back to article Techies beg world to join the 1% on IPv6 launch day

Today, Wednesday 6 June, may seem like any other day to you, but a group of network operators, kit-makers and websites have called it “World IPv6 launch day”. The Internet Society, Bing, Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, Comcast, Akamai, AT&T, Cisco and other tech heavyweights are all aboard the IPv6 launch day bandwagon, and …

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  1. Christian Berger

    Actually AVM...

    AVM is supporting IPv6 for routers roughly 5 years back. Every new router by them supports it by default. They also support Sixxs.net tunnels.

    The main problem is finger-pointing. Everybody claims that another party is acting to slowly instead of acting themselves. Everybody complains, nobody acts.

    1. TeeCee Gold badge
      Facepalm

      Re: Actually AVM...

      As a Fritz!Box owner I just mentally translated "made that commitment" to "jumped on the June 6th bandwagon".

      I'm sure that there are others who already provide IPv6 support and just couldn't be bothered to reannounce the fact to coincide with the new hype.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Actually AVM...

      There is a huge difference between just supporting IPv6 and having it enabled by default.

      In the former case the user will have to navigate the configuration to enable and use IPv6 and in the latter case the user should not have to do anything.

      1. David Webb

        Re: Actually AVM...

        My Technicolor TG528n (cheap router supplied by Plusnet, but bloody good for the home) supports IPV6 with the latest firmware, out of the box, plug it in and if your ISP supports IPV6 it'll give you IPV6 (I'm on the PN IPV6 trial so do).

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Actually AVM...

        Given that they are usually provided by your ISP, with firmware custom-made for the ISP, the default setting depends on the ISP, not on AVM. I got my Fritz!Box 7360 from my ISP (xs4all), which had it enabled by default, using native IPv6.

  2. Yes Me Silver badge
    Meh

    IPv6-enabled kit

    "Home networking kit makers are taking perhaps the biggest step, by shipping IPv6-enabled kit as default. Just four vendors – Cisco, D-Link, NEC AccessTechnica and ZyXEL have made that commitment."

    The brand-new Technicolor TG582n just supplied by my (UK) ISP claims to be IPv6-ready. Not that the ISP concerned would know anything about that though. Some ISPs should just be ashamed of themselves.

    My SixXs tunnel is working nicely though, ready for the Day.

  3. graeme leggett Silver badge

    looking to go unnoticed?

    First day back at work after extra long ban holiday and anniversary of invasion of north-west Europe by Allies. Not expecting it to get much coverage on The One Show.

    1. Beau

      Re: looking to go unnoticed?

      "anniversary of invasion of north-west Europe by Allies." Here in Belgium, our family along with quite a few other people, have a special reason every year, to remember that the 6th June was "D Day."

      1. Anonymous Dutch Coward
        Thumb Up

        Re: looking to go unnoticed?

        Yep.

      2. MrT

        Happy birthday to me...

        ... I wonder of all those nice new IPv6 packets will come gift-wrapped?

    2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Childcatcher

      D-Day? Don't remind me!

      We have been more than 10 years in a kind of Amoral Neverending War Everywhere Against Everyone and are currently dumping ourselves down the loo because we borrowed ourselves to death a bit earlier (some would say that "we owe it to ourselves so there is no problem" ... ha ha ha).

      Talking about high-falutin inanities like IPv6, are we?

      Yes, Mr. Hilter. Do you want Sachertorte to be delivered to your Bunker?

      1. sabba
        Facepalm

        Re: D-Day? Don't remind me!

        So I guess from your missive you'd not have us discuss anything for the next N years other than the state of the World economy and the morality of the various nations? Better turn off your telly, unplug your 'puter and head to the hills with a number of your like-minded pals where you can sit around the campfire and put the world to rights.

  4. Jusme
    Unhappy

    Great, but...

    I still have to configure my proxy to prefer the IPV4 address when a site offers both. Why? Well for me, like I expect 99% of people, IPV6 connectivity is via a tunnel over an IPV4 link. So I either have a fast IPV4 connection to the site or a slow IPV6 one.

