# Bring out your crystal ball: Some IPv6 Questions



## tonyg (Dec 27, 2013)

What will need to happen to force people into IPv6? Will it have to wait until one of the big internet player rolls out an IPv6 only site?

How far into the future do you forsee a good size shift towards IPv6?

The reason I am asking is that I have a few business/company VPS's I don't want to get into a last minute struggle to get them running  properly with the new addres space. Let me clarify, I have IPv6 availablity but they are presently only configured for IPv4.

Tony


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## tchen (Dec 27, 2013)

No one wants to roll out a IPv6 only site as that'd be suicide from a business standpoint.  The network is the slow point of adoption here, and given that AT&T, Akamai, Amazon, and T-mobile sucked up a whole bunch in the last year, it's still going to be a while.  I don't think there's anything to worry as the lead time for them to switch to dual-band is far longer than you can get a sysop to setup IPv6 for a single VPS.


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## telephone (Dec 27, 2013)

tonyg said:


> What will need to happen to force people into IPv6? Will it have to wait until one of the big internet player rolls out an IPv6 only site?



It will take all ISPs (globally) implementing IPv6 to force people into using it. Until then it'd be suicide to implement IPv6 only, as you'd lose a large portion of clientèle... At most, the majority of sites will start implementing dual stacks (IPv4/IPv6).


To make it clear, the demand for IPv4 will never cease to exist, and for the next 10+ years it will be the main implementation.



tonyg said:


> How far into the future do you forsee a good size shift towards IPv6?



Hmm, that depends on the country. In a lot of countries the infrastructure is owned by a monopoly; unless that provider decides to implement IPv6, none of the others will.


I'd say 10 years on a global scale (ISPs).


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## cubixcloud (Dec 27, 2013)

tonyg said:


> What will need to happen to force people into IPv6? Will it have to wait until one of the big internet player rolls out an IPv6 only site?


All content providers would need to roll IPv6 and start turning down IPv4. If this happens, I can almost bet you that the eyeball networks would move faster on IPv6. Then you would have a massive rush to purchase newer end user routers/wireless gateways that support IPv6 if not already. Most manufacturers released firmware updates that did support some IPv6 in 2009 but not many features. It's gotten better though.

 





tonyg said:


> How far into the future do you forsee a good size shift towards IPv6?



If I had to guess and with the IPv6 table growing and seeing more IPv6 traffic I would say 3 to 5 years and that's being optimistic. Even if you are a IPv4 only you can setup relays to help.




tonyg said:


> The reason I am asking is that I have a few business/company VPS's I don't want to get into a last minute struggle to get them running  properly with the new addres space. Let me clarify, I have IPv6 availablity but they are presently only configured for IPv4.




Then I suggest you NOT wait and dual-stack immediately. If providers would push dual-stacking then it would help a whole lot and more content would be available over IPv6. Then all that is left is the eyeball networks at that point.


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## maounique (Dec 27, 2013)

I am more optimistic. The IPv4 mafia will raise prices much sooner than an actual depletion will occur and it will gradually convince people to at least add ipv6 to be ready.

I think in 5 years will no longer be suicide to launch IPv6 only sites as most people will at least be able to use portals and free proxies to visit them, there will be free software to route over those if necessary so everyone will be able to use the IPv6 only sites. Some people will still be looking down to those sites, hey, they cant afford ipv4 how trustworthy are these... As many people today do not care for a free domain, for example many will not care for an ipv6 only site and the automatic routing to access ipv6 only sites from ipv4 only providers will make that transparent most of the time. And that is the only problem there will be, accessing IPv6 only sites from IPv4 only ISP. Once that solved with many free gateways to IPv6, everything is solved, barring slomewhat slower access.


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## cubixcloud (Dec 27, 2013)

@Mao you are right. The price for IPv4 will continue to rise.


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## maounique (Dec 28, 2013)

Yes, and it is only a question of time before last mile ISPs will add offers for ipv6 only. That will happen in the next 2 years on a large enough scale to matter, i think, then content providers will start thinking about it.


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## ocitysolutions (Dec 28, 2013)

Consumer ISPs like Verizon FiOS enabling the IPv6 support that is built into their provided home routers would undoubtedly start encouraging hosts to make IPv6 more readily available.

FiOS provides routers to all internet customers that have IPv6 support, they just disable it...


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## GIANT_CRAB (Dec 28, 2013)

Since Google forced Google Plus into Youtube for the better, I bet Google will force everyone to start using IPv6 or they won't be able to access their gmail, youtube, google search and many more.


