Wither the IPv6 internet? I think not.
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.Isn't this uncertainty a reason to adopt IPv6 sooner rather than later?
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.
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I recommend this for another view.
I'm not sure I follow.
I agree that there will be an IPv4 address market (Geoff Huston claims there already is). We will need IPv4 for a long time after the IANA free pool is exhausted.
I also agree that in the short-term, we'll be doing more IPv4 NAT.
But long-term, I don't see IPv4+NAT remaining viable. And the author of that talk makes the same point in his presentation (slide 20).
I do have serious concerns about what an IPv4 address market will do to internet routing stability, but that's a separate issue.
I first got in touch with IPv6 at around 2001, then was out of the game for several years and now re-enabled IPv6 both on my server and on on my home LAN few months ago and can see the great improvement that happened over the years. No more 6bone, no more A6 records, automatic 6to4 tunnels, native v6 connection to my hosted server, etc. But there's still a long way to go.
One of the biggest problems is with the enormous mass of ADSL and cable-tv home users to whom the ISPs don't offer native IPv6 connection. There's of course 6to4 but that's not an Average Joe User tool.
I can see it on one of my servers - most of the v6 traffic is DNS, second is SMTP, and only a fraction of that is v6 HTTP. That quite confirms that servers are slowly getting there but IPv6 for end user is still very rare.
BTW I've found your blog just a few hours ago and read it almost all. I'm happy there's someone else who's IPv6-positive like me ;-) Keep up the good work!
BTW2 Why is www.personal.psu.edu not on v6? What a shame!
Glad you like the blog. :) I've found your VIA padlock tools to be useful.
Regarding www.personal.psu.edu, that's a long story. The personal server uses Penn State's central file system, which isn't IPv6 enabled (and we're currently migrating to a new central fs). We're also stuck on Apache 1.3 because of a module that doesn't work on 2.x. Once the fs migration, we can start to upgrade to 2.x, and hopefully IPv6-enable more of our websites.
Our internal wiki is reachable over IPv6, but it's restricted to Penn State users for now.
Fear not, there are other "IPv6 positive" people out there ... and some companies that focused on it!
/TJ
He WAS in fact arguing in favor of IPv6.
THe author was arguing for ipv6.. he was trying to paint a bleak picture of what things would be like if we didn't switch.
Which author are you referring to? Me? J H Woodyatt? Or Niall Murphy / Dave Wilson?