Cisco 1801W, v6 on wireless, bvi argh.

[Benedikt Stockebrand]

Hi Gert and list,

> Well.  It's not like the 861 is an old product - there's 800 series
> routers that are much older and do IPv6 just fine, like the 836...

yes, but the early models were quite likely designed with a less
specific usage scenario in mind.

When a vendor first starts to build products for a market they are
unfamiliar with (in this case SoHo class routers), they try to keep
them flexible so they can serve a large market.  Once they understand
the market better and have established some reputation, they start to
"optimize" their products, possibly forking multiple product lines to
serve different segments of the market.

For that reason, whenever you buy a successor model to replace some
gear it always pays to check that all the features you need are still
available with the new one---especially when the new model is cheaper
than the old one.

Classic examples are the Adaptec 2940U/2940AU debacle years ago, the
SUNs move from E250 (server board) to E220R (workstation board) and of
course the assorted Linksys WRT54* products.

> So this is more like "how can a vendor position themselves as 'premium
> vendor' and 'we do IPv6 everywhere!' and at the same time design a 
> product in, what, 2005?, that cannot do IPv6?"

Did Cisco actually claim to "do IPv6 everywhere" as early as 2005?  As
far as I remember their IPv6 support at that time it was rather
limited, and considering the discussion about the 18xx series WLAN
interfaces they still aren't really up to speed today.

> It's not like this is a Linksys US$ 30 box...

No, the extra money you pay is for (some kind of) support,
possibly/hopefully better quality components and, most importantly,
proper lifetime management with an extended availability guarantee for
additional machines and spare parts, early on end-of-life
announcements and such.

Try to order an exact replacement for a two year^W^Wsix month old
Linksys router; chances are that you are told to try to buy one second
hand on ebay if you don't want one of the current models.

But otherwise it *is* like a Linksys box, only at a slightly higher
level.  Unless a feature is relevant to a significant part of the
intended market, you don't implement it to keep the price low.  And in
2005 very few people cared about spending money on IPv6, so spending
money to support IPv6 or even just to add the memory to allow IPv6 to
be retrofitted later on would have been counterproductive from a
business point of view.


Cheers,

    Benedikt

-- 
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Benedikt Stockebrand, Dipl.-Inform.   http://www.benedikt-stockebrand.de/