IPv6-Only Is Becoming Viable

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."

Re:Finally, some sanity

[Mashiki]

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:IPv6 and Unicorns

[rogueippacket]

The part I found interesting about the article is the focus on mobile devices - indeed, this is the area most likely to receive IPv6 before the public Internet at large. This becomes even more realistic when you throw LTE - a technology which is not strictly IP-based, being deployed by more operators worldwide virtually every day. The entire platform is almost a clean slate, as it were - a provider could conceivably activate an IPv6 gateway to their LTE network, and away they go. By contrast, this would be much easier than issuing IPv6 addresses over a well-established landscape of home routers. Just food for thought.

IPv6 and 4G

[anarcat]

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

[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. Why? Since the IPv6 address space is so large, they've already decided to limit the scale of the global BGP address table. So what? Well, now your hosts have to have multiple IP addresses. No big deal, IPv6 hosts already would already have multiple addresses assigned anyway for other purposes. The problem is now your hosts have to have the intelligence to decide which address to use. You could get around this by using only one ISPs addresses internally and NATing to the others for traffic in and out of the other ISPs link, but then you get back into what you were doing before with IPv4. Additionally, if you decide you no longer like that ISP, you have to readdress all your hosts. This is only one problem in a long list of many semi-larger (LDP can't signal over IPv6, etc.) and smaller, probably ignored problems (BGP router IDs currently only supported a 32bit number and are usually the IPv4 address used to initiate the session, etc.)

Re:FreeBSD, Windows, and Android are working on IP

[hedwards]

You seem to be confused. Linux is a kernel, no more no less. A Linux distro is a Linux kernel with a 3rd party userland. The kernel itself really has very little to do with what protocols are ultimately offered to the userland as those all have the option of loading kernel modules if need be.

Honestly, it's not that complicated. Those userland programs are why Linux can't yet be IPv6 only yet. I believe that most of them can handle it, but there are still IPv4 only utilties left.

Re:Bingo

[bbn]

There have been some improvements. IPv6 is not just IPv4 with longer addresses. You are stuck in IPv4 think - in the IPv6 world your computers will take a maximum of 30 seconds to discover a prefix change. Yes IPv6 has buildin route-verification. It is not just left to chance or to a timeout of the DHCP-lease. The computers are actively monitoring the router and if it fails the computers will go hunt for a new one with possibly a new prefix.

Your router is also monitoring the ISP the same way. It will not "forget" to do the prefix change.

All this is verified by independent testing centers for the IPv6 gold certification program. You can expect your equipment to actually do the right thing.