back to article Internet engineers tear into United Nations' plan to move us all to IPv6

A newly released draft of the United Nations' masterplan to transition the internet to IPv6 has met a furious and despairing response from internet engineers. "Utterly, utterly, broken. It has no redeeming or worthwhile qualities at all," commented one engineer to an dedicated IPv6 working group at Europe's regional internet …

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  1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

    Mapping plan

    the IPv4-IPv6 1:1 mapping plan that has internet engineers up in arms.

    Forgive me for not seeing a big problem with this, or for understanding why it would reduce address space by 25%, but can someone explain what the underlying issue is?

    In my naive mind I would think that a 32-bit address for IPv4 need only take 1/2^96 of the 128 bit IPv6 addresses to work, or around 1.3e-29 of addresses. What have I missed?

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Mapping plan

      Anything that poses a problem for the IoT is to be encouraged.

      The ITU, of course, has been in a permanent state of being miffed ever since the world preferred Internet technologies to its own on account of the former being here and working and the latter being in committees.

    2. Duncan Macdonald

      Re: Mapping plan

      Don't confuse politicians with common sense (and many of the "Internet Engineers" are politicians).

      The people who devised IPv6 were NOT engineers - any sensible engineer knows the KISS principle and would not produce such an overblown structure as IPv6. IPv6 was designed by theorists. An IPv6 designed by engineers would have been an addressing extension of IPv4 and would almost certainly have had a direct mapping from the public IPv4 addresses to a (tiny) subset of the IPv6 addresses. If that had been the case then IPv6 would have been in widespread use years ago.

      1. Frumious Bandersnatch

        Re: Mapping plan

        would almost certainly have had a direct mapping from the public IPv4 addresses to a (tiny) subset of the IPv6 addresses. If that had been the case then IPv6 would have been in widespread use years ago.

        This is also in reply to the first poster above...

        One of the goals of IPv6 was to make things easier for the routing system. Basically, the address space is carved out hierarchically with a top-level address registrar feeding down through RIRs (regional IP? registries) and so on down to local resellers and eventually users. It is assumed that the mainly geographical hierarchy will match up more or less with the actual routing infrastructure at at least the higher levels. Ultimately, the aim is to shrink the routing tables down.

        IPv4 is decidedly not based on a geographical hierarchy. If you try and graft IPv4 addresses into the IPv6 system, you end up with an explosion of routing table entries that need to be taken care of. So no matter how you try to devise an IPv4 to IPv6 transition mechanism, if it involves a 1:1 mapping of old to new addresses in any way, you effectively break routing (or at least negate IPv6's native advantage there), and thus pretty much break IPv6 for everyone.

        At least that's what struck me when reading the article.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Mapping plan

          The other two posters here covered alot of the broad strokes with the routing issues. 6 to 4 translation/mapping can happen at an endpoint router like the one at your home or a single site office at low/impact cost, when you are routing to one of your primary links. That is because the v6 address block is being routed to your internet connection from the outside. Since the IPv4 address space isn't assigned in the same structural hierarchy it appears the UN/ITU proposal wouldn't be able to to efficiently map to one block, it would require blocks in each division of the hierarchy for the legacy address space. That's where your big chunk goes.

          The IPv6 space is STUPID BIG. Losing 25% wouldn't be a non-starter in and of itself, but the rest of the proposal appears to have other huge problems beyond the address space useage.

          Unsurprisingly, the idea of reverse mapping the address space is not new. I set up one up in two days when I started breaking in my first IPv6 hand-off. The trick is that efficiently mapping address spaces in a trivial way leads to inefficient routing. The working group I was in was playing around with creating virtual IPv4 tunnels that overlay the IPv6 network. The key thing is you'd want your IPv6 block hanging as close to the tier 1 space as you can, as you will be bouncing traffic off of it in a somewhat inelegant fashion. It does work without breaking much, at least when the entire internet isn't doing it at once. You can spin up an Amazon tiny if you want to try it for yourself. It wasn't as horrible as it sounds as the IPv6 part of the routers were already dual stack anyway, and IPv4 stuff doesn't freak out about address translation that often these days. The project never went anywhere because it didn't get buy in from the people who really matter, the people who slinging networking silicon. If Broadcom, Qualcom, or Cisco don't back it, it's not happening.

