March 2008 Archives

Apple's Airport Express has long been a popular, cheap wireless access point. They're popular with several of my colleagues for business trips -- they're a nice way to get wireless in your hotel room when you travel.

This morning, Apple rev'ed the Airport Express. They added draft 802.11n support. They also added 6to4 tunneling support. This feature has been around in Apple's higher-end Airport Extreme for over a year, but the cheaper Express has lacked it. With today's announcement, Apple supports IPv6 tunneling on all of their wireless access points (the Airport Express, Airport Extreme and Time Capsule).

To the best of my knowledge, Apple is the only consumer electronics vendor who can say this. Most other vendors don't support IPv6 at all; a few support it on one or two of their products. Way to go Apple!

CAIDA has published their 2008 graph for IPv6 AS topology:

Not surprisingly, the graph shows that Europe has better IPv6 interconnectivity than the Asia/Pacific region or North America.

Google is reachable via IPv6 : http://ipv6.google.com/

So far, it's only their search engine, not any of their apps. And none of their nameservers are reachable via IPv6 yet. But it's a start.

I keep hearing that IPv6 will only be "successful" when the major web sites (google, yahoo, facebook, ebay, paypal, etc) start using it. This is a big step in the right direction.

I should point out that latency over IPv6 is terrible (from AS3999): 20.6 ms over IPv4 -vs- 251.3 ms over IPv6. It looks like the Internet2 → Global Crossing → Google routing is still very sub-optimal:

This morning I read an essay claiming that:

It's time to start talking about what the Internet will be like in a future where we abandon all our efforts toward the IPv6 transition. Because the transition isn't happening. It's not going to happen. We're going to be living on IPv4/NAT for the rest of our lives.

I think the author actually ends up arguing in favor of IPv6, even though he doesn't realize it.

Go give it a read, then come back here for my take.

He correctly point out that the IPv4 routing table is continuing to grow in size, and that there are issues with multi-layer NAT. To me, that's an argument against the long-term viability of our fragmented IPv4 system and of NAT. He claims that "the costs and benefits of just limping along forever with an IPv4/NAT-only architecture are predictable and well-understood," but then argues against this claim by saying that we don't understand the scalability limits of NAT, by pointing out that IP-in-IP tunneling has performance issues, and by saying that maintaining IPv4 will lead to uncertain cost increases. That doesn't sound like "predictable and well-understood" costs to me.

He correctly point out that an IPv4 market that's heavily regulated by the UN and WTO will be... shall I say, "painful" to work with. Again, that to me is a reason to adopt IPv6 sooner rather than later.

He correctly point out that the cost of routing IPv4 is increasing, and that it could increase sharply in the near future:

The monthly bill from your ISP is about to have an uncertain new fraction of it devoted to the cost of maintaining that globally routed IPv4 address you're using (and possibly sharing with your neighbors). How much? Nobody knows.... It could be pennies a year. It could be the better part of a hundred dollars a month. Nobody knows. Nobody freaking knows.

I disagree with the claim that the increased cost of maintaining IPv4+NAT won't drive people to IPv6. There are already some ISPs who are actively promoting IPv6 precisely because of the economic uncertainty of IPv4. And these ISPs are having some success.

IPv6 allocations have been steadily increasing in every RIR since 2000. See this graph from the RIPE NCC 2006 annual report.

There certainly are issues with IPv6. A fair amount of software doesn't support it (but a fair amount already does), DHCPv6 support is still buggy on several platforms, and many ISPs still don't offer IPv6. But these issues are being addressed.

IPv6 is here. Its deployment is growing. It's just happening very slowly and very much under the radar.