The state of IPv6 in South Africa?

[ambo]

Nope. You'll need an IPv6 address to access IPv6 sites, unless you go through some kind of HTTP(s) proxy server that does the conversion for you.

Actually no - you don't need a proxy. If you have an IPv6 only connection then your ISP can use DNS64/NAT64 to give you access to IPv4 sites. I use this quite sucessfully. Unfortunately your apps need to support IPv6 and there are still a few that don't (like Skype).

Of course... this doesn't work in the other direction An IPv4-only device can't reach IPv6 addresses without tunnels and proxies.

[ianst1024]

Actually no - you don't need a proxy. If you have an IPv6 only connection then your ISP can use DNS64/NAT64 to give you access to IPv4 sites. I use this quite sucessfully. Unfortunately your apps need to support IPv6 and there are still a few that don't (like Skype).

Of course... this doesn't work in the other direction An IPv4-only device can't reach IPv6 addresses without tunnels and proxies.

Is there any reason why windows apps don't just allow windows to handle the tcp/ip stack? I mean, if windows can handle the communication why doesn't skype just pass that job on to windows instead of trying to handle itself?

Here's an interesting read for those interested about how the security will work for IPv6
link

At least I feel pretty good about the security as long as you've made sure to set your firewall to default to deny-all. Do you guys think that when ISP's start dishing out IPv6 addresses that they'll dish out a subnet? Cause each of your devices will need an IP so they can't obviously give you just one. Or will they still do DHCP? If they do DHCP are our hopes of static IP addresses at home doomed to fail?

[ambo]

Is there any reason why windows apps don't just allow windows to handle the tcp/ip stack? I mean, if windows can handle the communication why doesn't skype just pass that job on to windows instead of trying to handle itself?

That is not always possible. It depends on how much control the app needs over the traffic flow. Typically anything doing peer-to-peer can't rely on the system.

Do you guys think that when ISP's start dishing out IPv6 addresses that they'll dish out a subnet? Cause each of your devices will need an IP so they can't obviously give you just one. Or will they still do DHCP? If they do DHCP are our hopes of static IP addresses at home doomed to fail?

The trend internationally is for an allocation of between 256 and 65536 subnets per end user. Even mobile phones get allocated a full subnet when they connect. These will still be dynamic allocations and you may still need to request a special service to get a static allocation. Practically - there is no requirement for changing dynamic allocations and its likely to be a headache to maintain. I'm certainly hopeful that allocations will be 'sticky' and only reallocated when you change ISP.

DHCPv6 would be a disaster. That would effectively mean that everyone would be on one giant LAN.

[ianst1024]

I don't think dhcp6 will be the disaster. I think it'll be the lack of knowledge about firewalls that will be. But I'm pretty sure networking appliances will default to some useable state.

Do phones receive an Internet ip address at the moment? Or do the providers do NAT on their side?

[Pada]

ianst1024:
Some mobile network operators give you public IP addresses, but most just give you private IPv4 addresses that they NAT/proxy.