Ars Technica on IPv4 exhaustion

Thu Jun 19 11:13:41 UTC 2014

On Jun 18, 2014, at 4:02 PM, George, Wes <wesley.george at twcable.com> wrote:

> 
> On 6/18/14, 4:09 PM, "Owen DeLong" <owen at delong.com> wrote:
> 
>>> 
>>> Now, consider DVRs, BluRay players, Receiver/Amplifiers, Televisions,
>>> etc. where there are, currently, no IPv6 capable choices available to
>>> the best of my knowledge.
> 
> I think this thread exemplifies a problem among the IPv6 early adopters
> who like to whine about the rate of adoption: the best of (y)our knowledge
> is likely stale, because things are changing constantly. People are fond
> of trotting out the same arguments they’ve been making for years about who
> is at fault for IPv6’s weak adoption without actually verifying that the
> issue still exists or is as bad as last time they looked i.e. ISP
> deployment levels, level of support in equipment, etc. Not saying that all
> the problems are solved, or that they didn’t contribute to the issue in
> the past, but the “guy walks into a big box store” tale of woe might be a
> bit exaggerated now.

I actually tend to pay pretty close attention to the current state of these things.

Do you know of any of the above devices that are IPv6 capable? Nobody anywhere
earlier in the thread has offered one. Note I left gaming consoles out of the picture
because there is now one on the market which does support IPv6 and another which
I believe is likely to support it reasonably soon.

So while your argument has some legitimacy and I’ve seen many people do it,
I don’t think it quite applies to my statement.

> The problem now is that because IPv6 isn’t a feature most customers ask
> for, a product’s support for it (or lack thereof) is not consistently
> published in the vendor specs.

Sure, but that argument seems to support my idea that consumer education is
now necessary.

> For example: in ~September 2013 I was pleasantly surprised to find (via
> some colleagues observing it in the UI) that a number of current Sony TVs
> and BluRay players do in fact support IPv6, but at the time, it wasn’t
> listed as a feature on their model info on the site. Haven’t checked to
> see if it’s there now.

Interesting… I will look into that. FWIW, my conversations with Sony presages
support over their 800 number in December had them telling me that there
were no Sony products that supported IPv6 at this time, but that they were
considering putting it on their road map.

I will admit that I am lazy enough that once a vendor tells me they don’t support
something, I don’t dig too much deeper to try and prove them wrong.

> @sonysupportusa on twitter has been helpful when asked questions about
> specific models’ IPv6 support, but as I told them, there’s really no
> substitute for having the info on the site. It’s not complete *cough* PS4
> *cough* but they’re getting there.
> Similarly, Belkin’s home routers appear to support IPv6, but that doesn’t
> appear in the specs or features list on their site when I just checked it.

Yes, many of the home gateways are starting to have undocumented IPv6 support
and that situation is rapidly improving. Notice I also did not mention home
gateways as a “no vendor support” issue.

> I support a recommendation to consumer retailers to start requiring IPv6
> support in the stuff that they sell, but unfortunately I don’t have very
> good data on how large of a request that actually is.

In my experience, retailers will sell whatever flies off the shelves without
regard to whether it’s good for the consumer or not. As such, I believe it’s
more of a consumer education issue if we want to effect real change in behavior
at this point.

Owen