-----Original Message----- From: Geert Bosch [mailto:bosch@adacore.com]
Honestly, I can't quite see the big deal for home users. I'm using an Apple Airport Extreme, and setting it up with a IPv6 tunnel from
$150? That's a high-powered device compared to most home gateways.
HE was quite straightforward. Sure, I don't expect the average user to go through these steps, but they could easily be automated and rolled out as part of a firmware update (which is a routine matter
Yes, if the ISP provided the gateway. In many markets, they don't. Even if they start now, they would have to convince every customer to swap routers. And find the capital to pay for them. And have a system for updating the firmware and configurations of those devices. Or maybe the customer's going to have to buy a new gateway, when the one they have is still functioning, and might even be brand new.
the foreseeable future, people will have (NATed or not) IPv4 connectivity, so content providers are fine without IPv6.
Depends on the content. Large-scale NAT is bad for you if you depend on IP geo-location, or use anti-DDOS measures to limit number of connections or bits from a single IP address, or use IP address to report abuse, or blacklist IP addresses, or log the user's IP address, or try to enforce copyright by reporting IP addresses of violators, or rate-limit outbound data per address, or record unique visitors by IP address. It might also increase latency, but probably not so much that you'd panic. Except for the most basic, static of websites, content providers are going to prefer IPv6 over IPv4. I don't know whether web hosting companies will ever automatically dual-stack the PTA's website, but at some point it will be easier for them to warn all their customers and just do it, than to track which customers asked for IPv6 explicitly.
So, I think we'll transition to a situation where for some purposes (Skype, gaming, file-sharing) there will be a benefit for (tunneled) IPv6 compared to (NATed) IPv4, but for simple content providers there will still be no incentive to leave IPv4. . . . Again, it seems it is far easier to deal with the relatively homogeneous base of users for IPv6, compared to the fragmented and irregular market of content providers.
That sounds heterogenous: web-browsing-only users, and peer-to-peer-application-using users. Lee