          That won't fix the IPv6 roll out though. IPv6 was and remains a lesson in failure. Too much forcing academic theory, not enough requirements analysis, and some bad assumptions on the wisdom of encouraging 25 year support windows for your core internet routing hardware.

          I hope that IPv7 or IPv8 routers are all software running on upgradable hardware with the expectation that anything that's running older than last years LTS with the latest patches will be voted off the island. We have two perfectly useful broken Internets for anyone that doesn't want to keep up.

          1. Adam 1

            Re: Mapping plan

            > I hope that IPv7 or IPv8 routers

            At the risk of having a Bill Gates moment, what on earth do you think we'll be doing in the future to need such an immense address space.

            Perspective time. The surface area of earth is roughly 5.1 x 10^8 km2

            IPv6 gives 2^128 addresses (ignoring reserved ranges for the minute). That's a big number*.

            That results in 667,220,330,000,000,000,000,000 ipv6 addresses per square metre on this planet. How much IoT tat do you need?

            *Citation needed

            1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

              Re: Mapping plan

              At the risk of having a Bill Gates moment, what on earth do you think we'll be doing in the future to need such an immense address space.

              https://xkcd.com/865/

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Mapping plan

              "That results in 667,220,330,000,000,000,000,000 ipv6 addresses per square metre on this planet. How much IoT tat do you need?"

              IP networking = Interplanetary Networking

            3. asdf

              Re: Mapping plan

              (Edit: my earlier comment was incorrect, here is the correct quote) - So we could assign an IPV6 address to EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths. It isn’t remotely likely that we’ll run out of IPV6 addresses at any time in the future.

      2. Yes Me Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: Mapping plan

        "The people who devised IPv6 were NOT engineers"

        Wrong. And they were very aware of KISS, which is for example why the IPv6 header has a simpler structure than the IPv4 header, and why the original transition model was pure dual stack.

        Things got complicated largely because of reluctance in the industry to adopt this simple transition plan.

        " direct mapping from the public IPv4 addresses to a (tiny) subset of the IPv6 addresses."

        Naturally this model was considered (in 1994 or thereabouts). Also, to keep the ITU happy, a mapping to OSI addresses was considered (also in 1994). The trouble is, neither of those models actually works. It's truly absurd that in 2018, the ITU comes up with a naive idea that was ditched more than 20 years ago.

        The good news is that nobody who makes their living out of IP service provision will waste any time on this nonsense. IPv6 works well already; just use it.

        1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

          Re: Mapping plan

          Wrong. And they were very aware of KISS,

          Yeah. Sure. Tell me how IPv6 address and parameter configuration follows the KISS principle.

          Listening to an IPv6 evangelicals defending the necessity to have two half-baked mechanisms for this (DHCPv6 and v6 autoconfig) is almost as entertaining as listening to true evangelicals proclaiming that the Earth was created 6k years ago and dinosaurs walked the Earth together with Adam and Eve.

          While v6 may have started as KISS it has been bogged down day one by technoreligious madness where anything and everything should also throw spanner in the v4 works. One of the best examples here is that a v4 DHCP server is not allowed to supply v6 information which is a restriction which has absolutely nothing to do with engineering - it is purely political.

          1. tschaefer

            Re: Mapping plan

            Why should a DHCPv4 server carry IPv6 information?

            In a IPv6 network DHCPv4 doesn't exist at all.

            An engineer would be stupid to mix things which are not mixable.

            1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

              Re: Mapping plan

              Why should a DHCPv4 server carry IPv6 information?

              Adam. Eve. Snake. Dinosaurs next to them. v6 Autoconfig. Goodness. Half of the parameters missing. Still goodness because scriptures say so. Asking DHCPv6. Half of the parameters conflict. Still goodness because the holy scriptures say so in RFC6214.

