Most IPv6-certified Home Network Gear Buggy 174
Julie188 writes "The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab held an IPv6 consumer electronics Plugfest on Feb. 14 and CableLabs has scheduled two more for this year. UNH is tight-lipped about the results, but the sad fact is that most home routers and DSL/cable modems certified as IPv6-compliant by the IPv6 Forum are so full of implementation bugs that they can't be used by ISPs for IPv6 field trials. And that's not helping the Internet have a smooth, fast transition to IPv6. Though OpenWRT and DD-WRT solve the problem, ISPs point out that requiring the average consumer to upgrade their own firmware, because the manufacturer can't do IPv6 right, isn't a practical solution."
IPv6 for older hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
However, Cisco isn't sure yet if routers bought prior to 2011 will get IPv6. "We are currently looking into which 'legacy' Linksys product can support IPv6. (There are many things that influence us being able to do it -- including if there is enough memory, as well as other factors.) The engineer teams are working on that," the spokesperson said.
I would be shocked if they offered firmware upgrades for old hardware to add IPv6 support even if the hardware could do it. It seems more likely they and others will use it as an excuse to obsolete a ton of old hardware and force people to buy new stuff.
Why IPv6 is a pipe dream (Score:4, Insightful)
Ding! We have a winner.
Where is the upside for a customer in caring about ipv6? Will they want to decloak when/if ipv6 becomes popular? OMG, my PC is broadcasting an IP address, of course I want your wonderful product to protect me! All ipv6 would do is get every Windows PC pwn3d twenty four hours after deployment and then everyone retreats behind a NAT and dynamic IP again, this time grafted onto ipv6. Or no ipv6 for end users. What is going to happen is that as addresses get tight the big ISPs will put residential users on 10/8 nets and double NAT just like they have been doing overseas for years and on mobile phones since day one. That will free up enough addresses for servers for the indefinite future. And end the open Internet as we have known it. P2P is over, end users consume content like they are supposed to and content producers produce content like they are supposed to. Or we implement IPv6 at a cost of billions in a down economy and uncork the P2P genie again along with untold new services once any host can reach any host as the Internet originally intended.. Put that way it is a real easy decision for the large players isn't it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)