Re: New Linksys CPE, IPv6 ?

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Apr 1, 2010, at 2:25 PM, George Bonser wrote:

> > I beg to differ. I know several ISPs that have been quietly putting
> > quite
> > a bit of engineering resource behind IPv6. The public announcement
> > of residential IPv6 trials by Comcast was not the beginning of a
> > serious
> > commitment to IPv6 by Comcast, but, rather more towards the middle.
> > Comcast has had substantial engineering resources on IPv6 for
> > several years now.
>
> None of my transit providers currently offer native ipv6 where we are
> located.  One recent vendor said they could tunnel 6 over 4 but any
> network address blocks assigned to that network would change at some
> point in the future.  In other words, we could do v6 over 4 now but we
> would have to renumber later.
You can get a permanent IPv6 address from the tunnel brokers at
Hurricane or SIXXS.  You can get an IPv6 PI Block from an RIR
and route that via BGP over an HE tunnel.

(Some people get upset when I say this and don't mention I work
for HE.  I work for HE because I think the above free services are
cool and I like what they're doing with IPv6.)

> What I heard at a recent (within the past six months) conference was
> that "there is no customer demand for v6" so it isn't on the immediate
> needs list.  He said they had a lot of inquiries about v6, but to date
> not having native v6 wasn't a deal breaker with anyone.
I watched a vendor at one conference tell 20 people in a row that each
one of them was the only one asking for IPv6.  I mentioned to him that
he should have his short-term memory loss checked out by a physician.
At first he was confused.  When I pointed out what I had just seen him
do, he went from confused to embarrassed and admitted that it was
the party line from his marketing department and they knew IPv6
was important, but, didn't have a story to tell yet, so, they were trying
to spin for delay.

> So my instincts tell me that until not being native v6 capable IS a deal
> breaker with potential clients, it isn't really going to go on the front
> burner.  Many companies operate on the "it isn't a problem until it is a
> problem" model.
It _IS_ a deal breaker for some potential clients.  It _WILL_ be a
deal breaker for an increasingly large number of clients over the
next couple of years. I suspect that it will be less than 2 years before
you see every client insisting that they need IPv6 capability RIGHT
NOW.

Owen