IPv6 is on the marketers radar

Sun Feb 13 03:34:21 UTC 2011

On Feb 12, 2011, at 21:03, Lee Howard wrote:
>> Honestly, I can't quite see the big deal for home users. I'm using
>> an Apple Airport Extreme, and setting it up with a IPv6 tunnel from
> 
> $150?  That's a high-powered device compared to most home gateways.
Sure, but the same thing is possible with a cheap 6-year-old sub-$50 
popular Linksys wifi router, see http://opensystems.wordpress.com/2006/06/01/linksys-wrt54g-ipv6-howto/
for example. The point is that it can be cheap, relatively easy 
and painless for users to upgrade.

Basically, it should not have to cost anything extra to set up 
new users for IPv6. The same hardware that handles IPv4 today
can be programmed to do IPv6.

>> the foreseeable future, people will have (NATed or not) IPv4
>> connectivity, so content providers are fine without IPv6. 
> 
> Depends on the content.  Large-scale NAT is bad for you if you
> depend on IP geo-location, or use anti-DDOS measures to limit
> number of connections or bits from a single IP address, or use
> IP address to report abuse, or blacklist IP addresses, or log the
> user's IP address, or try to enforce copyright by reporting IP
> addresses of violators, or rate-limit outbound data per address,
> or record unique visitors by IP address.
> It might als

> o increase latency, but probably not so much that
> you'd panic.
Users don't care about IP geo-location or anti-DDOS measures, or
any of the other reasons you list. These are things content providers
care about, but they don't get to choose wether their viewers use
IPv4 or IPv6.

> Except for the most basic, static of websites, content providers
> are going to prefer IPv6 over IPv4.  I don't know whether web
> hosting companies will ever automatically dual-stack the PTA's
> website, but at some point it will be easier for them to warn all
> their customers and just do it, than to track which customers
> asked for IPv6 explicitly.
As long as a majority of users come over IPv4, better anti-DDOS
measures or anti-abuse procedures for IPv6 are not going to make
any difference. "When you DOS my site, please use IPv6, so we
can better find out your location and more effectively block 
your IP address."

Users are going to drive adoption of IPv6, if and when they
find a "killer-app" where IPv6 can provide usability that (heavily
NATed) IPv4 can't. This could be better file-sharing tools, lower
latency online gaming, better long-distance video-calling or whatever, 
as long as the benefits will be worth the relatively small 
(<$50) investment of money and time.

For content providers, as long as 90+% of the net is IPv4 only and
essentially nobody is IPv6 only, providing dual-stack support is just
adding cost for little or no gain in viewership. Content providers
often depend on dozens if not hundreds of pieces of hardware and
software to provider their services, so supporting IPv6 is vastly
most expensive than it is for users to take advantage of it.

In my case, the upgrade to IPv6 was free. There must be many more
using an Apple router (any model, Express, Extreme or otherwise)
that can upgrade to IPv6 for free. However, I can't list any benefit
from doing so, except from going to test-ipv6.com and seeing a 10/10
score. Basically, you have to be a geek to be interested in IPv6.
That's got to change, before there will be any meaningful shifts.

   -Geert