Mac OS X 10.7, still no DHCPv6

Mon Feb 28 23:03:21 UTC 2011

On 2011-02-28, at 17:04, Owen DeLong wrote:

> On Feb 28, 2011, at 12:34 PM, Joe Abley wrote:
> 
>> On 2011-02-28, at 15:27, Randy Bush wrote:
>> 
>>> o if ipv6 can not operate as the only protocol, and we will be out
>>>  of ipv4 space and have to deploy 6-only networks, it damned well
>>>  better be able to stand on its own.
>> 
>> Do you think I was suggesting that IPv6 as a protocol doesn't need to be able to stand on its own two feet? Because I wasn't; that's patently absurd.
>> 
> 
> It is both absurd and pretty much exactly what you said.

Well, you misunderstood what I meant, which I'm sure is my own fault. I'm sure my view of the world is warped and unnatural, too, but most of you know that already. :-)

To me, delivering IPv6 to residential Internet users is the largest missing piece of the puzzle today. Those users generally have no technical support beyond what they can get from the helpdesk, and the race to the bottom has ensured that (a) the helpdesk isn't of a scale to deal with pervasive connectivity problems and (b) any user that spends more than an hour on the phone has probably burnt any profit he/she might have generated for the ISP that year, and hence anything that is likely to trigger that kind of support burden is either going to result in customers leaving, bankruptcy or both.

Small (say, under 50,000 customer) ISPs in my experience have a planning horizon which is less than five years from now. Anything further out than that is not "foreseeable" in the sense that I meant it. I have much less first-hand experience with large, carrier-sized ISPs and what I have is a decade old, so perhaps the small ISP experience is not universal, but I'd be somewhat surprised giving the velocity of the target and what I perceive as substantial inertia in carrier-sized ISPs whether there's much practical difference.

So, what's a reasonable target for the next five years?

1. Deployed dual-stack access which interact nicely with consumer CPEs and electronics, the IPv4 side of the stack deployed through increased use of NAT when ISPs run out of numbers.

2. IPv6-only access, CPE and hosts, with some kind of transition mechanism to deliver v4-only content (from content providers and v4-only peers) to the v6-only customers.

Perhaps it's because I've never seen a NAT-PT replacement that was any prettier than NAT-PT, but I don't see (2) being anything that a residential customer would buy before 2016. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't hear a lot of people shouting about their success.

Note, I'm not talking about the ISPs who have already invested time, capex and opex in deploying dual-stack environments. I'm talking about what I see as the majority of the problem space, namely ISPs who have not.

Joe