IPv6 Confusion

Wed Feb 18 05:40:07 UTC 2009

On Tue, 17 Feb 2009, Justin Shore wrote:

> different vendors, I asked each of them about their IPv6 support and 
> they all unanimously claimed that there was no demand for it from their 
> customers.

Well, this is just ignorance or a kind of a lie. There might be few 
customers who are willing to treat IPv6 support as a showstopper, but 
saying that there is no demand simply isn't true, it's just that they can 
get away without IPv6 support right now. We all hear the same thing when 
we ask for IPv6 support.

Most of the time the vendors don't educate their sales force (both the 
droids and the sales engineers) about IPv6 because they themselves have 
made the strategic decision that IPv6 isn't important to them (personal 
view). I've seen IPv6 show up on presentations more and more though, so 
it's going in the right direction.

But as you say, any new equipment decisions done today should include lack 
of IPv6 support as a show stopper (it should at least be committed in 
roadmap), plus it needs to be specified exactly what kind of IPv6 support 
should be in it.

I agree with you that 6to4 seems to be the tunneling mechanism of choice 
for the forseeable future. It's easy to implement in the home gateways, 
but there too, you need to force the CPE vendors to include 6to4 into 
their CPE software.

If any CPE NAT box vendor comes around and has 6to4 with proper IPv6, I'll 
happily recommend all our customers who want IPv6 to buy that perticular 
box.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se