James G. Sack (jim) wrote:
Assuming that with IPv6, there is no (heh: or at least, less) need to be
stingy with IPs,
_and_ assuming that ISPs will still assign IPs, ..
(please attack the assumptions!)
..then, what size range of IPs could an end-user expect to get?
Who knows. It is really at the discretion of the provider. But I suspect
users will be able to get as many as they want because there are so many
available. They are there for the asking.
Hmmm, is IPv6 routing qualitatively any different than IPv4?
No, it is pretty much the same.
I suppose that IPs might be allocated to end-users in fairly sizable
blocks, without significantly fragmenting the IP space. But beancounters
will doubtless charge by the pound (er.. by the K, or maybe 8K -- how
many do you need TR?, SS?).
They would like to be able to charge but when one ISP has the policy of
giving out as many IP's as their customers want because their IANA
allocated IPv4 class C has changed from 256 IP's to 1099511627776
(2^32*256) IPv6 IP's everyone else will follow.
Will DHCP go away?
No. Although IPv6 hosts can self assign IP's based on MAC they will
still need to be told what nameserver and gateway etc. to use. DHCP is
still very useful and has very little downside as far as I can see so I
am not rooting for it to disappear any time soon.
I understand that IPv6 is already more-or-less in-place in Asia (Japan?
China?).
Yes, it is quite common and it works great. And they are very happy not
to have to use NAT. And yes, VOIP does work better there. It's
funny...the Internet is somewhat partitioned. When I was in Hong Kong I
saw a whole side of the Internet that I never knew existed. Same with
Vietnam. I haven't used much Internet in Japan but it would appear to be
the case there as well. There is a huge chunk of the Internet out there
that is not written in english and never links to the english speaking
Internet just like the English speaking Internet never links to them.
They have their own search engines, myspace slashdot equivalents, you
name it. Baidu is a big Chinese search engine which most Americans have
never heard of but it has the potential to have more users than Google,
especially if China continues to modernize and more Chinese get on the
net. This is the real reason I believe Google is so ready to compromise
their principles and censor search results to do business with the
Chinese government. It's not that the Chinese would have no search at
all if it weren't for Google so they are better off if Google does give
in. After all, the Chinese have Baidu. It is that Baidu is going to eat
Google's lunch in China if they don't.
What'l (how _does_ one spell that?) it take to get the US (and Europe)
into the IPv6 boat?
Internet in the US is a relatively old technology with lots of
entrenched old standards like IPv4. It is always easier to roll out IPv6
when you are starting from scratch like much of the world is. For the US
to really change it is going to take some sort of economic hardship.
IPv4 addresses will have to get scarce enough and expensive enough that
we tolerate the pain of changing. Unfortunately, NAT is only prolonging
our misery. But NAT is really only detrimental to the end-users and does
not hurt the ISP's themselves in any way (it only helps them) so there
is no incentive for them to implement IPv6 on their networks. Another
factor is that someday a lot of good information that people really want
will be found only on IPv6 as the rest of the world passes us by. That
might be an incentive to change also.
--
Tracy R Reed
http://ultraviolet.org
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
