What's so bad about IPv6? [LWN.net]

What's so bad about IPv6?

Posted Jan 26, 2011 18:00 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: What's so bad about IPv6? by hmh
Parent article: LCA: IP address exhaustion and the end of the open net

Back in 2003 I was testing Cisco's hardware (as much as the IPv4 version is) IPv6 multicast snooping and routing. We were playing different full-rate video streams over a large multi-site IP network with maybe a dozen switch clusters. Without multicast, this was a quagmire (each person viewing incrementally increases the bandwidth needed at pinch points, until performance becomes excruciating) and without IPv6 it requires lots of management because the (Class D in this case) addresses were scarce and must be handled very carefully. With both it was a joy.

Granted, we found several nasty bugs and spent long evenings on transatlantic telephone calls getting their engineers to reproduce them. But that was now almost EIGHT YEARS AGO. This stuff was available for production users when ISPs were buying the gear that's now dusty and old and being thrown out. But they didn't buy it, because less capable gear is always cheaper.

In some way it's our fault as consumers. Most ISPs live on razor thin margins. If everybody was happily paying 50% more for Internet access there'd be money to buy anything the ISP's engineers could want, have real coffee in the DC quiet area, and still buy the Chairman a yacht. But it's a cut-throat business, only specialist players can afford to charge more and deliver better service.

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What's so bad about IPv6?

Posted Jan 26, 2011 19:54 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

> In some way it's our fault as consumers. Most ISPs live on razor thin
> margins. If everybody was happily paying 50% more for Internet access
> there'd be money to buy anything the ISP's engineers could want, have real
> coffee in the DC quiet area, and still buy the Chairman a yacht. But it's
> a cut-throat business, only specialist players can afford to charge more
> and deliver better service.

Our fault as consumers? That's outrageous.

Around here, people routinely get charged $50 a month by Comcast for mediocre internet service. And if Comcast has a technical problem, that requires a technician to solve, they will charge you for the time!

The real problem here is that the interests of the ISPs are not aligned with those of consumers. Consumer interests are best served by open markets and open standards. ISP interests are best served by creating high barriers to entry, locking in consumers, and offering the minimum acceptable level of service.

Nearly every place in the US has either a local ISP monopoly or duopoly. Comcast or AT&T are your choices. They're not even bothering to pretend that the different parts of AT&T are independent any more. It's not a free market, it's a monopoly. And they know how to milk it.