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Android The Internet Networking Upgrades

IPv6-Only Is Becoming Viable 209

Posted by timothy from the ok-but-what's-your-64-bit-phone-number? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With the success of world IPv6 day in 2011, there is a lot of speculation about IPv6 in 2012. But simply turning on IPv6 does not make the problems of IPv4 exhaustion go away. It is only when services are usable with IPv6-only that the internet can clip the ties to the IPv4 boat anchor. That said, FreeBSD, Windows, and Android are working on IPv6-only capabilities. There are multiple accounts of IPv6-only network deployments. From those, we we now know that IPv6-only is viable in mobile, where over 80% (of a sampling of the top 200 apps) work well with IPv6-only. Mobile especially needs IPv6, since their are only 4 billion IPv4 address and approaching 50 billion mobile devices in the next 8 years. Ironically, the Android test data shows that the apps most likely to fail are peer-to-peer, like Skype. Traversing NAT and relying on broken IPv4 is built into their method of operating. P2P communications was supposed to be one of the key improvements in IPv6."
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IPv6-Only Is Becoming Viable More

IPv6-Only Is Becoming Viable

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  • Finally, some sanity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FoolishOwl ( 1698506 ) on Friday January 13, 2012 @07:54PM (#38693798) Journal

    Given the fantastic growth in the number of Internet-enabled mobile devices, and that the infrastructure for such devices is still in rapid development, it makes sense that this is where you'd see IPv6 completely implemented first.

    • Re:Finally, some sanity (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Mashiki ( 184564 ) <mashiki@gm a i l .com> on Friday January 13, 2012 @08:00PM (#38693858) Homepage

      All that needs to happen now, is to get ISP to get their asses in gear and adapt IPv6. I know mine still doesn't on cable, and their DSL side has been in beta for 4 years. Cable though isn't so much their fault, but rather the fault of who they buy their headend connection through(rogers). And since most of their hardware is still docsis2, and they're still using docsis2 DPI hardware, well I'm sure it'll be another 10 years.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by data2 ( 1382587 )

        I have an Arris TM502B running Docsis 2.0, and having played a bit with its terminal console, it says that is supports ipv6, although of course there is no way to test it for me without my provider.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hitmark ( 640295 )

      Especially as LTE is basically built on IP6.

      • As someone else noted in this thread, the 4G standard mandates IPv6 and deprecates IPv4, so anybody doing 4G would have to go IPv6
    • Even a NAT'd private IP6 address space, behind limited IP4 addresses, would be better than reusing the same 10/8 addresses for every private network.

      • My Rural Wireless ISP does this.. every customer gets a 192.168.100. address.. very, very annoying. They say some equipment doesn't support IPv6, but would it be too hard to throw a 6to4 server up?

        • In a dual-stack lite setup, this might still happen: there may still be IPv4 only nodes, such as XP boxes. But what can happen is that the ISP can have all the networking equipment as IPv6, run all IPv6 native communications as is, and for IPv4 connections, encapsulate IPv4 packets w/ IPv6 headers in getting to the terminal points, before doing what's called a large scale NAT (LSNAT), where the IPv6 is decapsulated, and IPv4 header is used to route the packet to the ultimate node. The IPv4 node in this ca

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by julesh ( 229690 )

            In a dual-stack lite setup, this might still happen: there may still be IPv4 only nodes, such as XP boxes.

            In my tests of my company's network, XP worked perfectly acceptably with IPv6. I believe there are some issues with its DHCP implementation, but for most purposes it seems to work well enough.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Yvanhoe ( 564877 )
      In France here, a new mobile operator appeared, giving a lot more of technical informations than its competitor. It explained it could not accept more than ~100 open TCP connection per user, because it only has 8000 IPv4 addresses for its mobile network and expects 3 millions users. If users use more than 100 ports, he will have an exhaustion of IP/port combinations. We finally reach the point where IPv4, even using NAT techniques, is becoming impractical. The switch should happen soon.

  • IPv6 working != Internet IPv6 ready (Score:5, Informative)

    by bigogre ( 315585 ) on Friday January 13, 2012 @08:04PM (#38693900)

    I get to test software on the Internet. In the grand scheme of things there are few servers out there talking IPv6 at the moment. There are relatively few Web servers talking IPv6, and there are relatively few DNS servers talking IPv6. If I configure a caching DNS server to be IPv6 only I can only talk to a few things today. Even if the DNS server is configured to talk IPv4 but I query for names on IPv6 (AAAA records) there are few to find. Many DNS servers don't even handle AAAA requests properly. A lot of infrastructure is yet to be deployed to make IPv6-only a viable way to access the Internet.

    Those millions of mobile devices talking IPv6 today can only do that going through NAT64 gateways (read that as NAT 6 - 4, as in allowing IPv6 to access IPv4). Yes, having the devices that can talk IPv6 is part of the solution. Now the servers need to be there.

    I suppose you could call the large number of IPv6 devices the "chicken". Now the chicken needs to lay the egg.

    • This isn't IPv6-only in any meaningful sense of the term. All you've done is move the dual part of the stack from the mobile device to the operator. In fact since the *overwhelming* majority of servers are reachable by IPv4 only, the NAT64 will be used for almost everything. And since the IPv4 address the device would get in a dual stack setup would almost be from a NAT as well, you haven't actually changed IPv4 address usage in any significant way.