    When more sites offer both IPV4 and IPV6 addresses, anyone who's experimented with IPV6 will rapidly start to disable their IPV6 connectivity once they figure out why everything has slowed down.

    I predict "Your internet is slow?" "Have you disabled IPv6?" will become a common exchange :(

    If IPV6 is to take off, the last-mile ISPs need to support it. Anything else and it's just an academic experiment.

    1. Christian Berger

      Re: Great, but...

      I'm sorry, but there is no real reason why tunnels need to be significantly slower than native connections. For me, the difference in latency is 10 ms. Don't tell me you can notice that.

      It's rarely more, unless you select a POP which is in another country.

      1. Jusme

        Re: Great, but...

        Well I had to patch squid to prefer IPV4 because youtube was unusable over IPV6 last time we tried this.

        If you're stuck on 512Kbit ADSL it may be ok, but on 50/100MBit+ cable there is no way a free public tunnelbroker is going to keep up, or be willing to try if/when demand rises beyond a few spotty geeks playing with a curious new toy.

        And I'm not sure exactly what the AUP is for the one I use, but I dobut they'd be happy with me pulling several GBytes/day through their free service.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Great, but...

      Yeah, my outfit has a 50 meg fiber connection with ZERO IPv6 support. I would have gone live a year ago if it was going anywhere past my router. Cheerleaders aside, there is no good justification to tear up our network infrastructure just configure a IP6 to 4 proxy, regardless of how fast it is or isn't.

      Go beat up AT&T, because until I get an IPV6 hand-off I'm not changing anything.

    3. Yes Me Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: Great, but...

      True, except that there are going to be millions of IPv6-only mobiles coming along and content providers will need to serve them via native IPv6 to maximise performance. That isn't an academic exercise at all. Any wise ISP will be getting ready for this, even if domestic wire-line customers don't need it.

      It's well understood that users want the best performance available.

      http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6555

  5. jake Silver badge

    Or, perhaps ...

    ... We can ignore IPv6 for the duration.

    Seriously, kids, toasters & blenders don't need their own IP addresses.

    And I'm fairly certain that my home router is perfectly content handing out local IP addresses in order to route traffic between user machines and the box that the single IP address that my ISP provides me uses. Ain't network address translation wonderful? It's why we invented it ...

    1. Gerhard Mack
      FAIL

      Re: Or, perhaps ...

      You don't get it. This is not about each appliance having it's own IP, that's just a side benefit. We ran out of IPv4 addresses last year and now there are ISPs in Asia putting customers behind NAT and European ISPs planning the same thing for when Europe runs out. The more computers you put behind a NAT, the fewer connections each machine can have and that's on top of the inherent problems with running a NAT behind a NAT.

      1. Christian Berger

        Re: Or, perhaps ...

        Actually the even bigger problem is that NATed computers cannot be reached from the outside. If you only have NAT on your router, that's not to bad as you can use port forwarding. Once your router doesn't get a public IP address you won't be able to do that.

        In effect that means that many essential services on the Internet will break. For example you won't be able to receive e-mail as the sending mail server won't be able to reach your computer in order to deliver their e-mail.

        Of course that's no problem for post-privacy advocates who gladly post every bit of information on public servers they don't control.

        NAT breaks the end to end structure of the Internet. Instead of just dialing IP addresses in VoIP applications you need to install complex servers or resort to closed solutions like Skype.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Or, perhaps ...

          "NATed computers cannot be reached from the outside" - could be seen as a benefit by some.

          and for many computer users, they don't have their mail delivered, they fetch it, or browse it.

          1. AndrueC Silver badge
            Thumb Up

            Re: Or, perhaps ...

