IPv6

[ebendl]

Do anybody know the current status regarding IPv6 in South Africa?

Okay, this is for a university assignment, so specific information would be nice. But it did get me thinking - is Telkom, WBS, Sentech, the mobile operators etc. even worried?

Then again, it is only places like China where Internet-users is starting to rise in the billions. I can already see it know - in 10 years the world will be surfing at 10Gbps using IPv6, and in SA we will be stuck with 1Mbps (at best) using IPv4...

 

[Karnaugh]

hi

UUnet offer native IPv6. ([email protected] if you're interested, i think)

IPv6 has nothing to do with bandwidth, its just the address space which uses a 128bit model as opposed to IPv4 which uses a 32bit address space. Infact you'd probably have mildly less bandwidth due to overhead.

The IPv6 network in general is rather flimsy and most of the peering is not native, but tunneld over IPv4 - which is a bad situation as well as lots of software not supporting it properly.

The main differences you might be interested in are routing and mobile networks.

Even with the increase in people using the internet, most people see that the IPv4 address space has lots more left in it. Personaly I dont agree, but unfortunatly ignorant first tier ISP's and equipment manufacturers make it expensive for alot of people to switch over - and it has no present benefits.

 

[stoke]

The only reason i'd advocate IPv6 is because of the improvements in the protocol specific to broadcasting/streaming, it'll actually save huge amounts of bandwidth, and can be compared to bittorrent's methodology if you need a comparison.

Personally, the new terminology that they came up with for the protocol is confusing, and that's the principal reason (IMHO) (besides new routers + cost) for not upgrading to IPv6.

 

[ebendl]

The only reason i'd advocate IPv6 is because of the improvements in the protocol specific to broadcasting/streaming, it'll actually save huge amounts of bandwidth, and can be compared to bittorrent's methodology if you need a comparison.

Personally, the new terminology that they came up with for the protocol is confusing, and that's the principal reason (IMHO) (besides new routers + cost) for not upgrading to IPv6.

Broadcasting/streaming? I was unaware of this. As far as I know, the major improvements are
-Support for realtime services
-Security enhancements
-Autoconfiguration
-Enhanced routing
-Addressing (the biggest issue, right?)

Btw, this is what my networks-textbook specify.

Do you feel that we can still survive on IPv4 (regarding address-space) for a few years?

 

[Perdition]

The broadcasting/streaming that stoke is referring to would fall under "Enhanced routing" and possibly also "realtime services" (they're a bit vague there).

I'm sure there is still at least a few years left in IPv4. Some Eastern countries like Japan use IPv6 quite heavily internally and tunnel over IPv4 when accessing external sites. Just about all major backbone routers support IPv6 but you can't just flick a switch and change everyone over, it will be a gradual process (at least until the entire IPv4 address space is exhausted and people are forced to use IPv6).