On 10/7/15 7:00 AM, Mark Andrews wrote:
I don't see anyone wishing it went differnetly. I see someone pointing out the reality that lots of ISP's are way too late to delivering IPv6. *Every* ISP should have been planning to deliver IPv6 by the time the first RIR ran out of IPv4 addresses.
Look, I'm as much a supporter of delivering IPv6 as anyone. I've had IPv6 enabled on my home network (and the small data center I run in my garage) for over a decade now. In 2004, I made sure that IPv6 was fully supported in the peer-to-peer stack I developed and that eventually became RFC 7016. And for the last 5 years I've been pushing for IPv6 support in the product I work on for my employer.
But the reality is that there's a whole lot of small and medium-sized ISPs run by fine, upstanding individuals serving their communities -- even in and around the San Francisco Bay Area -- that have either no or very limited (tunnels only) support for IPv6. That's the reality of the transition. And threatening these folks with the attorney general isn't the way to get them to adopt IPv6, nor is shaming them. They will add IPv6 support when it is easy to do, when their staff has the time, and when the economics make sense.
Meanwhile we have app developers trying to use cloud platforms that don't support IPv6 well (or at all), writing code while sitting in offices that don't have IPv6 service due either to their ISP or their internal IT department... and so there's another reason ISPs need to keep concentrating on IPv4 as their first priority.
And so, in the current actual Internet, not some hypothetical one, if you want your website to be seen, you get it an IPv4 address. And with IPv4 going for $6-$8 each and it being possible to support hundreds or thousands of websites on a single IPv4 address, there's really no excuse.
Will this be different in the future? I sure hope so. But we're not there yet.
Matthew Kaufman
