Hi folks,
I have followed the topic over the week and it is definitely an interesting topic.
I am working for a financial company, we are not an ISP at all but our business is directly tied to IP and IT technologies...
I have to admit that IPv6 is definitely something that appears in our risk matrix and change management plans; anyway we are very sad to see that some of our main providers (Colt and Interoute to not name any of them) are as of today unable to provide us IPv6 services.
The worst is that the latest time we have asked them, not so far actually: September 2008, they were both not unable to give any precision of the subject. Colt seemed to be the most exceeded and they were likely to say that IPv6 does not appear anywhere in their documentations / plans, while Interoute told us they had a taskforce for this topic (if I remember right).
I definitely had the feeling that they were telling us something like "hey guys, you are a bit too much idealistic to imagine IPv6 to be in place and widely used before the year 2010" (like if we were talking about teleportation to become reality in like 10 years).
I personally think that the IPv6 deployment is the responsibility of both service providers (not ISP only!) and end users. As soon as big companies (any sort of) will start providing services over both V4 and V6, users V6 enabled will follow without to even notice. On the ISP side, a smooth switch could be made by offering directly nowadays V6-ready devices for Cable/DSL services.
As for most users, I don't think they should have to change their computers as soon as they are V6 enabled, I imagine more LANs to be unchanged and theirs routers should be the gateway between V4 LAN's and Inet V6 world.
As for older computers that does not support V6, that will be like legacy petrol "Super Plus" situation, people will have to think & do necessary changes on their own.
Just my 2 cents thoughts..
Cheers.
Gregory
--- Gregory Agerba IT Operations Manager MIG Investments SA 14, Route des Gouttes d'Or 2008 Neuchâtel Switzerland Phone +41 32 722 86 02
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De: swinog-bounces@lists.swinog.ch de la part de Stanislav Sinyagin Date: sam. 28.02.2009 23:53 À: swinog@swinog.ch Objet : Re: [swinog] IPV6 Go (lazy providers)
----- Original Message ----
You would be surprised how many of the "plastic boxes" support IPv6 today or can be made to support it with a simple software update. It might not be widely advertized yet.
I played around with Embedded Linux on such devices, and I can tell two things:
-- vast majority of those boxes are too limited in flash and RAM size: 4MB flash on a router is very common, sometimes it's even 2MB. 16MB RAM is common, and rarely there's 32MB.
What you can fit into 2MB flash is Linux kernel 2.4.x, plus some very limited number of libraries, daemons and utilities. Also, even the newest 2.6.x kernel is permanently popping up with ipv6 improvements and bugfixes. It is physically impossible to run a 2.6.x Linux system from 2MB flash. You can, however, run it from 4MB, and there's even some room for ipv6. The dd-wrt software for Linksys routers seems to support it, but I didn't test it.
Some of those devices are hardware-fixed to little endian architecture, even if the CPU allows running either BE or LE (bit noth both at the same time). In LE architectures, you have to swap bytes in every packet header in order to get the IP address or TCP port number. This slows down ipv6 processing significantly, as there are many more bytes to swap.
-- as I wrote before, none of the consumer electronics vendors has given any hint of v6 compatibility on any box that I looked at in mediamarkt. Try searching for ipv6 at brack.ch or digitec.ch - you will find as many devices there. When there's demand, the vendors will come up with new hardware, and the old one will be obsolete. Cool, geeks will have tons of free hardware to play with :-)
Remember this discussion is about OFFERING IPv6. Not REQUIRING IPv6. IPv4 will stay here for quite some time but an upgrade path has to be established. This is a long term transition and the IPv6 standards have lots of things in them to allow a smooth transition. And the first steps are the backbones. Today all the good ones have IPv6 in the core. And if not, you can use IPv4/IPv6 tunnels. Mainstream operating systems all have IPv6 support built in. The access link is now the last hurdle. The standards are there. You just have to plan and execute.
I thought we discussed this already. OFFERING requires significant investments at the ISP side. They will not go for it before there's a pressure, either from technology or from the customers. Consider a big enough ISP with, say, 500 routers. Apart from hardware costs, the whole planning, testing, and deployment is at the level of 2-3 thousand man-hours, or at the level of ~500k CHF. And that's only the core infrastructure. Taking ipv6 to the end user, be it Docsis or xDSL, is even more expensive, because you need to upgrade all the user-reated components, such as provisioning system, call center, billing, CPE hardware and software, etc. Are you ready to spend few hundred thousand now on something that will bring the new customers in 2014?
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