              The core issue here is that autoconfig has the implicit assumption that routers should supply configuration information and vice versa. That assumption is "your ship of fail has arrived" for proper network management. Big time. This was something which became absolutely clear when DHCP become the de-facto standard for v4 management combined with things like DHCP to DNS integration, option 82, etc. 15 years ago to be more exact. That was the point when autoconfig should have been buried 6 feet under with a stake through it so it does not get up.

              Autoconfig is a big fail in a modern campus architecture today where you may deploy vlan choice, broadcast isolation and/or multicast limitations based on the actual DHCP events and specifically option 82 in its "authenticated client ID" incarnation.

              Shipping full v6 info in DHCPv4 allows you to reuse existing layer 2 legacy infrastructure including things like option 82 without replacing all of it because the holy prophet* of v6 said so. It just works and if it was done, we would have had 40%+ of hosts on v6 by now instead of having technoreligious arguments with evangelicals which continue to explain that the holy sepulture, err simultaneous coexistence of autoconfig, DHCPv4 and DHCPv6 is somehow a good idea.

              The holy prophet is usually depicted as a Fred Bake-like charging rhinoceros accompanied by a large number of Homenet attendees in acolytes garb.

              1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

                Re: Mapping plan

                Autoconfig is a big fail

                Should not post before the 4th espresso.

                I meant Autoconfig + RA. Both. They need to be dead and buried and fully replaced by DHCP. They made sense in the 90-es when the protocol was designed. In 2018 they are a solution looking for a problem. Both of them and especially RA.

          2. Mage Silver badge
            Facepalm

            Re: how IPv6 address and parameter configuration follows the KISS principle?

            The problem is that IP6 was a bad design. It was later fudged (not relating MAC to an IP6). It was designed with no thought of backward compatibility.

            Yes, ITU is probably wrong. So is IP6, we need an IP8, with security & privacy designed in.

            My router & ISP both have IP6. I can't change over.

            1: Privacy of LAN. 2: Security of LAN. 3: Many things I have don't do IP6. 4:Many sites don't do IP6, all IP6 sites I use do have IP4.

            The Router essentially has no Firewall or NAT if using IP6.

            1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

              Re: how IPv6 address and parameter configuration follows the KISS principle?

              Yes, ITU is probably wrong. So is IP6, we need an IP8, with security & privacy designed in.

              This brings two things to mind: the ilusion of sunk cost; and the illusion that the next version will solve all the problems of the current version.

              There's no doubt that IPv6 isn't perfect, but, as the implementations show it does at least work and we have worked how to have both protocols working together.

              Regarding going back to the drawing board I suggest that not only would this lead to the same kind of delay that we've seen with IPv6, but also that it wouldn't get traction. IPv6 installations are already big enough to dominate the near future, ie. industry will enforce IPv6 as a de facto standard. Much better to be thinking of ways of updating the protocols in the future with less disruption.

            2. Alan Brown Silver badge

              Re: how IPv6 address and parameter configuration follows the KISS principle?

              "The Router essentially has no Firewall or NAT if using IP6."

              Firewalling rules are the same at ipv6 or ipv4. Just make sure you apply them to both, most decent consumer routers will do that for you.

              NAT is not a firewall, not even a poor substitute for one.

              IPv4 NAT breaks a shitload of things. It's a kludge and a rotten one at best which requires a lot of workaround on IPv4 networks (There is the possibility of NAT in IPv6, but it's 1:1 mapping, not the 1:many of Ipv4 NAT and you'd generally be bonkers to use it unless you absolutely had to)

              Anyone raising these arguments as a reason not to go to Ipv6 isn't competent to raise the objection.

              Adding "security" and "privacy" was one of the things that badly slowed down initial iterations of IPv6 getting off the ground. If you really want to go and reinvent that wheel then be prepared to spend a decade or two arguing about the minutia, because you're tacking so much onto TCP/IP that you really want to start over and redesign the entire packet structure from scratch - and good luck with getting THAT adopted within the next 30 years.

