Comments on: 5 ways your ISP’s failure to move to IPv6 could affect you

By: Bob

Bob — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 10:19:25 +0000

I’m surprised that a better reason of WHY IPV6 is now CRITICAL wasn’t given (for the benefit of lesser mortals than techies & geeks). Essentially we have now reached the point when NEW allocations of IPV4 addresses are impossible because the allocations have all run out! Now here is the critical piece of information which the ISPs have been ignoring for YEARS. ANY NEW IP address allocations that happen from here on out (pretty much anyway) will HAVE to be IPV6 or no address will be available at all. Anyone with such an IPV6 address ONLY for their web site, will be INACCESSIBLE by ANYONE at home on their IPV4 addressed PC as it simply will NOT be able to connect to that address. That is UNLESS their ISP has implemented a PROPER means of workaround. This means that HYPER URGENTLY, ALL ISPs will need to implement AT THE VERY VERY LEAST a means of providing FULL end to end IPV6 over IP4 (If you’re not technical, don’t worry – the ISPs are able to do this already BUT they HAVE to implement it – MOST HAVEN’T YET!!)

Fortunately anyone using Microsoft Windows XP or later , or Linux, or an Apple MAC already has the necessary ability built in to handle IPV6 addresses WITHOUT NECESSARILY having to buy a new router – although LONG term that would be best, no argument). Without the ISPs moving VERY quickly however, it is highly likely that some new web sites coming onto the Internet over the next year or two WILL BE INACCESSIBLE to ANYONE on IPV4 whose ISP has NOT implemented the necessary steps to handle it.

Bottom line is – KICK your ISP until it hurts (them) to get their commitment dates for IPV6 over IPV4 “tunnelling” (minimum) and full IPV6 implementation (which will include the latter) preferably and if they say “it’s not necessary yet” FIND ANOTHER ISP ASAP as the one you have is in denial mode and WILL cause you problems. The ISPs SHOULD have done this YEARS ago, but in fairness the major problem has actually been with the complete failure of the router manufacturers to get their heads out of the sand and fully implement IPV6 on their products MUCH sooner. I was working with guys who were discussing the move to IPV6 almost 20 years ago!

By: Build SEO

Build SEO — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 07:35:34 +0000

IPv6 sounds like it will be a good thing. I don’t see why ISPs wouldn’t switch.

By: christa

christa — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 06:53:20 +0000

Hi Megabeet,
Of-course the concept of IPv6 is really nice. It gives so many of combinations for providing a unique address to a node connected to network. Also, the count of combinations is so high that, the node addressing system can never be exhausted.

By: Will

Will — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 16:55:39 +0000

Stacey,

The horse has left the barn for sure. If there were a NAT standard released today that dictated the exact behavior of a NAT, it would still take vendors at least a year or two to implement it. I would imagine that effort would be better spent deploying native IPv6.

By: Stacey Higginbotham

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 13:05:53 +0000

Will, excellent additions to the article. But at this point even is there was a set NAT standard would ISPS deploy it, or has this horse left the barn?

By: megabeet

megabeet — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 04:16:47 +0000

IPv6, which allows for 128-bit numbering system is very nice!

By: Will

Will — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 01:05:00 +0000

Dave,

It would be in your best interest to hound Verizon but I’m not sure it will get you anywhere.

New router wise, I think it’s a pretty safe bet they will be doing DHCPv6-PD when they do finally deploy.

By: dave

dave — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 23:25:05 +0000

So should I be hounding Verizon for more info / a new router, or do I just sit back and wait for magic to happen? I’m still very confused. I’ll probably call Verizon and sound like a total dink.

By: Will

Will — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 22:34:01 +0000

6. State timeouts. Imagine you’re working on SSH and you’re idle for 5 or 10 minutes. Without fast keep alive packets, that session will drop. You actually see this a lot on mobile networks right now. Even if CGN/LSN implementations have the memory to keep long states, they can’t, as port exhaustion will be a huge problem.

It should be interesting to see how this pans out for AT&T U-Verse when they deploy CGN this June (read dslreports story Karl did earlier this week).

Geoff Huston did a great presentation last year at APNIC looking at why Teredo was so fail (eg. lots of breakage). The conclusion that he came across is NAT traversal and the fact there isn’t a RFC defined NAT implementation and every vendor has their own quirks that cause breakage. It’s a good read as to what failures might be like in an CGN environment. http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2011-04/teredo.html and http://www.potaroo.net/presentations/2011-02-23-dualstack.pdf