6to4 status (again)

[Keith Moore]

On 02/26/2013 01:23 AM, Lorenzo Colitti wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 3:07 PM, Keith Moore 
> <moore at network-heretics.com <mailto:moore at network-heretics.com>> wrote:
>
>     The problem is that the advice is based on a false premise. Native
>     access is NOT yet widely available in many parts of the world.  
>     If it were, there wouldn't be much 6to4 traffic, and turning off
>     6to4 relays wouldn't cause problems.
>
>     So a recommendation to drop 6to4 relays would, at the present
>     time, be a very harmful recommendation.
>
>
> Sure, but as far as I can see, the only alternatives are:
>
>  1. Upgrade the box with 10G interfaces, incurring substantial cost.
>  2. Drop the packets, degrading service quality.
>
> Suppose operators take the position that they don't want to upgrade 
> the relays because most of the traffic on them comes from third party 
> networks, and thus #1 is infeasible. What then?

What I find myself thinking is that if you're not willing to spend more 
money on faster interfaces to the relays (which I see as a purely 
business decision, similar to whether to procure faster links to a 
peer), then one alternative to shutting down the relay entirely might be 
to advertise the route to that relay less favorably, so that it doesn't 
look like a good route to as many peers, thus reducing the load that way.

Hopefully more access providers will take up the slack so as to provide 
better 6to4 service for their customers, at least until those providers 
provide native v6 access to their customers.   But I do see 6to4 relay 
as a service that probably has to migrate closer to the edge over time 
until there's no longer a need for it.

Keith

p.s. At my great distance, it does seem a bit odd for an operator to 
say, in effect, "too many people are wanting to send traffic to this 
prefix, therefore we need to shut down our link to it."     Is that the 
way operators think about prefixes in general?   But I also realize that 
there's nobody who speaks for 2002::/16 so there's no way to go to them 
and say "you need to pay us for more bandwidth". And I don't think that 
just because an operator is willing to run a relay, that this implies 
that they have to spend arbitrary amounts of money to keep it from 
dropping packets.

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