              IPv6 isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than what we have now - and what we have now is creaking badly. Yes, you could redesign BGP to have more than 65k routes whilst keeping IPv4, but why bother? It'd take 30 years to drive adoption of it when BGPv6 already exists.

              1. JohnFen

                Re: how IPv6 address and parameter configuration follows the KISS principle?

                "NAT is not a firewall, not even a poor substitute for one."

                True -- NAT does something entirely different. However, it is still useful, and should I even move my LAN to IPv6, I'll still be using a NAT to present a single point of presence to the internet.

              2. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: how IPv6 address and parameter configuration follows the KISS principle?

                >NAT is not a firewall, not even a poor substitute for one.<

                You need to remember who told you that, so that you know not to trust anything else they say.

        2. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

          Re: Mapping plan

          and why the original transition model was pure dual stack.

          Things got complicated largely because of reluctance in the industry to adopt this simple transition plan.

          And the fact that the original IPv6 model didn't work in the real world.

          Security? Nah - you don't need that.

          IP address auto-allocation? All handled. Except when it isn't.

          In short, all the modern OSes have been IPv6-enabled for years. But we are still not seeing mass takeup because it still doesn't (despite all the tweaks and kludges) work well in the real world.

      3. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

        Re: Mapping plan

        "The people who devised IPv6 were NOT engineers - any sensible engineer knows the KISS principle"

        I have to agree. Anyone familiar with v4 looking at v6 initially goes, "wtf is this?"

        That's not normal with properly engineered stuff building on previous things.

        And why is UN involved of all entities?

        1. Robert Halloran

          Re: Mapping plan

          "And why is UN involved of all entities?"

          The ITU is basically All The Legacy Telcos, who are still miffed that the ever-so-elegant OSI protocol stack [/sarcasm] lost out to a bunch of neckbeards who actually did *engineering*, and have been trying to claw back some validity ever since. "rough consensus & running code" >>>> kilopage specs with zero interoperability.

          [ I was *at* AT&T late 80s, they had an OSI package for their nascent 3B midrange line, and a third-party TCP stack for 'transitional purposes'. Shocked the feces out of them when World+Dog ignored the former, even/especially inhouse... ]

      4. Jaybus

        Re: Mapping plan

        "The people who devised IPv6 were NOT engineers - any sensible engineer knows the KISS principle and would not produce such an overblown structure as IPv6."

        Could not agree more. A simple extension of the address space to create a 128-bit IPv4 would have by now been in use worldwide for at least a decade. See Dan Bernstein's quite old article "The IPv6 Mess" https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html. Nothing much has changed.

        1. Nanashi

          Re: Mapping plan

          I don't suppose you have a suggestion for what that simple plan would be? I'm guessing you don't, because it's not possible to get any simpler than the plan we already have.

          djb also falls into this trap with that article -- he points out a bunch of problems, and then just sort of goes "these should be solved", without mentioning or apparently even realizing that they can't be solved in any better way than the way that v6 already solves them (with 6to4, Teredo, NAT64, DNS64/464XLAT and API translation).

    3. Tom 38

      Re: Mapping plan

      In my naive mind I would think that a 32-bit address for IPv4 need only take 1/2^96 of the 128 bit IPv6 addresses to work, or around 1.3e-29 of addresses. What have I missed?

      Its to do with how they map them, and how the routing to those mappings absorb or make unusable other addresses.

      The point of IPv6 is not simply more IP addresses, it is designed to make routing and routing decisions easier and more logical. Current IPv4 routing requires a global routing table of ~800k BGP routes, which is expected to grow to ~1.4 million routes by 2022, as the fragmentation of ranges requires even more routes.

      IPv6 on the other hand is intended to be given much larger allocations initially, which drastically reduce the number of routes required. IPv6 is expected to have no more than 130k routes by 2022 (not because it isn't used!).

      That follows on to FIB table size. IPv4 FIB tables are expected to grow above exponentially, reaching 1M entries by the middle of next year, which is the magic number of entries that many routers will go "pfffft" at, and start dropping traffic or using excess CPU.

