On killing IPv6 transition mechanisms

[Ole Troan]

Ted,

>>> I wonder, how no connectivity could be better than some?
>> because content providers measure the difference between IPv4 and
>> IPv6 behaviour for dual stack hosts. if the number of hosts with
>> broken IPv6 connectivity or with significantly worse latency than
>> IPv4, they will not enable IPv6.
>> to put it bluntly: if you don't get IPv6 from your SP, then don't
>> bother. you are doing more harm to IPv6 deployment than good.
> 
> Please quit FUDDing.  Content providers only care that customers on
> the Internet are able to get at their offerings.  Ebay, Craigslist and Amazon don't give a crap about latency of a connection if they get a
> credit card number over the connection for a valid order.  And there
> are still a VERY LARGE minority of people on dialup-only IPv4, so
> quit being a connectivity snob - the worst IPv6 broadband connection
> out there is going to have lower latency than a 56k dialup modem!!!

see: https://sites.google.com/site/ipv6implementors/conference2009/agenda/10_Lees_Google_IPv6_User_Measurement.pdf?attredirects=0

which shows that a dual stack host is about 150ms slower using IPv6 than IPv4, and that ~0.08% of the hosts have broken IPv6. (please take notice in the presentation that there is quite a bit of statistical uncertainty because of few IPv6 clients).

> While the IPv6 deployment isn't served by "broken IPv6 connectivity" any content provider looking at IPv6 knows 2 things, first that most if not all IPv6 connections to their dual-stacked servers are "beta testing",
> (since IPv4 is still available from the RIR's)  second that the more
> connectivity options they have to their servers the greater the chance
> that someone will be able to connect to them and get their content.
> 
> You seem to assume the content providers on the Internet are idiots.
> They know that IPv6 right now is in it's infancy, and they are watching
> the usage of it.  What is more important right now is GETTING the
> IPv6 connections from users, not how good they are.  That's what
> they are paying attention to.

if I was a content provider I would look hard at those numbers above to judge if I wanted to piss off 0.08% of my customers and slow down the web site for a quarter of a percent of the others.

if we continue to push for mechanisms which have higher probability of delivering broken IPv6 connectivity and/or high latency then I'm afraid that content providers will be reluctant to enable IPv6.

and users will disable it. see:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=disable+ipv6%2C+enable+ipv6

(and no, not even I pretend that the above is scientific, but users shouldn't search for "disable ipv6" at all. ;-))

cheers,
Ole


> 
> Lastly, SP's aren't going to offer IPv6 unless they see monetary loss by not offering it.  Obviously the best way is customer loss but there are others. Currently, Ivan's VPN solution essentially REWARDS his current non-IPv6-offering SP - however, Ivan can easily counteract that by calling into his SP, weekly if necessary, demanding IPv6.  It costs
> a SP money to pay labor to answer the telephone, and if Ivan makes 2
> phone calls a month and gets a live human being at his SP on the
> phone for at least 10 minutes, "filibustering" for IPv6, (ie:
> talking on and on an on touting his IPv6 VPN solution and how much
> better native IPv6 would be) then he will have eaten up all profit for the month for his SP on his account - and if enough people do this, then even SP's who are hostile to IPv6 will be forced to deploy it.
> 
> Ted