[LINK] Fwd: Internet Society, World IPv6 Launch

[Martin Barry]

$quoted_author = "Robin Whittle" ;
> 
> The new normal????

It will be... hopefully... any day now. :-)

 
> The IPv6 Internet is a different network, a separate Internet, from the
> IPv4 Internet which everyone uses. 

We can get into hair splitting here but I'd hardly call IPv6 a "different
network". Done right, all equipment runs dual stack (for the time being) so
while v4 and v6 are incompatible they run over the same devices, the same
links, the same "series of tubes".


> Email is the only application which works transparently between them.

Not sure why you singled out email here. There is no reason any protocol or
application that currently uses v4 can't also use v6. Of course there are a
lot v4-isms baked into existing networks and applications but over time
these should be fixed.
 
I spent the evening last night adding IPv6 to everything I personally
control (mainly email and web sites) and it was all fairly painless and
"just works". If you have v6 you access via that, if not it falls back on
v4. You type the same URLs into your browser. You use the same email
addresses.


> An connection to the IPv4 Internet cannot be used to send or
> receive packets to or from a connection to the IPv6 Internet.

This is true, but that's why running dual stack is necessary for the
transition phase.


> IPv6 has supposedly been ready to go since RFC 2460 of December 1998, so
> it is 13 years old already.  It hasn't been adopted at a great rate
> since then.

Mainly due to no pressure on the vendors and networks so the cost of running
an IPv6 roll out project was hard to justify. With the exhaustion of v4 the
dynamics have changed.

 
> No matter how desirable it would be for IPv6 or any other approach to be
> a seamlessly backwards compatible upgrade from IPv4, no such thing
> exists.  No amount of talking up the difficulties of exhaustion of
> previously unused IPv4 address space (its not really IPv4 address space
> exhaustion), and no amount of wishful thinking "it becomes the new
> normal for the Internet" will change this.

Except it has to become the new normal. There is no other option at this
point. The cost of clawing back v4 addresses or working around insufficient
addresses is now higher than implementing v6.


> There is, for all practical purposes, for ordinary users (who need to be
> able to communicate with the hosts of all other users) one Internet -
> the IPv4 Internet.  To talk of these two networks as if they are both
> part of one Internet is misleading.

Well, in an ideal world the switch to dual stack should go unnoticed by the
end user. Unfortunately it may not be quite that way for everyone due to
bugs, old hardware whose firmware only supports v4 and other v4-isms.

But when it does come together, it really is "the same Internet", the same
web sites, the same emails, the same content. Whether you connected over v4
or v6 is irrelevant.

cheers
Marty