      IPv6 isn't a magic bullet, but it is designed to fix these routing issues that affect the core internet, and this proposal aims to piss all over those designs in order to simplify migration - in effect making IPv6 just IPv4 with more addresses, but still with all the complexity that IPv6 needed to solve these routing issues (but not solving them).

      1. martinusher Silver badge

        Re: Mapping plan

        >IPv6 isn't a magic bullet, but it is designed to fix these routing issues that affect the core internet,...

        I was under the impression that IP6 traffic was supposed to carry its routing information embedded in the packet headers. Is this correct? (I was never much of a fan of v6 because it assumed varying length packet headers which according to my upbringing is not a good idea, it makes routing messy.)

        1. David Taylor 1

          Re: Mapping plan

          Uh, no. IPv6 packets do not have routing information embedded in them.

        2. tip pc Silver badge

          Re: Mapping plan

          I was under the impression that IP6 traffic was supposed to carry its routing information embedded in the packet headers. Is this correct?

          The Source and Destination IP addresses are routing information. Next hop router etc is something the machine doing the routing needs to know and is not in the packet.

          IPv6 DHCP will contain default gateway info though which your machine needs to know about to send traffic to a different network.

      2. Nate Amsden

        Re: Mapping plan

        1.4 million routes doesn't really sound like much to me for 2022. Other than the big service providers who really needs to carry the full bgp table anyway? Most folks that use BGP will probably only need a tiny fraction of it, or for the rest of us just uplink to a good service provider(in my case Internap) and let them do the routing.

        I have a document here for a high end core switch from May 2004 where a vendor was using a IXIA traffic test tool against a couple of different products, once of which was capable of 1.2 million routes, though on a per port basis it was 230k. But still that was 14 years ago, and it was a switch, not even a "router"(which typically have a lot more memory).

        Most companies have had to upgrade their hardware anyway just for increases in throughput.

        Today I see routers at least claiming over 2M IPv4 routes and 2M IPv6 routes in hardware(vs 230k on that switch from 14 years ago) on modern equipment just on a quick search I'm sure there are others that can scale higher.

        1. Tom 38

          Re: Mapping plan

          1.4 million routes doesn't really sound like much to me for 2022.

          It's the exponential part of it that is the issue, 1.4 million in 2022, 2 million the next year. The more we squeeze IPv4, the more fragmented IPv4 space becomes, and more routes are required.

          As an example of an affected router, 3 years ago the thick end of $20k bought you a Cisco 7600 series, which has a hard limit of 1 million IPv4 routes/512k IPv6 routes (IPv6 routes takes twice as much space, your choice on how you split it), and 512k IPv4 FIBs and 256k IPv6 FIBs - ruh-roh.

          That router is EOL/EOS, but still supported by Cisco until 2022 (assuming you keep paying).

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Mapping plan

            I wouldn't worry about it if you're in the EU with all of the Censoring coming online soon.

            The Internet will be a one way service soon enough.

        2. Joe Montana

          Re: Mapping plan

          You may have missed the bit about developing countries...

          They have slower connections, which don't need these new expensive routers, so they buy older routers that providers in developed countries have discarded, which is part of the problem as many are using equipment which doesn't support ipv6 or incurs significant performance penalties when doing so (eg ipv4 in hardware, ipv6 in software on a slow cpu).

          1. wayward4now
            Trollface

            Re: Mapping plan

            "You may have missed the bit about developing countries..."

            ...and think of the children.

          2. tschaefer

            Re: Mapping plan

            Look to India. There are no excuses. Even for countries called "developing countries".

          3. Alan Brown Silver badge

            Re: Mapping plan

            "You may have missed the bit about developing countries..."

            I didn't, and experience in actually being in places like outer bumfuckistan shows that the telcos have just as new shiny shiny kit as anyone else.

            The developing countries are actually the perfect fit for large scale deployment of IPv6, but there's more money to be made selling them huge CGNAT systems and management defer to furren conslutants with shiny websites instead of actual engineers.

