[LINK] IPv6 doomed

[Adrian Chadd]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008, Frank O'Connor wrote:
> Mmmm,
> 
> Good pick-up.
> 
> IPv6 has a number of other advantages over IPv4, other than address space.

Most of which don't really matter today.

The useful ones (eg mostly-pervasive IPSEC) were ported to IPv4.

The rest of the world widely deployed DHCP; autoconf sounds great in theory
but seems to be missing 10 + years of commercial DHCP development/features.

Noone has figured out how to "do" v6 inter-domain routing any way other
than the "v4 plus more bits" method.

I reckon networks will be doing traffic engineering the same way they do it now -
including the "break up our IP space into lots of smaller chunks and treat each
seperately" trick which deaggregates the space just like it is in IPv4.

Also, some friends of mine who work for ISPs in places like Finland note
that their commodity internet deployments involve "bridge" CPE equipment
which just pass the packets through like an ethernet switch. They assign
IPs and run DHCP on the ISP side. His notion of IPv6 is "assign users
individual IPs and potentially charge for the number of computers per house";
thats apparently their business model now and it works very well.

So effectively it -is- about the extra address space. Maybe some markets have
picked up the "v6 features" like mobile; there's fun anycast possibilities in
v6 which you're slightly more restricted to w/ v4, but noone has recently put
forward any kind of benefits re: ipv6.



Adrian