At 3:30 PM +0000 5/27/07, Chris L. Morrow wrote:
what's going to change this in the near future?
At some point in the near future (e.g. 3 to 5 years), an ISP is going to be connecting some customers to the 'Internet' using just IPv6 addresses. It may not be your ISP doing it first, but it will very quickly go from just one ISP connecting IPv6-only customers to lots of ISP's doing IPv6-only customers. This changeover will not: 1) Fix the routing problem inherent with present locator/endpoint binding, nor 2) solve your favorite fib/rib/cam/convergence limit, nor 3) make the infrastructure inherently either easier to operate or more secure. One can argue with the date when this occurs, based on your particular address reclamation, reuse, and market expectations, but it's still going to happen since there's no other game in town. (*) At this point, ISP's should make solid plans for supplying customers with both IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity, even if the IPv6 connectivity is solely for their web servers and mail gateway. The priority is not getting customers to use IPv6, it's getting their public-facing servers IPv6 reachable in addition to IPv4. We've have to move efficiently towards readiness for the IPv6-only customer that will be told this is his only choice for Internet connectivity. While some customers may shop around or buy their way of that honor, that only works for a very short time until the answer is the same throughout the network. Actual behavior of ISPs will change as they realize even if they're not the first ISP to have to connect customers via IPv6-only, they will be face that situation in time. /John (*) Anyone advocating staying with IPv4 and relying on NAT and market demand as an alternative needs to consider the completely deaggregated address usage pattern (and routing table explosion) that results. P.S. I'm not at this NANOG, and it's probably too late to round up presentations, but what might be really helpful to most folks would be presentations which cover some or most aspects (getting transit, address planning, routing, firewall, DNS/DHCP) of dropping IPv6 into existing IPv4 service providers with destroying today's production services by accident. Real world experience is preferred over vendor thoughts, but at this point well-conceived plans would be helpful from any quarter. I would be happy to volunteer my services to recruit for presenters for future meetings; if anyone has an a thought for folks qualified to speak on such plans, drop me a note and I will encourage they find their way to the NANOG PC with the right enthusiasm.