          4. itzman
            FAIL

            Re: Mapping plan

            Unless the USA is a developing country you are entirely wrong

            Developing countries either go straight to fibre or to 4G cell in rural areas.

            There is no point on laying expensive copper

        3. Norman Nescio Silver badge

          Re: Who uses the full BGP table

          1.4 million routes doesn't really sound like much to me for 2022. Other than the big service providers who really needs to carry the full bgp table anyway? Most folks that use BGP will probably only need a tiny fraction of it, or for the rest of us just uplink to a good service provider(in my case Internap) and let them do the routing.

          If you are single-homed (only one connection to the ISP), you are correct, you do not need the full BGP routing table - a default route will do.

          However, many organisations wish to have resiliency/redundancy. At one level, you can have two connections into your ISP and do some mucking about to avoid needing the full BGP routing table by setting route preferences etc (bearing in mind that if you want load-sharing rather than just failover, it gets 'tricky') - and you need cooperation from the ISP. If, however you want independent routes to separate ISPs you need to use the full BGP routing tables approach with some very capable routers on your autonomous system (AS) boundary to the multiple ISPs you are connecting to. It's very easy to get wrong. Once your organisation gets big enough to want multiple connections from multiple autonomous systems spread across the globe, you might want to start dealing with Route Reflectors and other techniques used to make managing multiple entry/exit points manageable rather than polynomially hard.

          IP routing, at scale, is an amazing piece of co-operative software and protocol engineering which requires expertise to understand. I take my hat off to the folks who do, and listen seriously to the ones who can give reasons behind the design decisions in IPv6. It's an example of where listening to your technical experts is worthwhile, because the alternative is chaos.

        4. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Mapping plan

          @Nate Amsden

          Quite a few Enterprises have valid reasons as to why they might want full routing table.

          And I say that as somebody who has exclusively worked in the Service Provider sphere, never worked for Enterprise.

          Although agreed it is not for everybody though. Many SPs themselves can do well with 2 or 3 x default route-only from different Tier 1 or maybe some sort of partial routing table mix from the likes of Lonap and Linx (assuming UK-centric ISPs).

      3. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

        Re: Mapping plan

        IPv6 isn't a magic bullet, but it is designed to fix these routing issues

        At the cost of making implementation for the end user much, much more complex. Even my small home network is hard to configure for IPv6 (router, firwall, VM host - they can all see each other but can't route IPv6 packets successfully..)

        IPv6 was designed by theorists who designed 'the perfect addressing model'. Once that was presented to people who actually do networking, the kludges needed to make it actually work started appearing. Like DHCPv6..

        1. John Sager

          Re: Mapping plan

          Even my small home network is hard to configure for IPv6

          Perhaps that's a router issue? My v6 network autoconfigures fine - I just run radvd and it all happens. The firewall config wasn't too hard - lots of good info on the net. It's true I have some v4-only hosts (TV, etc mostly) so run dual-stack. But all my laptops, phones, servers etc all use v6 when they can.

          I think the home router manufacturers have a lot to answer for here. Mine is a home-brew linux-based router, and once you get the design right it all just runs. So why can't the mfrs get with the program?

          1. asdf

            Re: Mapping plan

            In my case my router is all ready to go with IPv6 I believe and does assign it on the local network but my router can't seem to pull an v6 ip from my ADSL ISP. Should just work when ISP start supporting it I believe.

            1. Alan Brown Silver badge

              Re: Mapping plan

              " my router can't seem to pull an v6 ip from my ADSL ISP."

              You're on TalkTalk aren't you?

              Even if your ISP can't provide IPv6 directly and despite 6to4 being deprecated, you can do it with a 6in4 tunnel. HE are still offering free tunnelbrokering services.

              1. asdf

                Re: Mapping plan

                >You're on TalkTalk aren't you?

                Nope CenturyLink. Wrong continent. Probably the equivalent in that they are one of the slower options with crap customer service but also only choice for getting decent standalone internet for $40 a month (no bundling garbage).

                >you can do it with a 6in4 tunnel.

                Completely indifferent to ipv6 so if it doesn't autoconfig then I can't be bothered. Network engineers care a lot more about it than end users at this point.

