IPv6

[Chris Bell]

Hello,
BBC Technology has an article on the June "IPv6 day" saying that the UK
is not in the leading 20 countries. Most of the population have not even
heard about it, yet may need new or updated hardware. I understand that
recent BT hubs are IPv6 capable, but probably most hardware is unknown. Many
modems on sale do not even mention IPv6. I am connected by C&W LLU, and
there has been no mention of IPv6. Will the UK be just told one day to get
on with it?
I could just transfer to FTTC and let someone else sort that part of the
hardware, although I do not need the extra speed.
At least one of my computers, my old faithful Acorn RISC PC, is running
very old software, and would probably need to continue using IPv4, but at
least I have a choice of boxes. Most people will not have a clue.

[Jason Clifford]

Post by Chris Bell
BBC Technology has an article on the June "IPv6 day" saying that the UK
is not in the leading 20 countries. Most of the population have not even
heard about it, yet may need new or updated hardware.

In fairness most of the population have never heard of IPv4 so that's
not really a big issue.

For IPv6 the big issue wont arise until internet sites start to become
available only via IPv6 and even then it wont matter to most people
until it affects a mass market website.

Post by Chris Bell
I understand that
recent BT hubs are IPv6 capable, but probably most hardware is unknown. Many
modems on sale do not even mention IPv6. I am connected by C&W LLU, and
there has been no mention of IPv6. Will the UK be just told one day to get
on with it?

Most consumer hardware simply does not support IPv6. Even new hardware
generally does not support it. The extent to which this can be addressed
via firmware updates is unclear - it should be possible however the
willingness on the part of manufacturers is limited.

So far we're unable to offer IPv6 at all on the C&W LLU platform. We can
offer it everywhere else including the BE/O2 LLU platform via Enta.
Despite my requesting this from our supplier for C&W nothing appears to
be happening there yet.


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[Bernard Peek]

Post by Jason Clifford
In fairness most of the population have never heard of IPv4 so that's
not really a big issue.
For IPv6 the big issue wont arise until internet sites start to become
available only via IPv6 and even then it wont matter to most people
until it affects a mass market website.

That's pretty much the answer I got from Zen. Of course there are a lot
of people who want to try IPv6 on a home network first.

[Keith Edmunds]

I switched to goscomb.net as my ISP specifically because they support
IPv6. The fact that they are a smaller ISP and generally have a clue was
an added bonus.

I see little interest amongst our clients for IPv6 at the moment. It is,
of course, in the interests of big Internet companies (Amazon, Google,
Facebook, etc) to delay the general rollout of IPv6 as long as possible.

[Alain Williams]

Post by Keith Edmunds
I see little interest amongst our clients for IPv6 at the moment. It is,
of course, in the interests of big Internet companies (Amazon, Google,
Facebook, etc) to delay the general rollout of IPv6 as long as possible.

Why ?

[Chris Bell]

Why ?

Perhaps because they have more changes to make? But they probably have
similar replacement cycles, unless they care less about on-line problems?

[John Edwards]

Post by Keith Edmunds
I switched to goscomb.net as my ISP specifically because they support
IPv6. The fact that they are a smaller ISP and generally have a clue was
an added bonus.

And small (growing) ISPs probably don't have a large lump of old Class
A or B subnets sitting around.

Post by Keith Edmunds
I see little interest amongst our clients for IPv6 at the moment. It is,
of course, in the interests of big Internet companies (Amazon, Google,
Facebook, etc) to delay the general rollout of IPv6 as long as possible.

How did you work that one out?

Google and Facebook were part of the IPv6 test day last year:
http://www.worldipv6day.org/

And will be part of the permanent launch this year:
http://www.worldipv6launch.org/

I don't know if Amazon will be part of that launch, but IPv6 is very
much in their interest for their cloud computing platform. Having
multiple virtual machine instances greatly increases the demand for
IP addresses. On one network with virtual machines the IP usage has
gone up from 8 IPs to 35 in 4 years.

