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Re: When IPv6 ... if ever?

  • From: Leo Bicknell
  • Date: Sun Sep 03 11:04:57 2000

On Sun, Sep 03, 2000 at 01:11:59AM -0700, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:
> This is kind of what I was getting to. IPv6 seems stuck in the same type
> of morass as new TLDs. Maybe, with less business potential.

	There is an important difference though.  New TLD's require
marketing and a change in human behavior (the automatic "it must be
.com" mentality of most users).  It will be very hard for new TLD's
to be successful.

	IPv6 doesn't really suffer from this problem.  Largely network
administrators can switch the network from v4 to v6, and as long as
things like automatic address selection continue to work in one form
or another most users won't even know that something has changed.

	The chicken and egg for IPv6 is networking hardware/software.
Host support is essentially done.  There are enough people interested.
The only problem is the lack of "production" software for routers,
and the hardware designs of many high end routers that make them
unable to support line rate IPv6 at this time.

	If the hardware could line rate forward it in core boxes, and
relatively stable code for v6 was included in a mainstream v4 release
early adopters would be playing with it very quickly, and I would
venture that within 18 months you'd see some sizeable backbones
supporting it.

-- 
Leo Bicknell - [email protected]
Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440
Read TMBG List - [email protected], www.tmbg.org