      This is one of those necessary steps that has to be take

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by julesh ( 229690 )

      There's no need for servers to talk IPv6. They'll function perfectly well through 6->4 tunnels, and everyone will be happy. It's the client-end infrastructure that needs fixing, and any service that does peer-to-peer connection. These are the areas that will fail when clients stop receiving IPv4 addresses.

  • Waste and Bloat (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Renegrade ( 698801 )

    50 billion mobile devices? How much of this will end up as landfill? Does everybody REALLY need seven mobile devices?

    Also, I'd feel a lot better about IPv6 if there weren't quite so many RFCs associated with it. The more complex a standard is, the more room there is for security holes, bugs, and non-conforming implementations... Is the second system effect going to bite us in the ass really hard?

    Well, maybe we WILL need seven devices, just to load the new stack once..

    • Over 8 years. My phones last longer than 1 year, but not everybody actually takes care of theirs. Especially not if it is still under warranty when the next generation is released.

    • Criminal Hackers all over the world are working hard to come up with lots of zero day exploits for IPv6. When it finally goes live, they'll have plenty of hacks to bring it down in the first hour.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kesuki ( 321456 )

      consider it this way. 1 phone per person. 1 ipad/tablet/ereader per adult, 1 laptop per student 1 desktop per house -- plus several smart tvs, plus 1 wifi gateway plus game machines blah blah blah.
      marketing was clearly relying on a future of thorium reactors every few blocks away. i just recently learned the earth and it's magnetosphere are based on thorium reactions in the magma layers of the planet.
      widespread computing has its drawbacks.

  • IPv6 and 4G (Score:5, Interesting)

    by anarcat ( 306985 ) on Friday January 13, 2012 @08:15PM (#38693998) Homepage

    One thing that is not mentionned here is that the 4G specs actually mandate IPv6 and deprecate IPv4 support - something that should really push IPv6 adoption forward, especially with providers that offer both cell phone and traditionnal internet connectivity...

    Good thing too. Getting those suckers in would have been difficult otherwise. With IPs running out in Europe this year, we are really starting to feel the pressure now...

  • Still work to be done (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Though this discussion has focused purely on web access over the Internet, as many people mistakenly believe they're the same thing, there's still work to be done for enterprise and service provider networks to operate on pure IPv6. For example, with IPv6, there isn't really provider independent address space. So, when you get all your address space from your ISP, how do you dual-home to different ISPs? ISPs are not going to accept your advertisements of another ISPs address block like they would with IPv4.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swalve ( 1980968 )
      I believe it doesn't matter. If you are on a LAN that connects to multiple providers, each client will have multiple addresses. [isp1]:[mac address], [isp2]:[mac address] and [internal lan]:[mac address] (roughly) The hosts don't have to decide, they just use whatever they want. And I don't think you have to readdress, as dhcp and the automagic self-addressing scheme will figure it out.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dagger2 ( 1177377 )

      For example, with IPv6, there isn't really provider independent address space.

      Uh.

      Yes there is. See for example this [arin.net] and this [ripe.net]/this [ripe.net].

      • Re:Still work to be done (Score:4, Informative)

        by unixisc ( 2429386 ) on Saturday January 14, 2012 @04:23AM (#38696054)
        Any organization that gets a /48 directly from ARIN, APNIC or any of the other RIRs has provider independent address space. They can then allocate different subnets to different ISPs, in addition to subnetting their various offices/locations, departments and so on.

        Otoh, it's IPv4 that would be incapable of providing provider independent addresses, since everybody is scouring for them.

  • I'm surprised at the amount of need for IPv6 upgrades at the application level. Really I would hope more OSes would allow IPv6 only with an internal IPv4 fake NAT approach to translate IPv6 information (local and remote targets) to fake internal IPv4 addresses. Remote targets would also need some form of IPv4 to IPv6 resolution. Perhaps add a notification from the OS that the application in question is not IPv6 capable and running in a compatibility mode with degraded performance.

    And yes, I know part

  • I was recently in attendance in a chat room where I noticed several people's connections info seemed to include IPV6 addresses (hexadecimal separated by ':' ) When I asked one of them how they were liking IPV6, they responded that they did not even know they were using IPV6, that they were using their iPhone to join the chat room.

    • out of interest do you remember if they were using regular IPv6 addresses, 6to4 addresses (2002::/16) or teredo addresses (2001:0::/32)?

  • Somebody from my ISP has told me, in so many words, that they have absolutely no intention of making IPv6 available to consumers until [!!!!] they run out of IPv4 addresses... which the fellow I spoke to insisted was still years away, and offered absolutely no timeline given for any actual switch. To top it all off, he said that they would not even be doing any sort of gradual transition when it does happen... that the switchover would be essentially instantaneous for everybody, and would be transparent f

    • It may well be years away for them depending on how many IPs they have spare and how stable the size of their customer base is.

      I suspect his insistence that it would be instantanous and transparent either means
      1: He hasn't got a clue
      2: They don't have any plans
      3: They are hoping they can wait for everyone else to transition first.
      4: They really plan to deploy IPv4 NAT instead of deploying IPv6 but they don't want to admit that.

  • the carriers will not route incoming connections to the devices, even with IPv6. This would endanger their current business models, so they will try to avoid it. It would be cool, when some important new App would really need incoming connections, so the carries virtually must support it. But i doubt they will, and there will be no such app. So the only thing they see is, that smartphones, tablets and other wanted consumer hardware should not have this feature, and tethering with notebooks is evil for them,

  • ,,,aside from Comcast and Hurricane Electric?

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