This is not a whole solution, true.

Posted Jan 31, 2011 12:19 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Their cost/benefit analysis was all wrong. by dlang
Parent article: LCA: IP address exhaustion and the end of the open net

the problem with your 'solution' being new users is that the new users still want to talk to everything on the existing IPv4 Internet, and for that a globally routed IPv6 address does them no good.

Sure, but this is the first step. There are many ways to exploit even simple ubiquitous point-to-point connectivity between two points you control. Think remote desktop, remote play, access to your home video library, etc. Once most people have IPv6 access (used for point-to-point connections mostly) you can start to use it to build P2Ps on top, etc. But this plan falls apart because IPv6 is about the worst technology for the point-to-point connectivity in today's internet. Different forms of VPN, SSL tunnels, etc are much better for that.

they may get by with their ISPs doing NAT64, but if each ISP is doing NAT64 before the traffic leaves that ISP, and the ISPs do not want the users to be running servers (see their various terms of service if you doubt this), then why should the ISPs bother to expose and route the underlying IPv6 addresses instead of just having everything go through the NAT64 boxes?

Forget about ISPs already! Any transition plan which starts with "ISPs must do ..." is doomed from the onset. The most you can expect from them is indifference. Some of them will actively fight IPv6 but most of them will just ignore it's existence when they discuss different plans. ISPs will join when there will be active IPv6 community and people will actively demand IPv6 - not before.

This is not a whole solution, true.

Posted Jan 31, 2011 22:25 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

but there is a catch 22 here:

why would anyone demand IPv6 until there are any IPv6-only resources?

and why would anyone ever willingly deploy an IPv6-only resource if the vast majority of users will not be able to reach it?

until something breaks this stalemate how will IPv6 gain any traction?

Have you actually read what I wrote?

Posted Feb 1, 2011 15:18 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

why would anyone demand IPv6 until there are any IPv6-only resources?

Have you actually read what I wrote? IPv6 promised "end-to-end connectivity". You can use end-to-end connectivity for a lot of things besides accessing public IPv6-only resources. You can access your own resources: console in your living room, NAS with your collection of MP3s and videos, etc.

Sadly IPv6 in it's current form can not be used for this: there are no simple way to connect to IPv6 network from behind multilevel stateful NAT (cheapest and the most common version of Internet access available). Yes, you can use, for example, stunnel to reach some kind of bastion host and use said bastion host to enable access to IPv6... but why will you do that? If you've connected your console or NAS with bastion host you can as well just connect directly to the bastion host without adding IPv6 to the mix!

and why would anyone ever willingly deploy an IPv6-only resource if the vast majority of users will not be able to reach it?

This is correct question - and the answer is simple: it's Ok if the resource is intrinsically designed to be only accessible by very limited number of users. I've shown some examples above, but you can invent many other similar uses. Some of them will not use IPv6 for that anyway (for example for a lot of organizations it's better to deploy their own VPN because it's more secure), but some of them may do. For it to be useful you need some simple way of obtaining connection to IPv6 network - and currently all simple ways assume that ISP will do that. And ISPs are the last persons to participate in such plan.

until something breaks this stalemate how will IPv6 gain any traction?

Poorly are we can see.