Microsoft: Give Xbox One users IPv6 connectivity

[Jared Mauch]

On Oct 9, 2013, at 11:19 PM, Geoff Huston <gih at apnic.net> wrote:

> I applaud what you guys are doing, really, but from my perspective it looks like the reliance on Teredo is really quite scary given what we see out there about how it behaves, and I'm kinda wondering what I'm missing here that you obviously must've thought through in justifying this product decision! 

Geoff,

I've noticed some interesting behavior of the home-user CPE devices in recent years.  They continue to push into the "application aware" department, and bring with them the defects of that.  We're also seeing an increasing number of folks using carrier provided CPE in the states (eg: if you have ATT UVerse, you must use their device, including the software defects and lack of knobs that come with it).

These devices have many benefits of providing a consistent set of access, but also a consistent set of defects. It seems Microsoft is just using Teredo as their own "VPN" gateway to allow the relevant communication to be possible.  No different than an enterprise that provides an "office router" for the teleworker to connect to IT resources which might be behind a VPN.

I've seen the internet continuing to shift in this direction with services, either all tunneled over http/https because that isn't blocked.  They are just leveraging it to VPN out to avoid having a centralized server aggregate and relay as necessary.

This should be applauded as you mention above, as it preserves the e2e aspects while working around devices that are incapable of providing this type of service.

I for one anxiously await the update for the 360 devices to take advantage of the same technology ;)

It should resolve a significant number of IPv4 issues and if that were to come out, I suspect it would be a significant "killer app" driving adoption of IPv6 and upgrade of CPE/Cable Modems/whatnot.

- Jared