"It's the end of the world as we know it" -- REM

Fri Apr 26 11:31:02 UTC 2013

On Apr 25, 2013, at 10:49 PM, Michael Thomas <mike at mtcc.com> wrote:

> On 04/25/2013 07:27 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
>>> At some level, I wonder how much the feedback loop of "providers
>>> won't deploy ipv6 because everybody says they won't deploy ipv6"
>>> has caused this self-fulfilling prophecy :/
>> It's a definite issue. The bigger issue is the financial incentives are all in the
>> wrong direction.
>> 
>> Eyeball networks have an incentive not to deploy IPv6 until content providers
>> have done so or until they have no other choice.
> 
> Yet, eyeball networks are the ones being asked to pony up all of the
> cost to put in place the hacks to keep v4 running so they don't get
> support center calls. That's a pretty asymmetric, and a potential opportunity.

Quite the contrary… I personally think that the abysmal rate of IPv6 adoption among
some content providers (Are you listening, Amazon, Xbox, BING?) is just plain shameful.

I applaud Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and others who have adopted IPv6. I'd like
to applaud Netflix here, but they keep going back and forth on their IPv6 support,
so they get a one-handed clap for the moment.

I'm trying to encourage people to push on the content providers to deploy IPv6
to avoid the need for eyeball networks to pony up all these bizarre hacks.

Lee Howard has some rather interesting research showing that for eyeball
networks, the most cost effective thing up to about (IIRC) $15/address is to
simply keep buying IPv4 addresses on the transfer market. Beyond that, it
actually becomes cheaper to simply go IPv6-only and accept the loss of
customers that won't accept that solution.

>>> On the other hand, there is The Cloud. I assume that aws and all of the
>>> other major vm farms have native v6 networks by now (?). I hooked up
>> You again assume facts not in evidence. Many cloud providers have done
>> IPv6. Rackspace stands out as exemplary in this regard. Linode has done
>> some good work in this space.
>> 
>> AWS stands out as a complete laggard in this area.
> 
> Heh... that's why I put all kinds of question marks and hedges :)
> That's disappointing about aws. On the other hand, if aws lights
> up v6, a huge amount of content will be v6 capable in one swell-foop.
> Which is a different problem of death by a thousand cuts of corpro
> data centers, and racked up servers in no-name cages.

Actually, if Amazon.com lit up IPv6, it would dramatically change the IPv6-only
client landscape. I believe they are the single largest IPv4-only content provider
remaining. IIRC from Lee's statistics, Amazon + any 2 other members of the
Alexa 100 would make it possible for 70% or more of web traffic to go over
IPv6.

>>> v6 support on linode in, oh, less than an hour for my site. Maybe part
>>> of this just evangelizing with the Cloud folks to get the word out that
>>> v6 is both supported *and* beneficial for your site? And it might give them
>>> a leg up with "legacy" web infrastructure data centers to lure them? "Oh,
>>> your corpro IT guys won't light up v6? let me show you how easy it is on
>>> $MEGACLOUD".
>> +1 -- I encourage people to seek providers that support IPv6.
>> 
> 
> Name. and. shame. At some level, some amount of bs is probably useful
> to scare the suits: "OMG, VZW'S PHONES SUPPORT V6, DO WE DO THAT????".
> Roll your eyes, but, well, remember they're suits.

I've been doing just that. Interestingly, I got a great deal of criticism for doing
so recently.

Owen