Subject: [RRG] IPv6 immediate benefits to some end-users?

From: Robin Whittle <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:30:50 +1000

In an off-list message, Fred Templin suggested something which
should have been obvious to me and which prompted this train of
thought - about a way IPv6 could be of immediate benefit to
end-users in a way that IPv4 can't:

Home and SOHO end-users typically have their PCs etc. behind NAT and
can only accept incoming communications directly, or run a server,
by messing with the NAT in their modems and doing other tricky
things.  Then, they would still need a dynamic DNS arrangement,
since their IP address is unstable.

If they had a native IPv6 service over the same DSL, cable modem or
fibre link - and a suitable new modem  - and if they were given a
stable IPv6 prefix that wouldn't change from one month or year to
the next, then they could run their own web servers, game servers
etc.  I know nothing about games and care less, but have been told
that some of them can use IPv6.

Likewise, some people are keen to run massive P2P file sharing apps,
including streaming P2P file sharing with packets coming from
multiple peers.  I guess supernodes for those systems are best on
public addresses, rather than behind NAT.

A problem with this is the limited upstream capacity of DSL and
DOCSIS cable modem services.  Likewise the extra admin and hardware
costs for IPv6 routing, IPv6 traffic counting and billing, IPv6
upstream links etc.  The service would have to cost more to pay for
the cost of getting a real, stable, native IPv6 address and the
separate stream of native IPv6 packets.

Perhaps some of these benefits could come via Teredo or 6to4,
probably with the modem doing the work rather than some PC behind
the IPv4 NAT system.  However, 6to4 and I think Teredo IPv6
addresses depend on the public IPv4 address of the modem.

This semi-permanent public IPv6 address is a direct benefit - for
some end-users - which can't be done with IPv4.  They could have
their own outpost on the frontier of the Net.

But this has been true for years.  If it is attractive, then where
is the evidence that end-users, beyond those with IETF technical
interests, are actually keen to pay for a real IPv6 service?

If there are attractions to at least some ordinary end-users, then
is this happening with free IPv6 tunneled services?

It can't be too hard to get Windows Teredo going, or use a tunnel
broker service.  Within 10 minutes of looking at:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_broker
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IPv6_tunnel_brokers
  http://broker.aarnet.net.au

I had an account and downloaded, compiled and installed the source
code "Gateway6 5.1 Source Code (Linux/Unix/Darwin/BSD) from:

 http://go6.net/4105/download.asp

on my CentOS 5.1 machine which directly handles the fixed IP address
of my DSL service. It went smoothly and I got a semi-permanent /56 .
Firefox on that machine could access http://ipv6.google.com .

  - Robin

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---

From: Jeroen Massar <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:51:20 +0200

[ Quick link: http://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/ ;) ]

Robin Whittle wrote:
> things.

Which is the sole reason I got into IPv6: I had only one public address 
and that was not enough, thus I then joined the then tunnelbroker 
IPng.nl as a user and started using it in various places, later joining 
the team at which point we made the move into making it into SixXS as we 
have today. Per default you get a /64 tunnel, and a /48 if you have 
earned enough credits (providing a Linked/XING link gets you there).

> interests, are actually keen to pay for a real IPv6 service?

The problem with IPv6 is of course chicken and egg: the local and remote 
side AND the path in between need to support it.

"Normal" users don't know about e2e though and they just know how to 
prod their NAT box to do what they want, also most applications 
circumvent those things with ease using uPNP and other such protocols.

AICCU (http://www.sixxs.net/tools/aiccu/) exists to fill the niche where 
people who don't want to know how to setup a tunnel can still use these 
kind of services. This helped in usage rate quite a bit over the years:

http://www.sixxs.net/misc/usage/
http://www.sixxs.net/misc/requests/

The numbers (which are actual users, not people who ever signed up and 
are not using the service anymore) are still going up but not very fast, 
most likely because we very strict policies on who we accept and require 
valid data to be provided, if that doesn't happen people get rejected; I 
can assume that quite a number don't even signup because they don't want 
to provide this data, they just forget that they do provide those 
details to their ISPs and we are just that: an IPv6 ISP.

Also it is not an anonymous service and we loath abusers, this signup 
policy weeds out quite a number of those already. If we would have an 
anonymous signup I am pretty sure that the numbers of users would 
explode and so would the abuse, thus that is not going to happen, we 
really love being a stable users for the people who actually use it in a 
decent way. (Of course an ISP can have an anonymous mode for their own 
PoP etc, it is their PoP thus their policies are implemented, but we are 
not going to handle abuse for that mode of setup)

> is this happening with free IPv6 tunneled services?

Yes, from what I have seen in the request reasons quite a few people 
signup because of NNTP access to a couple of servers in .nl, see 
http://www.sixxs.net/misc/coolstuff/ for a list of other "Cool Stuff".

Multicast is also something that I sometimes work on and try to get up 
and running fully, though demand is not really big unfortunately thus 
people don't report it when it breaks. Because it does break it is 
marked as an experimental service.

> Firefox on that machine could access http://ipv6.google.com .

Depends on where you are though, as from what I understand the go6 
service is heavily overloaded and up/download speeds are thus very low 
as such hurting deployment as people then state "IPv6 is slow", ignoring 
the point that they are running into a bottleneck on the other side of 
the planet. This might quite well shy away people who try to go down 
that avenue too.

Check http://www.sixxs.net/misc/traffic/ for the traffic stats per PoP. 
Not a lot, but it is going somewhere compared to a few years ago.

Greets.
  Jeroen

---

From: "Templin, Fred L" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:48:38 -0700

Hi Robin, 

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Robin Whittle [mailto:[email-masked]] 
>Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 9:31 PM
>To: Routing Research Group
>Subject: [RRG] IPv6 immediate benefits to some end-users?
>

If their IPv4 NAT also becomes an IPv6 router that gets a
proper IPv6 prefix delegation and can sub-delegate to nodes
inside the NATed domain, then it doesn't matter if the IPv4
addresses inside the NATed domain are unstable. 

>addresses depend on the public IPv4 address of the modem.

You are forgetting about ISATAP. That, plus site border routers
that get stable IPv6 prefixes gives you the ability to use IPv6
addresses w/o embedded IPv4 addresses (unless the stable IPv6
prefix is being served by 6to4).

>their own outpost on the frontier of the Net.

Sure.

>Firefox on that machine could access http://ipv6.google.com .

If you have IPv6 routers attached to your private IPv4 network,
ISATAP is much more flexible and efficient than tunnel broker.
(If you don't, Teredo should take care of things automatically.)

Fred
[email-masked]

---

From: David Conrad <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:46:52 -0700

Robin,

> interests, are actually keen to pay for a real IPv6 service?

a) The vast majority of end users simply want (to consume) their pr0n,  
they don't care how it gets to them
b) ISPs actively discourage it because it breaks their business models/ 
requires new or different 'stuff'
c) Very few of the applications end users want to run support IPv6
d) Very few of the content providers end users want to connect to  
support IPv6
e) all of the above

Regards,
-drc