            I agree. This is why I think that ditching NAT is a mistake. For most people most of the time it functions perfectly well and provides a handy bit of extra security. I think that suddenly having all my devices appear on the Internet is a bad thing. I run email and FTP servers from behind a NAT to to mention remote access software. All works perfectly well, thanks. Never come across anything yet that didn't. Now if it's the ISP's NAT then I can see it gets more tricky but customer NAT seems fine.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          @Christian

          You make a valid point apart from one: Why would anyone caring for e-mail try to run the server on their home computer?

          Because if you value your e-mail you'll make sure to have backups and are not depending on one single server. Especially not in an environment where an outage could easily occur (commonly speaking ISP's don't guarantee 90% uptime but work on best effort).

      2. jake Silver badge

        @Gerhard Mack (was: Re: Or, perhaps ... )

        "We ran out of IPv4 addresses last year"

        Uh ... no. We didn't. Plenty of IPv4 addresses have been issued, revoked, given up, and re-issued in the last 12 months. Enough, in fact, to keep TehIntraWebTubes[tm] ticking along quite nicely.

        We're here rubbing elbows, world-wide, with a few exceptions[1], aren't we?

        [1] Australia, mainland China, North Korea, etc.

    2. Fatman
      WTF?

      Re: Or, perhaps ...

      Excuse me, but please tell us what it looks like, staring at the insides of your ass???

      Fscking luddite!!

      And NAT is such a pain in the ass!

      <===== The most appropriate icon I could find.

      Hey Reg, how about a `head up ass` icon?? Please??

  6. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    The most important lesson for Internode is that done right, customers will not even notice the change to IPv6

    My router (FritzoBox is set up to run IPv6 when possible). Those devices on the LAN that are IPv6 capable play along happily and the rest (the telly, one mobile phone) carry on blissful of their ignorance. ISP, Unitymedia, doesn't provide an IPv6 uplink yet but has it in the FAQ.

    1 % is already pretty good compared to a few years ago. Many of Germany's ISPs have committed to supporting IPv6 this year and I assume it's similar elsewhere. The rest will follow as network buildouts and updates use IPv6 capable hardware. There won't be anything dramatic unless particularly positive (much more efficient routing, lower latency, simpler provisioning) or negative aspects (security, privacy, configuration headaches) associated with deployment come to light, which events like IPv6 are supposed to highlight.

    Will El Reg be running an IPv6 service like Heise does?

  7. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge

    And there I was thinking June 6th is

    I cannot see the transit of Venus due to bleedin' clouds day

    sigh

  8. John Burton

    Come on theregister,...

    Why aren't you reachable in ipv6 yet? Seems I have to use the old internet to connect to you still!

    1. Christian Berger

      Re: Come on theregister,...

      Yes, either get IPv6 or build a box I can dial in via modem and terminal. If you choose to stay in the 1990s at least do it right. :)

      1. jake Silver badge

        @Christian Berger (was: Re: Come on theregister,...)

        When I'm at my place just outside Fort Bragg, I use a pair of old USR modems to connect to my systems here in Sonoma at 19,200 baud (if the weather permits ... sometimes fog and/or rain + the aging cable plant's dusty, hardened, cracking wires screw up the signal to noise ratio to the point of dropping it to 1200 baud ... or lower ).

        I still manage to read and post to ElReg without any histrionics.

        Going text-only doesn't hurt ;-)

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    all well and good

    But I think I'll have to be tunnelling for at least another year looking at Brit ISPs (for us miser home customers)

    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      Re: all well and good

      Andrews & Arnold are offering IPv6 *and* will send you a Technicolor router that you can use to connect to it. I dare say there are others. Your pessimism has been good for about 10 years but things are finally starting to move in the UK.

      1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

        Re: all well and good

        Uh-huh.. and A&A will charge through the nose for it, too.

        It's 'only' about 20 quid more expensive than my already expensive top of the line Be Internet connection to get less service. Even if you compare another pricey business only broadband provider such as Zen for high data volumes, they're vastly cheaper than A&A.

        10GB/month during business hours by default? Don't make me laugh - throw a few databases around or a couple of operating system images and I can get through 3x that in a day for work purposes. Not every day, granted, but enough to make 10GB laughable. Home usage is a lot more reasonable, I don't torrent and all my traffic is legal - but nevertheless I don't fancy limiting myself if I fancy a heavy month of large Unix distributions, lots of Steam and Lovefilm and suchlike.

        Things are moving slowly in the UK, but the only reason A&A have improved recently has been due to cheap(er) routers. They've had an IPV6 network for years.

  10. Herby

    No, June 6th is...

    ...Voting day in California (ans some other states). We here in sillycon valley get to cast votes on a variety of issues. Oh, yes there IS that Venus transit, if you miss it, there will be another one a few years from now (maybe your clone might attend!). Didn't you see it a few years ago, as these things happen every so often. Sorry the intervals are measured in years, but there was one in 2004.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'm surpised the cell companies haven't jumped

    I'm surprised the cellular companies haven't done more with IPv6 - they control the network, and here in the US they have great control over the devices on that network as well. You'd think Verizon would set up my Android device with an IPv6 address, and set it up such that hotspot mode would hand out routable IPv6 addresses to the devices that support it.

    1. Christian Berger

      Re: I'm surpised the cell companies haven't jumped

      2 Reasons:

      1. Direct non-NATed network access generally involves a bit of "background noise" traffic. Since they charge by traffic or at least they need to transfer it, they don't like that.

      2. IPv6 would enable the customer to have actual Internet. They could abandon otherwise expensive provider based VPN solutions.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'm surpised the cell companies haven't jumped

      Vzw already provides native IPv6 on at least LTE to Android users (at least GB & ICS). Hotspot is still IPv4 though.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Windows user here.

    My windows 7 lists an IPv4 number and a IPv6 number when I check my NIC. Checking my router later if it shows those too. I'm hoping this is enough when my ISP decides to play ball.

    1. Lusty

      Re: Windows user here.

      That will be your local address. If your Router supports it you would get a couple more addresses for use in the big wide world.

      I don't know what the fuss is about, we switched off IPv4 at one customer and they didn't even notice because their IPv6 was all auto configured!

    2. Fatman
      Linux

      Re: Windows user here.

      Please get the terminology right!

      It is NOT: `Windows user`,

      but

      `WindblowZE (l)user`

      *nix user here!

  13. Graham Dawson Silver badge
    Coat

    They get millions of IP addresses each, I'm stuck sharing with hundreds of other people on a rotating basis because there aren't enough left to go around. I am the 99%.

    ... right?

    Oh. Never mind then.

    1. Daniel B.

      OCCUPY INTERTUBEZ!

  14. Steve Knox
    Meh

    Biggest Little Step

    "Home networking kit makers are taking perhaps the biggest step, by shipping IPv6-enabled kit as default."

    How about shipping firmware updates to existing kit...?

    Shipping new kit just shows a commitment to making money. Supporting old kit would show real commitment.

    1. Fatman

      Re: Supporting old kit would show real commitment.

      THAT may not be possible with some REAL old kit.

      First, that would require new firmware, with the possibility that the router firmware may end up being too large for the installed flash chip.

      Second, the size of a IPv6 address, memory capacity in old kit may not support the 16 bytes needed to store a IPv6 address vs only 4 for a IPv4 address.

      Third, there is some really old kit that should end up being retired.

      1. Steve Knox

        Re: Supporting old kit would show real commitment.

        [i]THAT may not be possible with some REAL old kit.[/i]

        I agree -- but it should be possible to do for pretty much anything made in at least the past 5 years. If not, then the original kit was poorly designed to begin with. IPv6 has only been a standard for 14 years, FFS.

  15. Oli 1
    Go

    We went IPv6 yesterday (apparently)

    My record labels site now IPv6 thanks to CloudFlare's Automatic IPv6 Gateway.

