Why is IPv6 broken?

Sun Jul 10 14:14:38 UTC 2011

On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 5:25 PM, Bob Network <networkjoe at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Why is IPv6 broken?

You should have titled your thread, "my own personal rant about
Hurricane Electric's IPv6 strategy."  You may also have left out the
dodgy explanation of peering policies and technicalities, since these
issues have been remarkably static since about 1996.  The names of the
networks change, but the song remains the same.  This is not a novel
subject on this mailing list.  In fact, there have been a number of
threads discussing HE's practices lately.  If you are so interested in
them, I suggest you review the list archive.

There are quite a few serious, unresolved technical problems with IPv6
adoption besides a few networks playing chicken with their collective
customer-bases.  The lack of will on the part of vendors and operators
to participate in the IETF process, and make necessary and/or
beneficial changes to the IPv6 standards, has left us in a situation
where IPv6 implementation produces networks which are vulnerable to
trivial DoS attacks and network intrusions.

The lack of will on the part of access providers to insist on
functioning IPv6 support on CPE and BRAS platforms has even mid-sized
ISPs facing nine-figure (as in, hundred-million-dollars) expenses to
forklift-upgrade their access networks and end-user equipment, at a
time when IPv6 seems to be the only way to continue growing the
Internet.

The lack of will on the part of major transit networks, including
Savvis, to deploy IPv6 capabilities to their customers, means that
customers caught in multi-year contracts may have no option for native
connectivity.  Cogent's policy of requiring a new contract, and from
what I am still being told by some European customers, new money, from
customers in exchange for provisioning IPv6 on existing circuits,
means a simple technical project gets caught up in the complexities of
budgeting and contract execution.

If you believe that the most serious problem facing IPv6 adoption is
that HE / Level3 / Cogent don't carry a full table, you are living in
a fantasy world.

-- 
Jeff S Wheeler <jsw at inconcepts.biz>
Sr Network Operator  /  Innovative Network Concepts