An Internet IPv6 Transition Plan

Tue Jul 24 11:20:14 UTC 2007

Alain -

  Present residential broadband Internet service is "provide the
  customer with access to/from any public-facing IPv4-based
  resource"

  Around 2011 (date for discussion purpose only) residential
  broadband Internet service is "provide the customer with
  access to/from any public-facing IPv6-based Internet resource"

  The specific "vision" of how to provide such service is left to
  the provider.   The Internet/IAB/IETF/ICANN/ISOC/... history
  does not proscribe such items as prefix size, static versus
  dynamic addressing, management models, minimal security,
  or much else for that matter...  It's entirely left to the service
  provider.  

  There's certainly suggestions, both direct (such as filtering
  for end-site devices) and indirect (embedding a /48 endsite
  assumption into the addressing scheme), but at the end of
  the day its up to the service provider to make their own
  design tradeoffs and let the market decide if they're right. 

  This overall transition plan simply states that you might want
  to provide customers with access to sites which are served by
  IPv6-only sometime around 1 Jan 2011.  The will be particularly
  useful to ISP's who may (for lack of any choice) be using IPv6-
  only to provide "Internet" service, and would prefer to be making
  faithful representations that sites connected in this manner are
  reachable by everyone out there.

  This isn't a very hard concept.  ISP's will not have access to
  the previously deep pool of IPv4 address blocks that have
  allowed their ongoing growth in the past.  Continuation of
  the ISP industry is predicated on enabling IPv6 for public-facing
  sites over the next few years.

/John

At 1:41 AM -0400 7/24/07, Durand, Alain wrote:
>John,
>
>Thank you for writing this down, this will help start the discussion.
>
>One of the things that is missing IMHO is that there is no clear vision
>of what the IPv6 Internet will/should looks like. Let me focus on the
>residential
>broadband for a minute, I'm fully aware there are other cases, but let's
>start somewhere.
>
>1) What is the IPv6 'service'?
>   For example, is it reasonable to define a 'basic' level
>   service as web+mail and an 'extended' service as everything else?  
>   Random ideas include for example offering a lower cost
>   'basic' service with v6 that would be 'proxied' to the rest
>   of the v4 Internet....
>
>2) What is the connectivity model in IPv6 for the residential customer?
>   1 address versus prefix delegation?
>   what prefix size?
>   is this prefix 'stable' or 'variable' over time? (ie renumbering is
>expected)
>   (note: the answer to this question has huge implications)
>   What types of devices are connected? PCs or appliances or sensors?
>   What is the management model in the home?
>   (how much all of this has to be controlable by the user vs made
>automatic?)
>   Are there 'servers' (ie things that answers connections from the
>outside) in the home?
>   Is there any kind of DNS delegation happening to the home?
>
>3) What is the security model of all this?
>   I just listened today half mistified to a presentation at IETF
>   that was saying that the 'recommended' deployment model in the home
>   is to put a NAT-like stateful firewall in the home gateway...
>   This would mean that IPv6 would have to inherit all the NAT-traversal
>   technologies from IPv4 to work... Is this really what we want?
>
>4) What about the 'legacy' devices that cannot upgrade to IPv6?
>   What kind of service is expected for those? Does defining an
>   80% type solution as in 1) take care of them?
>
>
>IMHO, until there is a better understanding of the answers to those
>questions (and many more I'm sure) to describe what the brave
>new world of IPv6 looks like, it will be difficult to define
>any Internet scale transition plan...
>
>My $.02
>
>  - Alain.