N reasons for not deploying ipv6 (was: Re: [narten at us.ibm.com:PI addressing in IPv6 advances in ARIN])

[Sam.Wilson at ed.ac.uk]

Excuse me while I delurk.

> From:     Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch at muada.com>
> Date:     Mon, 17 Apr 2006 20:09:56 +0200
> 
> I think that's a fairy tale too. What kind of gear that you can buy  
> today can't do IPv6? And how much of that is un-upgradable? ...

- VOIP phone systems from at least one major manufacturer, and no
timescale for IPv6 support - big money and no idea about upgrades;

- management access to network kit - we have many hundred edge switches
on our campuses (OK we can continue to manage them on IPv4 private
addresses like we do now, but that's not the brave new world, is it?);

- IPv6 multicast support in edge switches - we're just beginning to get
IGMPv3 support in the latest products and there's enough IGMPv2 support
out there that we can envisage turning on IPv4 multicast most places
anyone needs it, though there are still significant islands of kit that
don't support it at all (switches running software whose release notes
are dated 1997, for instance).  It will be ~5-10 years before we could
think of having that stuff replaced with kit that's contemporary now. 


Sam Wilson
Network Development Team, Infrastructure Services Division
Computing Services, The University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK