No more IPv4 addresses in Latin America and the Caribbean
lacnic.net
lacnic.net
Can someone give me some idea of the situation with numbers that are easier to understand? Can we still limp through for a few years, or is this actually the crisis point?
> Since it began operating in 2002, the organization has assigned more than 182 million IPv4 addresses throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
182 million addresses in 12 years is roughly 15 million addresses per year, or 1.25 million addresses per month. At that rate 4 million addresses would last maybe 3 months.
IMHO all of the IPv4 exhaustion articles are basically scaremongering attempting drive adoption ahead of the real pressing need. Which isn't the worst goal, as it encourages people to become familiar (have YOU setup a tunnel from he.net, sixxs, or with 6to4/miredo and started playing around?). But I suspect we'll be hearing variations on the same "we're out! (but not really out)" story for the next 5 years at least.
But besides a larger address space, v6 doesn't really give new features (besides plausible deniability of what constitutes a host address) and just adds to packet overhead. So the only compelling reason will be the ever growing number of endpoints that are v6 only, and behind NAT (from businesses who decide that providing v4 addresses to new customers by default is too expensive). Other businesses wanting to better serve/track those customers (avoiding NAT64 etc) will then finally have a real reason to treat IPv6 as a first class concern.
Also it's a nice backup link for NATted WAN machines in case tinc/autossh/etc accidentally goes down.
1. The governments of the world push IPv6 legislation. Everyone invests the resources needed to migrate in a few years, overall everyone's pretty OK with this.
2. Carrier-grade NAT becomes much more widespread. People who need a public IP (mostly p2p users, I guess) pay more for that. Again, overall everyone's pretty happy.
3. Gradual, failover-friendly solutions are deployed. The network becomes fragmented, this plays out like IE6. After a few years, most of the people who matter get tired of this, pull support for IPv4.
In other words, I believe the limiting factor on v6 adoption is no longer technical or interop, instead it's lack of problems with v4.
One cable company used to do it in Brazil back in the 2000's
This is where many people can share one IP. But NAT has problems - you can make connections, but you can't accept connections from elsewhere. And it sometimes breaks particular applications.
The only real solution is widespread IPv6 adoption, which seems depressingly unlikely right now.
Slow maybe, but unlikely? No, not really. IPv6 internet has grown fairly steadily (and afaik at a growing pace) since its inception and I don't see any reason why that trend would slow down or stop. There hasn't been any real opposition or alternatives for IPv6, mostly just indifference and ignorance. More and more new gear supporting IPv6 natively out of the box is being deployed on the field, reasons for not enabling it are dwindling. XP just got deprecated, most end-user stuff probably already supports IPv6. Old network engineers retire someday, and new generation is well aware of the issue at hand.
Note that your link says something about trials / tests and so on. Many did that, yes, but not all of them actually deployed IPv6 in result.
The largest ISP in the USA, Comcast, has had IPv6 for a couple years now.
Or T-Mobile, which recently deployed 464XLAT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl-hIyZSAmA
I think the next big step for ISP's is to provide IPv6-only native service to their clients, and add IPv6-to-IPv4 gateways to allow access to IPv4-only internet.
Isn't that pretty much how DS-lite works?
Edit: for my money, NAT64 + DNS64 would get us 90% of the way there. OS support for pseudo-IPv4 would really fix this 100%: if the application wants to talk IPv4, the OS would transparently translate it into an IPv6 address in the 64:ff9b::/96 address prefix.
Personally, DS-Lite seems cleaner but I don't think it's worth arguing about.
From slide 8:
> Mobile networks don’t use DHCP, so no way to setup MAP or DS-lite without some heavy lifting in protocols and standards
Why can't the handset itself do the DS-lite IPv4 NAT/encapsulation, or why is 464XLAT easier to do on handset than DS-lite?
edit: found this gold-nugget of a slide: http://i.imgur.com/VhMSA2p.png ... ugh, just kinda weird/sad that this is still such an open problem.
Yeah, I've made exactly the same argument. As you found, there's a lot of history here. As I remember it, T-Mobile was originally pitching NAT64 because it required no support on the phone at all and DS-Lite would require the phone to do encapsulation. People pointed out that DS-Lite supports v4-only apps and NAT64 does not, but it seems like T-Mobile chose not to hear that argument. Then, having already committed to the NAT64 route, they added a stateless NAT46 agent on the phone to fix v4-only apps.
I think that agreeing on a standard is more valuable than continually iterating towards perfection, so I wish the industry had just declared DS-Lite "good enough" and stopped, but now we have this menagerie of transition schemes.
As in what is (unfortunately) actually being used. ISP's have taken so long to even begin to look at moving to IPv6 that stopgaps like CGN have to be put in place. Then, of course, why break what is working so IPv6 is put off even further.
That may be the best forcing function in IPv6 adoption.