> From: William McCall
> Sent: Wednesday, January 27, 2010 7:51 PM
> Subject: Re: Comcast IPv6 Trials
>
> Saw this today too. This is a good step forward for adoption. Without
> going too far, what was the driving factor/selling point to moving
> towards this trial?
SWAG: Comcast is a mobile operator. At some point NAT becomes very
expensive for mobile devices and it makes sense to use IPv6 where you
don't need to do NAT. Once you deploy v6 on your mobile net, it is to
your advantage to have the stuff your mobile devices connect to also be
v6. Do do THAT your network needs to transport v6 and once your net is
ipv6 enabled, there is no reason not to leverage that capability to the
rest of your network. /SWAG
My gut instinct says that mobile operators will be a major player in v6
adoption.
SWAG is wrong. Comcast is a major cable TV, telephone (VoIP), and
Internet provider, but they don't do mobile (so far).
What I've heard is that the driver is IPv4 exhaustion: Comcast is
starting to have enough subscribers that it can't address them all out
of 10/8 -- ~millions of subscribers, each with >1 IP address (e.g.,
for user data / control of the cable box).
What I've heard is that the driver is IPv4 exhaustion: Comcast is
starting to have enough subscribers that it can't address them all out
of 10/8 -- ~millions of subscribers, each with >1 IP address (e.g.,
for user data / control of the cable box).
But then that begs the question of why lots of other very large retail Internet access providers have not indicated that they're committed to the same course of action (?).
They're certainly not the only provider that employs a public IP address-intensive access model, so where are the other retail IPv6 trial announcements/pre-announcements?
If they start appearing with some frequency real soon now, then maybe it's just a time-until-overflow issue. If not, then maybe there are other/better explanations.
That really makes sense - on an incredibly smaller scale (and I mean MUCH smaller scale), we operate cable modem in two small communities - currently we use 3 IP addresses per subscriber. One for the cable modem itself, one for the subscriber (or more depending on their package), and one for voice delivery (packetcable). If we moved even two of three IP assignments to native V6 we'd reclaim a lot of V4 space - I can only imagine someone their size and what this means...
They'll need to be soon to keep up with others in their space (not that they
generally compete directly thanks to franchise laws), although I'm not sure
how the data side of things is handled for MVNO's, normally they don't have
any network of their own:
From: tvest@eyeconomics.com [mailto:tvest@eyeconomics.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 08:12
To: Richard Barnes
Cc: NANOG
Subject: Re: Comcast IPv6 Trials
<SNIP>
But then that begs the question of why lots of other very large retail
Internet access providers have not indicated that they're committed to the
same course of action (?).
They're certainly not the only provider that employs a public IP address-
intensive access model, so where are the other retail IPv6 trial
announcements/pre-announcements?
Other providers are moving in that direction, atleast a couple are (as a
swag) 6-18 months behind Comcast ...
I have no particular reason to to doubt that claim, and lots of reasons to actively hope that you are right.
That said, the appearance of more public commitments like this -- and sooner rather than later -- could make a large difference, e.g., by reducing the general level of uncertainty (and uncertainty-amplifying speculation) during the terminal stages of IPv4 allocation.
While no commercial entity would (and none should) willingly make such a public commitment before they're ready, it would be prudent to consider the potential downsides of that looming uncertainty when making judgements about how "ready" (or perhaps "ready enough") should be defined.
steve pirk:> Does G4 count? I have seen fliers from Comcast talking
about mobile G4
Comcast is using Clearwire for 4G. Seattle 4G rolled-out about 2
weeks ago. Many more markets to be turned-up this spring. No IPv6 in
the configs at this time, but most of the core seems capable. Clear
is layer-2 up to the major market POPs so it would seem to be mostly a
config/firmware change on the network side.
Typically the CPE address is private, not sure why they would use a
public IP. The MTA (VoIP) part of the modem would need a public IP if
it was talking to a SIP server that was not on the same network. Most
smaller cable system outsource their VoIP to a reseller with a softswitch.
---- ---- ---- ----
Chris Gotstein, Sr Network Engineer, UP Logon/Computer Connection UP http://uplogon.com | +1 906 774 4847 | chris@uplogon.com
What I've heard is that the driver is IPv4 exhaustion: Comcast is
starting to have enough subscribers that it can't address them all out
of 10/8 -- ~millions of subscribers, each with >1 IP address (e.g.,
for user data / control of the cable box).
What do you meaning starting, that happened years ago.
15 million ip subscribers, 6 million voice subscribers, 30 million cable
tv subscribers...