--On Monday, 12 January, 2004 22:03 -0500 Noel Chiappa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
... IPv6 simply isn't going to get deployed "as a replacement for IPv4". It's just not enough better to make it worth switching - and you can flame all day about how NAT's are preventing deployment of new applications, but I can't run an SMTP or HTTP server in my house because my provider blocks incoming SMTP connections unless I pay for business service, and I personally find that a lot more problematic than the limitations of NAT.
IPv6's only hope of some modest level of deployment is, as the latter part of your message points out, as the substrate for some hot application(s). Somehow I doubt anything the IETF does or does not do is going to have any affect on whether or not that happens.
Noel, I'm slightly more optimistic along at least two other dimensions...
(1) As others have pointed out, the knowledge/skill level of a typical ISP seems to be on a rapid downslope with no end in sight. There are lots of ways in which that is not surprising, but the only realistic solution for someone who needs high reliability in that environment is multihoming, and there seems to be no hope for multihoming of small-scale networks with IPv4. The bad news, of course, is that the IPv6 multihoming ideas that don't cause immediate routing catastrophes seem to be about as ready/ mature/ deployed today as they were a decade ago, which is to say... Not. And that _is_ an IETF problem.
(2) The "no servers unless you pay business rates", and its close relative, "you don't get to run VPNs, or use your own email address rather than ours" nonsense you and many others are experiencing is sort of an old story. In a competitive market, it is also a pretty simple matter of economics:
* You don't "want" the server and address capability
enough to pay for it, because you consider it
excessively more expensive than the cheap "client"
service. I go ahead and pay for it, both because I have
a higher perception of need and because it is still lots
cheaper, and offers better performance most days, than a
dedicated DS0 from any plausible ISP I've been able to
find.
* The difference between those "business rates" and
whatever you are paying are mostly determined by a "what
they can get away with" mentality -- we know what the
marginal operational costs are. If those prices stay
high, it is either because there is no alternate
provider, or because there is (illegal) price-fixing
going on, or because no one sees a business opportunity
by operating a business service at a lower margin. Many
of us can remember when the solution to "no viable
Internet dialup service" was "go form a consortium with
a few friends"... perhaps it is time to do something
similar with DSL. Or maybe we would rather whine than
do something, perhaps because what we have been fed is "good enough".
And, of course, if enough of those sorts of things happen, it starts to put pressure on the address space, and that means IPv6 unless someone comes up with another viable alternative _really_ soon.
No, that doesn't make me a lot more optimistic. But some...
john
