Good news, bad news (and free porn) on IPv6

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 19 August 2008 09:27

Business IT - Technology

"Since we do not currently have a good estimate for the number of monitored routers in our study that are capable of exporting flow records for native IPv6 traffic, we are unable to conclude whether this is due to a true lack of native IPv6 traffic or simply due to the limitations of the network reporting infrastructure itself... There are no comprehensive measurements of how much of today's IPv6 traffic is tunnelled as opposed to native. At least one recent study has shown that 90 percent of IPv6 traffic on the Internet today is tunnelled over IPv4,7 while others have estimated that tunnelled traffic represents around 25 percent of total IPv6 traffic."

In a lengthy blog post commenting on the study, Labovitz says the lack of IPv6 traffic is not for lack of trying. "Many organisations and individuals offer a range of lures to encourage IPv6 adoption. For example, the next generation research and education backbone in the US, Internet2, offers free transit for IPv6 traffic. And unlike IPv4, many large ISPs have very liberal IPv6 peering policies."

He adds that "for ISPs or large multi-homed enterprises struggling to justify just one more tiny, little IPv4/16 allocation, the minimum IPv6 allocation is /32 or a staggering 2^64 larger than the entire IPv4 Internet today." But the biggest issue, according to Labovitz, is money "The [US] Department Of Commerce estimates it will cost $US25 billion for ISPs to upgrade to native IPv6. And this massive expense comes without the lure of additional revenue since IPv6 offers diminishingly few incentives nor new competitive features to attract or upsell customers."

And the free porn? According to Labovitz, it's just one incentive being offered to promote IPV6 "...IPv6 proponents offer free high quality IPv6 porn (the porn-free, IPV4 home page is http://www.ipv6porn.co.nz/ ) Others provide ASCII animation of Star Wars movies   (IPv4 users get only black & white — make sure you watch the 'Return of the Jedi' version). And, of course, the dancing turtle. "