    Although i still have very little idea as to who is going to connect to us using it, it just seemed like a good thing to do whilst i was signing up for their proxy / cdn services.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: We went IPv6 yesterday (apparently) - IPv6 gateway

      So you're saying NAT is actually working, we only have to turn it the other way then (for inside v4 to outside v6) and we'll all be friends.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Should have been on 6/6/2066

    People might be interested by then

  17. Sureo

    What happened to IPv5 anyway? Things seem too rushed....

    1. The Unexpected Bill
      Go

      Worth what you paid to hear it...

      So far as I know, all the "odd numbered" revisions to the IP spec are beta and testing releases only. Even numbers are for production use.

  18. Danny 14
    FAIL

    oh well

    I use TMG. Good job we have a few spare ipv4 :)

  19. Mr. Great Sage
    Facepalm

    So, only some what related

    Has anyone tried to navigate to an IPv6 only PC with no DNS entry? Does "\\fe80:0000:0000:0000:0202:b3ff:fe1e:8329\c$" look scary to you?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So, only some what related

      it looks like an ipx address of dos-quake era. Funny i remembered that.

      1. Cpt Blue Bear
        Thumb Up

        Re: So, only some what related

        Somebody else showing their age! My first thought was it looked like an IPX node address (am I remembering the right terminology?). But that was for Doom rather than Quake - by Quake we'd all converted to TCP/IP

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: So, only some what related

          An IPX address looks like: 0000000A:0101AE560163AC

          (Original) Quake has IPX capabilities. From the main menu, navigate: Multiplayer> Join a Game> IPX, and you'll see it. (Original) Quake also supports TCP/IP.

          DOSBox has an IPX-over-IP tunnelling feature, so you can still play those old DOS games in multiplayer mode.

    2. PyLETS
      Boffin

      Re: So, only some what related

      'Does "\\fe80:0000:0000:0000:0202:b3ff:fe1e:8329\c$" look scary to you?'

      Looks like a link local IPV6 address to me. I think you'll only access that kind within the LAN. Most globally routable IPV6 space currently seems to start at around 2001:

    3. Colin Miller

      Re: So, only some what related

      Or use fe80::0202:b3ff:fe1e:8329, there can be one (and only one) double colon in an IPv6 number; it means all the octets between the colons are zero, the number of specified octets controls how many zero octets :: expands to.

    4. DJ Smiley
      Thumb Up

      Re: So, only some what related

      \\fe80::0202:b3ff:fe1e:8329\c$

      Fixed it a little for you.

  20. Mark Eccleston
    Thumb Down

    Cisco, hah!

    They put they support IPv6 on the box, but the e4200v2 I got would not do IPv6 over my PPoE connection using PPP. The only option they had was automatic native or manual IPv6 tunnel. I went out and got an Asus RT-N66U. I now have a dual stacked IPv4/6 site as well as a test IPv6 only site at home.

    Cisco has to do more to support IPv6 than say they do so on the package.

  21. NoHttpsHere :(
    Thumb Down

    IPv6 validation for theregister.co.uk

    Checking for AAAA DNS record

    no AAAA record

  22. Alan Brown Silver badge

    As so many others have said

    It's only going to start being useful when the major ISPs start supporting it.

    As TalkTalk can't tell their collective arses from their elbows (and their "business" side is no better), this may take a while. The current wheeze from almost every other ISP is "no demand ==we won't do it"

    BTW: Going to IPv6 will break all your carefully laid out IPv4 firewall rules don't forget to sort that out when changing over.

    Personally I'm dreading the inevitable surge in Pwned boxes which were previously unreachable behind NAT shields and will become directly reachable.

    1. PyLETS
      Boffin

      Re: As so many others have said

      "Personally I'm dreading the inevitable surge in Pwned boxes which were previously unreachable behind NAT shields and will become directly reachable."

      More likely to happen for gung ho hobbyists tunneling through their own IP4 only router than ISP provided IP6 or dual stack routers or firmware upgrades. ISPs need to be careful to install default IP6 firewalls which require the user to configure a port forward for an internal server on IP6 also.

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