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## drmike (Dec 28, 2013)

IPV6 transition is already under way. It will be a dual stack IPV4/IPV6 solution along with gatewaying from one to the other.

Considering the finite IPV4 resources and obvious cost/shortage of IPV4, I see little legitimate reasoning to adhere to single IPV4 stack.

When will IPV6 become common talk among the masses? Well, 2016-17 I guess.


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## jebat_ks (Dec 28, 2013)

drmike said:


> When will IPV6 become common talk among the masses? Well, 2016-17 I guess.


Sounds about right according to most ISP in my countries, they begin dual stack deployment earlier this year and predict that by 2017 ipv6 will surpassed ipv4 in term of adoption & traffic.


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## joepie91 (Dec 28, 2013)

tonyg said:


> What will need to happen to force people into IPv6?


Have IP registries refuse to hand out any further IPv4 ranges to organizations that do not have IPv6 rolled out network-wide.


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## nunim (Dec 28, 2013)

joepie91 said:


> Have IP registries refuse to hand out any further IPv4 ranges to organizations that do not have IPv6 rolled out network-wide.


That would destroy the ColoCrossing business model.


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## Kris (Dec 28, 2013)

nunim said:


> That would destroy the ColoCrossing business model.


Here I thought unloading VPS nodes with 100+ IPs for $120/month through a 'reseller' was a sound business model. It's almost like they're... hoarding IPs! 

(Flashback to pre-lucifer run LET when I said something was odd when *140k IPs* were under their name. I only started tracking their usage after they requested seven /24's under HVH's name when a /25 was requested. Someone from BlueVM got an HVH IP. )

Only took 400,000 IPs and a university paper for people to realize. With the /14 issued, they really don't give seem to give a crap at this point, as the cat's out of the bag. 

It's cute they got an IPv6 subnet allocated, I wonder how many years until that will route (2607:9D00)


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## ocitysolutions (Dec 29, 2013)

CC has five years to make 50 IPv6 assignments via SWIP. Who will be lucky enough to be one of them?

I personally think that if ARIN really wanted IPv6 to start being more available they would require ISPs to make more assignments or in less years.


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## joepie91 (Dec 29, 2013)

nunim said:


> That would destroy the ColoCrossing business model.


That's a feature, not a bug


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## scv (Dec 30, 2013)

You're gonna see dual stack for another decade minimum. IPv6 has been "good to go" for some time now but the sheer amount of equipment that doesn't support it is going to prevent total migration. Even if you take that out of the picture, the simplicity of an IPv4 setup and the long lifespan of some networks is going to push dual stack well into the future, just with more NAT.


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## BuyCPanel-Kevin (Dec 31, 2013)

I don't see IPv6 becoming relevant for another 10 years at least, the number of computers in the world is simply not increasing at a rapid enough pace for IPv6 to be legitimate. (I believe something like everyone on earth could have a million computers and we would still have enough IPv4 addresses to go around) I think for a convergence to happen we would need for someone huge (Google/Facebook) to start pushing for it


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## zzrok (Dec 31, 2013)

BuyCPanel-Kevin said:


> (I believe something like everyone on earth could have a million computers and we would still have enough IPv4 addresses to go around)


Umm... no.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion.  4.3 billion addresses.  You're thinking of IPv6.


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## joepie91 (Dec 31, 2013)

BuyCPanel-Kevin said:


> I don't see IPv6 becoming relevant for another 10 years at least, the number of computers in the world is simply not increasing at a rapid enough pace for IPv6 to be legitimate. (I believe something like everyone on earth could have a million computers and we would still have enough IPv4 addresses to go around) I think for a convergence to happen we would need for someone huge (Google/Facebook) to start pushing for it


Uhm....

I'm sure that's why we've been stuck with NAT for the past 10 years.


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## willie (Dec 31, 2013)

DJB wrote this around 10 years(?) ago and it seems to have predicted later events almost perfectly:

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html


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## wlanboy (Jan 1, 2014)

ARIN, etc can force their clients to implement IPv6 if they would force everyone who wants to keep IPv4 addresses to use at least the same number of subnets for IPv6.

But this is only one side of the medal.

The ones providing the internet access to the consumers don't need anyone and cannot be forced to do anything (ok maybe goverment).

As long as the consumers cannot use ipv6 nativly the whole IPv6 discussion is useless.


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