In an off-list message, Fred Templin suggested something which should have been obvious to me and which prompted this train of thought - about a way IPv6 could be of immediate benefit to end-users in a way that IPv4 can't:
Home and SOHO end-users typically have their PCs etc. behind NAT and can only accept incoming communications directly, or run a server, by messing with the NAT in their modems and doing other tricky things. Then, they would still need a dynamic DNS arrangement, since their IP address is unstable. If they had a native IPv6 service over the same DSL, cable modem or fibre link - and a suitable new modem - and if they were given a stable IPv6 prefix that wouldn't change from one month or year to the next, then they could run their own web servers, game servers etc. I know nothing about games and care less, but have been told that some of them can use IPv6. Likewise, some people are keen to run massive P2P file sharing apps, including streaming P2P file sharing with packets coming from multiple peers. I guess supernodes for those systems are best on public addresses, rather than behind NAT. A problem with this is the limited upstream capacity of DSL and DOCSIS cable modem services. Likewise the extra admin and hardware costs for IPv6 routing, IPv6 traffic counting and billing, IPv6 upstream links etc. The service would have to cost more to pay for the cost of getting a real, stable, native IPv6 address and the separate stream of native IPv6 packets. Perhaps some of these benefits could come via Teredo or 6to4, probably with the modem doing the work rather than some PC behind the IPv4 NAT system. However, 6to4 and I think Teredo IPv6 addresses depend on the public IPv4 address of the modem. This semi-permanent public IPv6 address is a direct benefit - for some end-users - which can't be done with IPv4. They could have their own outpost on the frontier of the Net. But this has been true for years. If it is attractive, then where is the evidence that end-users, beyond those with IETF technical interests, are actually keen to pay for a real IPv6 service? If there are attractions to at least some ordinary end-users, then is this happening with free IPv6 tunneled services? It can't be too hard to get Windows Teredo going, or use a tunnel broker service. Within 10 minutes of looking at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_broker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IPv6_tunnel_brokers http://broker.aarnet.net.au I had an account and downloaded, compiled and installed the source code "Gateway6 5.1 Source Code (Linux/Unix/Darwin/BSD) from: http://go6.net/4105/download.asp on my CentOS 5.1 machine which directly handles the fixed IP address of my DSL service. It went smoothly and I got a semi-permanent /56 . Firefox on that machine could access http://ipv6.google.com . - Robin -- to unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body. archive: <http://psg.com/lists/rrg/> & ftp://psg.com/pub/lists/rrg