[Keith Edmunds]

Post by John Edwards
How did you work that one out?
http://www.worldipv6day.org/
http://www.worldipv6launch.org/

I didn't say that they weren't interested in IPv6 connectivity: I know
they are. What I said was that it was in their interests "to delay the
general rollout of IPv6 as long as possible".

At the moment, the big Internet companies have good IPv4 connectivity and
improving (sometimes already good) IPv6 connectivity. The next
Facebook/Amazon/Google/Twitter/Youtube will also be able to get good IPv4
and IPv6 connectivity, but there will come a time (maybe some way off)
when the next YouTwitFace can't get sufficient IPv4 connectivity. How
popular will that site be if it's only accessible via IPv6? So it is in
the interests of the not-yet-even-a-sparkle-in-the-eye future major
Internet companies to have IPv6 roll out as soon as possible, but for
exactly the same reasons it is in the interests of the established
players to have the IPv6 rollout (particularly to the masses) take as long
as possible.

[Chris Bell]

How popular will that site be if it's only accessible via IPv6?

That just puts current IPv4 sites at an advantage because they can have
both, it is not yet either/or.

[Keith Edmunds]

Post by Chris Bell
That just puts current IPv4 sites at an advantage

That's my point.

Post by Chris Bell
because they can
have both, it is not yet either/or.

It never will be either/or. It will be both available until the IPv4
address space is depleted, then it will be IPv6 only.

[John Edwards]

Post by Keith Edmunds

Post by John Edwards
How did you work that one out?
http://www.worldipv6day.org/
http://www.worldipv6launch.org/

I didn't say that they weren't interested in IPv6 connectivity: I know
they are. What I said was that it was in their interests "to delay the
general rollout of IPv6 as long as possible".

If they wanted to delay IPv6 then it would seem very strange that they
pushing for it's adoption.

Post by Keith Edmunds
At the moment, the big Internet companies have good IPv4 connectivity and
improving (sometimes already good) IPv6 connectivity. The next
Facebook/Amazon/Google/Twitter/Youtube will also be able to get good IPv4
and IPv6 connectivity, but there will come a time (maybe some way off)
when the next YouTwitFace can't get sufficient IPv4 connectivity. How
popular will that site be if it's only accessible via IPv6? So it is in
the interests of the not-yet-even-a-sparkle-in-the-eye future major
Internet companies to have IPv6 roll out as soon as possible, but for
exactly the same reasons it is in the interests of the established
players to have the IPv6 rollout (particularly to the masses) take as long
as possible.

Facebook/Amazon/Google/Twitter/Youtube are not the ones with the huge
blocks of IPv4 addresses. They didn't even exist when the large IPv4
blocks were allocated.

The organisations sitting on the large blocks of IPv4 are the old
"pre-dotcom" Internet companies, universities and gov/military:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks

Getting those people to give up IPv4 addresses is almost impossible.


The Google+others companies have a rapidly increasing need for IP
addresses and IPv4 addresses are a finite resource. Basic economics
will show you that is going to be a rising cost. To reduce it requires
moving the rest of Internet to IPv6. It's not enough to have IPv6
yourself, you have to get other people to use it.

The interests of "not-yet-even-a-sparkle-in-the-eye future major
Internet companies" are pretty much irrelevant. Bigger companies have
much more effective ways to deal with them than playing games with
IPv6, including legal battles over patent and other dirty tricks. But
I can't see any evidence that they are delaying IPv6.


You could make an more effective argument that large ISPs (such as BT)
have delayed IPv6 rollout, because of those reasons. BT have lots of
IPv4 address, and because they control the ADSL backbone they can stop
other ISPs that use their service from providing IPv6 addresses and so
force them to use private IP addresses.

I don't think that it is the main reason for BT were slow at providing
IPv6, especially after they took part in last year's world IPv6 day.
Management slugishness and the cost of replacement network kit are
more likely reasons.

See Andrews and Arnold's problems with IPv6 over ADSL in 2008:
http://aaisp.net.uk/news-ipv6.html