Mike wrote:
> My question might take this thread else where's, why hasn't the internet
> community adopted ipv6?
>
> ipv6 wasn't it to replace ipv6?
>
> And what are the pros vs cons to using internal ipv6 on ones net work?
Well, that all depends on what you mean by "adopted," "internet
community," and, for that matter, "hasn't." :-)
If you mean, why isn't IPv6 available from every ISP, why isn't every
web site served in IPv6, never mind IPv6 only, etc., etc., then the
answer boils down to a combination of the chicken and egg problem and
the lack of financial incentives, with a very uneven application
depending on where you are. Mobile phone networks in China and
residential cable service in the U.S. aren't in the same place in
regards to IPv6.... There's no real incentive for most content
providers to provide IPv6 service (particularly in N. America and
Europe), as it's likely to perform less well (islands of IPv6 with
connecting tunnels here and there running on stacks that haven't been
tuned as finely...it's just not the same), and there's nobody they care
about screaming about how they have IPv6 only. Consumers don't care,
because they can get everywhere they want with IPv4. ISPs don't care,
because the consumers and content providers don't care. More or less.
(Well, that and early content provider adopters of IPv6 found that they
were spending entirely too much time explaining to Windows XP users that
if you turned IPv6 on in Windows, but had no IPv6 connectivity to the
world, that things would work only in a slow
and timeouty fashion.)
I recently read a timeline and analysis by an early adopter ISP, which
clearly showed that no payback, so far, for their investment. Build it
and they will come clearly didn't apply. On the other hand, I suspect
they'll be ahead of the game once there's a big crunching noise heard as
the RIRs squabble over the last /8 of unused IPv4 address space. :-)
But the crunching sound is coming, the plans I've heard bandied about
for using mid-network NATing to keep IPv4 going make me nauseous, and I
certainly hope things pick up in IPv6 land.
Meanwhile, I believe that Google has promised that this time they'll
keep http://ipv6.google.com/ running. (And the logo dances; the turtle
must have gone to their heads.... ;-)
Pros: You'll be ahead of the game. Even now you can easily get a /48
of real, routable addresses to use on your network.
Cons: You'll probably have trouble getting IPv6 service other than via
some tunneling service. Unless you're interested in the technology for
its own sake, there's nothing much you can do with it that you can't do
with less bother using IPv4.
--Jon Radel
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