Rate of growth on IPv6 not fast enough?

Mon Apr 19 17:14:12 UTC 2010

On Mon, 19 Apr 2010, Bill Bogstad wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 12:10 PM, Frank Bulk - iName.com
> <frnkblk at iname.com> wrote:
>> Don't forget the home gateway aspect -- it's a huge gaping hole in the IPv6
>> deployment strategy for ISPs.  And don't talk to me about Apple's Airport
>> Extreme.  ISPs want (once the volume of IETF IPv6-related drafts has settled
>> down) for every router at Wal-mart to include IPv6 support.  If they start
>> right now and presume that home gateways/routers are replaced every 3 to 5
>> years, it will be several years before they've covered even 50% of the
>> homes.
>
> Alternatively, they could commission the vendors to release firmware
> upgrades with IPv6 support for the most common older devices.   Given
> that many of them are Linux based and the code already exists, this
> isn't likely to be technically difficult.

Yes it is. Most of the home gateways are are manufactured : develop, 
produce and forget life-cycle. The development codebase, is not existing 
anymore. The developers are moved to another company.... You barely have 
support for low-end home gateways after a year of first shipment. In the 
first year some bugfixing....

Adding new features, like ipv6 is not acceptable/feasible to the 
manufacturers....

> The customer support costs, however, of convincing people to actually 
> install the new firmware is another story.  A consortium of ISPs could 
> collectively work with the biggest OEMs/vendors to get this done if they 
> wanted to do so.
>

This might be done for new devices, but not for old ones.

> Start by commissioning IPv6 support into all new hardware.   I would
> think that given the razor thin margins in home gateways/routers extra
> money coming in for simply turning on code which already exists would
> be attractive to at least some of them.  Come up with some kind of
> logo for the program "IPv6 READY!".

Don't count much on "IPv6 READY!" logo. IPv6 READY usually means, there 
are some IPv6 support in the device, but it might not work on your 
particular environment....: no IPv6 on PPPoE, no DHCPv6 support, no 
IPv6 setting are possible on webinterface....

>  Make it a bandwagon thing so that vendors who aren't part of the 
> program look behind the times. Offer some kind of cheap to implement 
> network service to customers which can only be accessed via IPv6 to 
> create user demand.  Many people have said that the reason that no one 
> is doing IPv6 is that there is nothing in it for the end users, so 
> change that.

I fully support you.....

Best Regards,
 		Janos Mohacsi