Creating demand for IPv6, and saving the planet

Thu Oct 4 05:49:27 UTC 2007

On Wed, 3 Oct 2007, Daniel Senie wrote:
> BTW, thanks for bringing this thread back to the question of creating 
> demand for IPv6. There's plenty of anti-NAT activity on other 
> threads. Some constructive discussion over ways to create incentives 
> to deploy IPv6 is worthwhile. The most common argument for deployment 
> of IPv6 is fear, as in "the sky is falling." Yeah, we all heard that, 
> and have for a decade. Got it. Now, is there some POSITIVE reason to 
> push IPv6? Fear is not a positive force.

Ok, I'll bite and throw out a wacky idea I've been mulling over.

As the data at http://bgp.he.net/ipv6-progress-report.cgi shows for the
IPv6 and IPv4 nameserver tests, some of the time IPv6 connectivity is
*faster* than IPv4 connectivity (66 out of 264 test cases), because of
network topology differences due to different peering and transit
relationships between IPv4 and IPv6.

So you could write a download accelerator for your browser that checked
IPv6 vs IPv4 connectivity and used whichever was faster.

With only 3 percent of neworks running IPv6 this idea is a little early,
still it would be a hilarious browser plug-in.  You could imagine it might
even have a little "IPv6 accelerator" icon that shows up in your status
bar when you've switched on the nitro.

(hehehe, shaving off that extra few ms of latency, yo!)

Mike.

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