Mac OS X 10.7, still no DHCPv6

Tue Mar 1 00:00:16 UTC 2011

> 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.
> 
Ready or not, IPv6-only (or reasonably IPv6-only) residential customers are less than 2 years out, so, well within
your 5-year planning horizon, whether those ISPs see that or not. Denial is an impressive human phenomenon.

> So, what's a reasonable target for the next five years?
> 
In five years we should be just about ready to start deprecating IPv4, if not already beginning to do so.

> 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.
> 
Icky, but, probably necessary for some fraction of users. Ideally, we try to avoid these multi-NAT areas being
done in such a way that the end user in question doesn't also have reasonably clean IPv6 connectivity.

> 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.
> 
This is, IMHO, preferable to option 1.

> 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.
> 
Personally, I think DS-Lite is the cleanest solution, but, it isn't without its issues. The reality is that post-runout
IPv4 is going to be ugly, regardless of whether it's NAT64 ugliness, LSN ugliness, or DS-LITE ugliness.

IPv4 is all about which flavor of bitter you prefer at this point. The sweetness is all on IPv6.

> 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.
> 
The majority of the problem space IMHO is end-user-space at ISPs that have put at least some dual-stack
research effort in, but, haven't come to solutions for end-users.

However, we're less than 2 years away from seeing what happens in those environments without IPv4.

Owen