At our current rate of progress, IPv6 will be fully implemented on May 10, 2048

http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/07/at-our-current-rate-of-progress-ipv6-will-be-fully-implemented-on-may-10-2048/

by johnkoetsier • 13 years ago

40 72 13 years ago

jgrahamc• 13 years ago

There's more data in the blog post: http://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-day-usage-attacks-rise

ancarda• 13 years ago

My ISP hasn't given me an IPv6 address so I can't play with it easily so it remains a mystery for me. I managed to get a tunnel up and running so I could test & configure the IPv6 address my server had available for years but I hadn't setup.

What needs to happen for IPv6 to take off? CloudFlare is doing a lot by allowing automatic IPv6 for many websites - it makes it very easy to get a foothold in IPv6.

zanny• 13 years ago

What needs to happen for IPv6 to take off?

1. Consumer grade routing hardware that always supports ipv6 out of the box.

2. ISPs transitioning into supplying both an ipv4 and ipv6 address to households.

3. Major network backbone services (google, amazon, etc) transition to both ipv4 and ipv6.

4. Once a majority of the critical network infrastructure is available on both, ISPs need to start dropping ipv4 addresses from customers, preferrably from new customers.

5. Slowly depreciate ipv4 by using a ISP provided ipv4 tunnel service for a while for those that still need to access the ipv4 web.

Basically, it requires most of the work be done on the backs of ISPs. In the US at least, the ISP business is an oligopoly of cable tv and Hollywood and will resist ipv6 because it enables more peer to peer trafficking and open communication over the Internet.

bdb• 13 years ago

Actually, you'd be surprised -- Comcast is leading the charge on the residential IPv6 front in the US, and Time Warner Cable isn't too far behind. Verizon, the largest carrier in the US not owned by a content company (by my back-of-napkin math), has been slower in deployment of IPv6, by contrast. (OTOH, since IPv6 is critical to LTE deployment, VZW et al have been much quicker on the uptake.)

I actually think that the content hosting folks are behind the curve here. Amazon is one of the biggest hold-outs; their IPv6 rollout has thus far been a total joke. No IPv6 for Cloudfront? No IPv6 glue for Route53 authoritative nameservers? No IPv6 on VPC, barely on EC2 at all, etc., etc. From what I've heard, the management at Amazon doesn't really care about the network behind their infrastructure; instead of investing in building a backbone that could do a better job supporting this kind of stuff -- and all kinds of inter-region applications which would be useful -- they want pretend the network doesn't exist and that nothing needs to change. It's too bad. I think we'd see more IPv6 usage if Amazon would get their act together.

magg• 13 years ago

in the meantime, there are many IPv6/IPv4 transition mechanisms to help fight this, like NAT64: https://github.com/NICMx/NAT64

tptacek25• 13 years ago

Good. IPv6 is a failed experiment. It's time to reconsider the IP service model. The future of the Internet belongs to startups, not to the IETF.

My hope is that by 2020, IP will have approximately the same importance to the global connectivity fabric that Ethernet has today; it'll be a particularly flexible next-hop technology, and we'll be routing something more clever than IP on top of it.

jerf2• 13 years ago

It's already 2013, so that's an aggressive schedule; it seems to imply the next-hop tech must already exist. Did you have something in mind?

(Tone: Honest question. I'm curious.)

ghshephard2• 13 years ago

There is no candidate to replace IP for global routing connectivity in the next 20 years. I'll wager a long-bet at 10 to 1 odds up to $1,000 (you win $10,000) for anybody who thinks differently.

nknighthb8• 13 years ago

Thomas always says this whenever IPv6 comes up. He wants some sort of "overlay" network. He's ambiguous on what this would look like, why it would be better than IPv6, and why IPv4 will suffice as its underlying protocol.

My conclusion is that his application-level networking experience has fooled him into thinking he knows more than he does about actual network architecture, management, and performance issues. Or maybe he doesn't realize the issues even exist.

tptacek25• 13 years ago

Since I'm randomly coining terms here, let me try to be clearer.

When I talk about next-hop transport, I mean, "the mechanism by which one node might connect to one or more other nodes in the topology". As soon as those hops form a connected graph --- a very easy problem to solve when your connection fabric is datagram delivery on IP --- routing over the topology is a Solved Problem. Think of what I mean by "next hop transport" as "the lowest common denominator of connectivity that allows any 2 hosts in the world, possibly by means of some number of intermediate hops, to talk to each other".

Then, to be clear about what I'm saying --- though this is probably not how you'd design such a system in the real word, imagine we did this:

* Stopped fussing about IPv6 (and IP multicast, although we've already stopped fussing about that).

* Took IRC

* Made it 8 bit clean and capable of delivering much larger messages.

* Gave it a real routing protocol so that it could express biconnected graphs.

* Built applications on top of that.

That system would provide a service model that would be compatible with a superset of all Internet applications today --- it would allow point-to-multipoint applications along with point-to-point applications, it would admit to client-server, it could express caching and CDN topologies, and it would admit to logical addressing that would enable you to attach to lots of different endpoints on the network with the same, static address, in the same way as I can talk to you now on HN as "tptacek" despite the fact that my IP address is temporarily owned by GoGo Inflight.

ghshephard2• 13 years ago

Well, we have 12 millions+ nodes happily communicating every day via IPv6 that suggests IPv6 is a pretty successful "experiment."

