Hello everyone. My name is Elliott Karpilovsky, a student at Princeton
University. In collaboration with Alex Gerber (AT&T Research), Dan Pei (AT&T
Research), Jennifer Rexford (Princeton University), and Aman Shaikh (AT&T
Research), we studied the extent of IPv6 deployment at both global and local
levels. Our conclusions can be summarized by the following three points:
1.) IPv6 deployment is not seen as a pressing issue.
Agreed. SPs are driven by customers. Customers, generally, still want the
IPv4 net. However, at least where I am at, we have started to gain more and
more demand for IPv6 services (in this case, its specific to Private IP
services). The relief is hampered by the ability to provide the service
quality demanded by our customers. As an SP, if you can't provide the
quality and technology together, you will push back to stave it off until
you are able to provide both (either way is less than optimal, but one way
results in losing whole accounts and the other is just a minor setback)
2.) We saw a lack of meaningful IPv6 traffic (mostly DNS/Domain and ICMP
messages), possibly indicating that IPv6 networks are still experimental.
There is not a widespread adoption yet. Until SPs are deploying gear that is
adept to handling this traffic and able to guarantee the service quality,
there will not be a significant load on the IPv6 infrastructure. On a
separate rant, since we have to NAT/PAT on IPv4 already, who really cares if
we NAT/PAT between IPv4 and IPv6? Interop as a transition tool would
certainly hasten the deployment of IPv6. With major SW vendors now providing
full support for the IPv6 suite, SPs that provide interop with IPv4 can
start the migration sooner rather than later.
3.) Studying Teredo traffic suggested that it may be used for NAT busting
by P2P networks.
Kudos to the p2p developers/users who have gone this route. What an
intuitive way to handle matters.
Unfortunately, I will have to state that that thus completely makes that
whole paper useless as the data is used is just that: useless.
I really really really hope that AT&T finally realizes that they have to
start deploying IPv6.
When they have done that, re-run your "study" and then release those
numbers as then they will maybe be interesting when there are actual
customers on the links.
Greets,
Jeroen
From our perspective as net engineers, this is how we are going to view
this. The information in the document gives *some* good information, but
Jeroen is right... the data coming off of AT&T nodes doesn't give any
credence to the report. The report *does* tell us that there is still an
active effort to avoid IPv6. The rationale used to derrive the conclusions
in the report is lacking at best, harmful to adoption at worst. I feel that
the grossly incomplete data will be percieved as a lot of FUD coming off
this report, but I'm unsure who it would benefit to maintain such stances
(except a current Tier-1 IPv4 provider who doesn't have the same status in
the IPv6 Internet).