think the most optimistic scenario is this: when IPv4 exhaustion hits, particularly in countries that have to yet to have their internet 'boom' and so will have a very low number of existing addresses per capita, obviously some sort ISP side NATing is going to be required. People may decide that they might as well implement IPv6 and TRT [wikipedia.org] anyway, particularly if they're deploying new hardware / software combinations (netbooks? set-top boxes?) and so can dictate IPv6-readiness. Hopefully once sufficient numbers of IPv6-only nodes are out there, it'll seem worthwhile rolling out IPv6 on servers.

The alternative, ultimately, is people auctioning off tiny IPv4 address blocks and exponentially bloating routing table sizes, or a horrible twisty unreliable world of multiple NAT or ALGs, where net neutrality is a quaint concept consigned to history ..

And yes, printable IPv6 addresses are ridiculous. Admins will have to get used to trusting DNS (or /etc/hosts) when configuring stuff .. :)

Re:Makes me happy

I usually do not reply to my own posts (or replies to my posts) on /., but this is one area where I think it may actually be important.

First of all, if I were to guess, I'd say that all those who replied while questioning my background don't actually do network development for a living. While I could start beating my own chest about how most of your traffic right now probably goes through something designed by me, that would be beside the point (and noone knows you are a dog on the Internet :) ).

That said, a few points specifically.

1) "Never heard of structs?". Structures are orthogonal to the size of IP addresses. You can represent IPv4 address as a structure (as original in_addr used to do, exactly because not all hardware supported 32 bit natively). You could do the same with IPv6 (or you can simply stuff it into 16 sequential bytes). What won't change is ability to perform operations directly on the data type.
You can natively compare two v4 addresses by using a == b (which will translate into a single assembly instruction). You cannot do that on a 129 bit data item. Your choices are - memcmp, or defined operation (compare first 4 bytes, then next 4 bytes, then next, then next :) ). This is inefficient, prone to error and makes code less maintainable.

2) Radix trees. Sure, anything can be stored in a radix tree with appropriately long prefix or appropriately large number of nodes in a prefix. What can't be done, however, is keeping this tree in memory (given current device and system memory sizes, which are in low gigabytes to a few dozen gigabytes). This problem is exacerbated by the fact that IPv4 address space is very compact of necessity (not too many holes, and everything is neatly CIDRed together), whereas IPv6 is of necessity full of holes (and designed to stay that way).

3) Performance is a relatively minor consideration in this.

As far as NAT goes - I firmly believe that solutions (in technology and elsewhere) are of two kinds - "organic", i.e. borne of and supported by needs and circumstances, and "artificial". Organic solutions are not always streamlined or pretty. Humans are a good example. A rock of salt is pretty darn inorganic (though I wouldn't want to stretch this analogy too far :) ) NAT is the former, IPv6 is the latter.

Re:Makes me happy

One of the key features of ipv6 is simplified routing (it was pretty much the #1 design improvement), so the amount of processing routers have to do goes way down, in spite of the higher bit count.

Please read the first page of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6 [wikipedia.org]

and of course more if you are seriously interested.

How to really accelerate the migration...

Make all porn only reachable through IPv6.

Re:Solution looking for a problem

Also, most of the world is using Windows XP. Can you show me where in my TCP/IP settings panel I am supposed to enter my IPv6 information? Exactly.

You don't. As is the benefit of IPv6, if it's installed it should be automagically configured. It shouldn't require manual configuration.

Re:What's the downside?

What's the downside to being ready?

Because it's work. Work takes time. Time is money.

A certain product at a certain company (forgive my being vague, you know how these things are) has a network interface. This interface is currently IPv4 only, no IPv6 support. When anybody asks the design team why not, they say that no customers have asked for it. Somebody suggested that IPv6 was the sort of thing you want to support ahead of need, but these guys have a lot of deadlines to meet and not enough resources to meet them. They aren't about to spend time implementing features nobody's asked for.

Of course, the time will come when their customers realize they've put off changing over to IPv6 much too long, and will start crash programs to make it happen. They'll demand that this product start supporting IPv6 immediately, if not sooner. So the design team will begin their own crash program, and IPv6 support will be added to the product in a hurry. The implementation will probably cost more and be less robust (at least initially) than if they'd planned ahead.

But they have no incentive to plan ahead. It's a common pattern.

Re:Not needed.

Why is everyone so eager to use NAT? I've never quite understood this, once NAT use became widespread things became a lot more problematic, in my first year of college all the workstations in the computer labs (Ultra 5s and older Sparcstation 5s) had public IP addresses and the ISP I used gave all 10 Mbps customers 5 public IP addresses. I've recently started taking a few college courses again, the uni's labs are all NATed (so you can't access /tmp or /var on workstationname-57.lab04.cs.unidomain.tld from home any more, you have to dump the files on your NFS mounted 150 MiB home dir and then access that, great fun) and my current ISP gives each customer ONE public IP address, but I suppose I should consider myself lucky for not being NATed...

Seriously, we need to move back to an internet where a machine connected to the internet can almost always be assumed to have a proper, public, IP address. It would simplify a lot of things. Also, any trolls pulling out the "yuo cant has teh firawalls withouts teh NAT!!!11" crap can please not respond to this as packet filtering does not in any way require NAT. (Not directed at parent post, just tired of trolls and ignorant fools always using that argument).

/Mikael

Re:It is obvious

99% of IPv4 traffic is bittorrent.

Coincidentally, 99% of percentages seen in Slashdot comments are made up on the spot.