If P2P became IPV6, and therefore universally endpoint addressable, and therefore seeded by every download, as opposed to solely seeded by those who have enough clue to configure the inbound ports through their IPV4 NAT, then the bandwidth problem should solve itself, at least for the widely popular downloads. Assuming every downloader could also seed, for the popular stuff, the traffic would be primarily local, which is not where the bottleneck is in most cases. Of course, this is assuming that the reason the SPs are opposed to P2P isn't related to their desire to derive revenue from the content that is non-ratable if delivered over P2P, but that is a different topic.
-----Original Message----- From: Nathan Ward [mailto:nanog@daork.net] Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2008 3:33 PM To: Niall Donegan Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: spurring transition to ipv6 -- make it faster
On 15/10/2008, at 8:56 AM, Niall Donegan wrote:
Scott Doty wrote:
After all, if most p2p traffic is v4, prioritizing ipv6 (as a general concept) should improve the user experience.
How long do you think it will take for the P2P software authors to transition over to IPv6? I'll bet that P2P users will be a lot more likely to use IPv6 over Aunt May checking her email once a day.
Sorry, it happened already.
Presentation I gave at APNIC26 on the subject: http://www.apnic.net/meetings/26/program/ipv6/ward-ipv6-stats.pdf
A Teredo/6to4 relay in Finland operated by CSC/FUNET: http://www.braintrust.co.nz/temp/csc-funet-teredo-6to4.png
Note the massive increase of traffic. It ramps up the *day* uTorrent 1.8 came out.
I have long said: 1) IPv4 will continue to exist for web/email/etc. servers. 2) When ISPs run out of IPv4 space and start NATing their customers, IPv6 will become the new way to do applications that require end-to- end. This is *why* Teredo exists - so Microsoft applications that require end-to-end can get it, without having to implement a NAT traversal stack in each and every app. Teredo is now available on most OSes. 3) (2) is clearly happening already, with bit torrent applications. It's an easy way to do NAT traversal for free. 4) When IPv6 is widely enough supported, then maybe someone will run a web/email/etc. server on IPv6 only.
There is a lot of work to attempt to keep IPv4 end-to-end alive when SP-NAT happens. Personally, I think attempting to prolong IPv4 end-to- end is a waste of time when IPv6 does it already, and all these proposals require applications to be updated to support dynamic ports and things. If you're updating the application, just make it support IPv6. For most applications this is trivial.
-- Nathan Ward