Asking for practical advice on choosing /48 vs. /56 on a residential
broadband CPE is largely unanswerable.
Why?
Because I don't know of any residential broadband CPEs that support IPv6.
If one doesn't look then you won't find it.
I want to be wrong about that. Seriously. Send me a link to one. I want
to be wrong. (And by residential, I mean a CPE/router/firewall that costs
less than $150US.)
Any device with a docsis 3.0 cable modem embedded in it (Scientific
atlanta/cisco DRG2800 for example)
probably more now that CES is going on right now.
etc
just an anecdote real quick.
So I stayed on a small guest house on the southern outskirts of Toyko a
couple of weeks ago and along with the luxury of getting breakfast with
my $80 a night 9-tatami room, the complimentary wifi shared with 4 other
guests had v4 and v6 provided via kddi residental vdsl. My hostess who
was 75 if she was a day had email down pretty well but I wouldn't
characterize her a technical user.
I want to be wrong about that. Seriously. Send me a link to one. I want
to be wrong. (And by residential, I mean a CPE/router/firewall that costs
less than $150US.)
If you go to ARIN IPv6 Wiki - ARIN's Vault
there is at least one presentation from Comcast, a residential
broadband provider who explained that they simply cannot continue
in business without IPv6. They started IPv6 deployment planning
in 2005. If you don't know of CPE that supports IPv6, maybe you
should ask a broadband ISP that is serious about surviving in business
past the crunch of 2010.
I agree. I regularly ask my vendors when IPv6 support is coming. All of them, from ComTrend to Zoom to 3com to etc. have stated that they are not even started working on IPv6 yet. They all plan on it, though, for what that is worth. The closest I've found so far is the soho boxes from cisco. Not really aimed at the residential market, however.
Business-level service is supported now, of course.
IMO, the only answers so far:
businesses get /48
dialup gets /64
Wrong!
The answer so far is that EVERYBODY gets a /48, but if you think that
there is a risk that you won't be able to get additional /32s when you
outgrow your first allocation, then give a /56 to RESIDENTIAL SITES. This is not the same as dialup, i.e. residential sites could be
connected
with DSL, T1s, wireless, or whatever. In fact, if a business is
connected via dialup, you should give them a /48, because businesses have a habit
of
continuous growth, unlike residences which tend to top out at 5 or 6
residents.
We will probably disagree about this one. I will probably give out /48 to residential broadband when we expand IPv6 to residential. But dialup users typically have zero networks; not even the single LAN of res broadband. The "CPE" is the laptop (or PC) they dialed in with. ARIN says "/64 when it is known that one and only one subnet is needed".
Not that changing "all" of our IPv6 dialup users would take more than a couple of calls :). Talk about a narrow niche.
I want to be wrong about that. Seriously. Send me a link to one. I want
to be wrong. (And by residential, I mean a CPE/router/firewall that
costs
less than $150US.)
Any device with a docsis 3.0 cable modem embedded in it (Scientific
atlanta/cisco DRG2800 for example)
probably more now that CES is going on right now.
Thanks for the links. I'll have to investigate the airport extreme's
IPv6 support. At a $180 it's at the extreme price end for resi, but it's
closer.
Do you know of a north american vendor for the ampg300nh? I don't know
Japanese, so I could not glean it from the page.
There's currently an injunction preventing buffalo from selling wireless
technology in north america. Win lose or settle it seems likely that
they'll be back on the shelf at fry's eventually.
The odms that make these things work of a common pile of components
(from broadcom marvell atmel etc) includings software so it's only a
matter of time before you see the same features in other products.
Hm... How do you provision IPv6 for dial-up, anyway? PPP won't give you an IPv6 address and vendors have different opinions on stateless autoconfig (RAs) over PPP links.
> The answer so far is that EVERYBODY gets a /48, but if you
think that
> there is a risk that you won't be able to get additional
/32s when you
> outgrow your first allocation, then give a /56 to RESIDENTIAL SITES.
> This is not the same as dialup, i.e. residential sites could be
> connected with DSL, T1s, wireless, or whatever. In fact, if
a business
> is connected via dialup, you should give them a /48, because
> businesses have a habit of continuous growth, unlike
residences which
> tend to top out at 5 or 6 residents.
>
We will probably disagree about this one. I will probably
give out /48 to residential broadband when we expand IPv6 to
residential. But dialup users typically have zero networks;
not even the single LAN of res broadband.
I'm not talking about old folks hanging on to their 386 running
Windows 3.1. There is a vast expanse of real estate known as
rural America that is unlikely to get broadband anytime soon
due to the large distance from the exchange. But these residential
sites are often also family businesses with a network in the barn,
one in the feed silo, etc., etc. They deserve to be assigned an
IPv6 allocation under the same terms as urban sites, i.e. a /48.
Admittedly there are issues in getting IPv6 access to these folks
but in a world in which there aren't enough free IPv4 addresses,
it is still doable using an IPv4 island containing their modem
gateway, your terminal server and your IPv6 tunnel broker. Because
it's an IPv4 island you can hijack any old IPv4 addresses and nobody
will notice. And using IPv4 for transport avoids the need to upgrade
PPP and terminal servers to support IPv6. Those old IPv4 terminal
servers aren't likely to wear out anytime soon.
Not that changing "all" of our IPv6 dialup users would take
more than a couple of calls :). Talk about a narrow niche.
For a rural ISP, it might be the core of their business.
One size does not fit all. There is still room for good old-fashioned
hackery in making an IPv6 Internet functional, just like the early
days of the commercial Internet when people were building terminal
servers out of Linux boxes, and hacking things like PoP before SMTP
to glue things together.
free.fr use their own (broadcom-based) CPE which runs modified 6to4,
their subscribers get one /64 (from free's allocation, not the classic
2002:: of normal 6to4). I don't know about costs (it also handles
VoIP and video) but it's definitely residential.
as you might expect, this results in people doing nasty tricks so they
can use their own firewalls, see http://ip6.fr/free-broute/ (in French,
but fig.2 tells all).
The former is intended for residential users while the latter is
intended for SOHO and teleworkers. The 870 cisco series supports IPv6
with the "Cisco IOS Software Features on Cisco 870 Series
Routers-Advanced Security Feature Set".
I'm not aware of prices though. I guess it depends on local dealers in
each region.