I know you meant to say, "Failed experiment for consumer web connectivity" - but, I think it's important to remember that IPv6 has some very successful niches. Mesh networks, Smart Grids, anything with large scale flexible address and routing requirements has been using IPv6 very successfully for at least 5+ years now.

The only real competition IPv6 has over the next 20 years for global routing dominance though, is, ironically, IPv4.

The main reason is that all the Autonomous Systems have to have some common language to communicate, and share routing updates, and, for better or worse, IP is the "English" of network engineers when it comes to internetwork routing.

tptacek25• 13 years ago

I agree: IPv4 is going to be a fierce competitor for the slot that IPv4 currently occupies and IPv6 hopes to occupy. The point of an overlay design is to moot the point of which one wins, by "pushing them down" the stack and building something new on top of them.

Frame Relay is a good example of what this design looks like: a "layer 2" technology with "layer 3" features (Frame had aspirations to be a layer 3 technology) that only network operators care about, because no Frame user ever expected global all-points connectivity to be provided by Frame.

IPvX should be demoted to Frame Relay status: a very flexible way of providing point-to-point connectivity between nodes that will provide global connectivity through routing done at a higher layer.

gypsobelum• 13 years ago

The future of the Internet belongs to startups

It looks like you went down the front page desperately looking for any non-NSA related articles to comment on, but rest assured the rest of us have been reading them and your boy Obama and his NSA have just blown the SaaS web startup industry out of the water. No web startup has a chance in hell of selling services to anybody outside the USA now (or anybody inside the USA with half a brain).

gverri• 13 years ago

Oh you are so wrong... People forget things pretty fast.

tptacek25• 13 years ago

I like how a bunch of people obviously voted this comment back up. (It went light grey, then black again an hour later).

I'm not like, mad or anything about it; it's a self-evident kind of comment.

chc• 13 years ago

I'm a little confused as to what you're suggesting here. The best interpretation I can find is that you think IP will be replaced by a mish-mash of different network operators' ad hoc standards. But that hardly seems like something to hope for.

wmf5• 13 years ago

Some have suggested that instead of IPv6, everything will be tunneled over HTTP (or perhaps WebSocket or WebRTC) over multiple layers of IPv4 NAT.

tptacek25• 13 years ago

I think network operators should have about as much say in what service models Internet protocols should support as the telephone companies do about what apps run on Android and iOS.

I think large open source projects (like BitTorrent) and startups should start thinking about applications that build their own connectivity layer on top of IP, and that don't assume any two nodes will have direct IP connectivity. Obviously, this is already true of the Internet we use today, because a huge percentage of hosts don't expose direct connectivity for reasons of security (not addressing scarcity --- there are companies sitting on /16s that static-address every desktop, but allow none of them direct Internet connectivity).

If you believe TorrentFreak, BitTorrent accounts for double digit percentage points of all Internet traffic. BitTorrent is an overlay design (albeit not one that reliably avoids the need for direct point-to-point connectivity, unlike the Gnutella overlay). We already know designs like this are tenable. I'm saying we should explore them further as alternatives to an Internet design controlled by giant telecoms.

sliverstorm6• 13 years ago

I'm not sure how to read your comment. Are you arguing that we can somehow make the internet work better by having everyone use whatever routing protocol they please, and throwing standards out the window?

tptacek25• 13 years ago

Yes!

(I think we could make the Internet work better by throwing some standards out the window. Not all of them.)

jiggy20113• 13 years ago

Build the internet on top of some startup that decides to "pivot" and change their TOS and API every few months.

No thanks.

tptacek25• 13 years ago

What percentage of all Internet traffic is already carried over overlay networks of some sort? You need to account for all of BitTorrent and all of Skype, both of which are overlay designs. It is also worth noting that SMTP is an application overlay design; you just don't notice it because in its modern configuration everyone is one hop away from each other.

wmf5• 13 years ago

More likely that each startup cobbles together their own Internet to build their app on. (This muck also creates a nice barrier to entry against other startups.)

nknighthb8• 13 years ago

Prince is hoping that the growth will not be steady-state but exponential, accelerating through the adoption curve. Even if that happens, however, CloudFlare predicts that full IPv6 adoption would take seven years, until January 2020.
Not impressive.

Perhaps not impressive, but pretty much as-expected. RFC 2460 was finalized December 1998. I'm not sure why a 20-year +/- deployment process should surprise anyone for what is, ultimately, a telecom standard, one built before it was needed because we knew it would be.

Remember, APNIC is the first to hit its last /8 and only did so in 2011, and due to their exhaustion policy, hasn't exhausted that last /8 yet. Other regions are in better shape.

As we've always known, the big push will come when the IPv4 supply dwindles so low that it becomes reasonably impossible to accomodate new endpoints.

Qantourisc• 13 years ago

Still waiting on my ISP. I'd love to implement IPv6 on my servers, but no way to test it atm. (unless using tunnels an alike) Edit: Just rechecked at my provider ... they are rolling it out this year ... I'm actually surprised.

At our current rate of progress, IPv6 will be fully implemented on May 10, 2048

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