          2. JohnFen

            Re: Mapping plan

            It's also possible that he doesn't want stateless autoconfiguration and so isn't using radvd. Many people prefer stateful, or even manual, router configurations.

        2. Mpeler
          Coat

          Re: Mapping plan

          "Even my small home network is hard to configure for IPv6 (router, firwall, VM host - they can all see each other but can't route IPv6 packets successfully..)"

          You should give the firwall back to your cat, and put in a firewall :)

          (Watch out for those hairballs, they're non-routable, and induce hacking).....

    4. Joe Montana

      Re: Mapping plan

      There is already a mapping from ipv4 to ipv6 - the 6to4 address space:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4

      Every routable ipv4 address has a /64 of ipv6 space in this way.

      The way to encourage ipv6 adoption is to make it a desirable feature that users demand from their ISPs... Microsoft do this to a small degree by stating that the xbox one works better with ipv6, but more is needed.

      If big services like google and facebook start promoting ipv6, and making new desirable features available on ipv6 first then people will start asking their isps for ipv6, and are more likely to favour providers that are offering it. ISPs don't bother at the moment because its a cost, if they start to lose customers due to lack of ipv6 then they will take action.

      1. tschaefer

        Re: Mapping plan

        6to4 servers are deprecated, so 6to4 is also useless.

      2. JohnFen

        Re: Mapping plan

        "The way to encourage ipv6 adoption is to make it a desirable feature that users demand from their ISPs"

        What you're recommending here is a bit like extortion. The plain fact is that for 99% of end end users, IPv4 vs IPv6 doesn't matter. This is an issue that matters to ISPs and other industrial routers.

        I disagree with the notion that it is OK to artificially degrade the end user experience just so that users will get mad at their ISPs.

      3. Quenchize

        Re: Mapping plan

        I think ISPs will rapidly adopt IPv6 the minute they can't add any more customers due to address exhaustion. DSL modems and mobile devices are probably the best use case for IPv6.

        Their problem is that it spoils their billing model. If they are giving every home a /56 they cant charge you for extra IPs anymore.

    5. tip pc Silver badge

      Re: Mapping plan

      @Paul Crawford

      IPv6 is set to use just a fraction of its pool of addresses until some time in the very distant future.

      Global routable addresses issued by the IANA start with prefix 2000:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#General_allocation

      Only one eighth of the total address space is currently allocated for use on the Internet, 2000::/3, in order to provide efficient route aggregation, thereby reducing the size of the Internet routing tables; the rest of the IPv6 address space is reserved for future use or for special purposes. The address space is assigned to the RIRs in large blocks of /23 up to /12.

      other addresses are also reserved for IPv4 mapping and translating

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#Special_allocation

      This does depend of course on the mechanism they use for mapping but 25% is a stupidly wild number, maybe they meant 25% of the 2000::/3 prefix?

      So yes, address space reduced by 25% is complete and utter bollux as they could use a new prefix like 4226::/3 if they wanted and retained the already huge space in 2000::/3 for pure IPv6 use and still avoid address wastage.

      there is a lot of misunderstanding, slight of hand and deception going on around IPv6 and all its doing is making people hold onto IPv4 longer. Its time we ditched IPv6 and made a start on IPv8 (odd numbers are experimental apparently) taking advantage of the positives we have learnt in IPv4 and removing the negatives from IPv6.

      It's worthwhile noting that IPv6 looks to be designed as a marriage of MAC addressing & IP addressing in 1 protocol. In its original incarnation, it would not have been too hard to get cheap switches to do routing by reading the first 64 bits of the destination address for routing and the last 64 bits for switching, paving the way for the Ethernet frame and IP packet to be collapsed into 1 framing process thereby saving some bits on the wire and making things a bit quicker.

      The way we use IPv4 has evolved hugely since 1994 and IPv6 has not kept up which is another reason why IPv6 adoption is so low, its doesn't have any mature tools to go with out and it's like going back to 1994 again in terms of features and how we can use them.

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