I'm cynical enough to think we may not see widespread ipv6 (or any alternative to ipv4) for a long time. Why not?
A) The entrenched power players "have theirs"
B) It will cost a lot of money for the big players to upgrade.
C) Instead of spending money, the big players can make money by charging for something that is a scarce resource.
This will be looked at as pure 'market forces' by many and there will be no major push for a long time.
It also requires a heck of a lot of coordination, or so it seems, between major players. Why do so few (none?) retail stores carry ipv6-capable routers? Maybe because so few ISPs support ipv6? Why don't the ISPs support it? Cause no consumers have the hardware for it? Extreme chicken and egg, and the only real downside for the next few years is some orgs are in control of resources that are becoming potentially more valuable by the day. What real incentive do they have to upgrade to ipv6 ASAP?
Not really; they have enough to support 1-2 years of customer growth. After that, they have to do something.
C) Instead of spending money, the big players can make money by charging for something that is a scarce resource.
If you have N million addresses and N+1 million customers, charging more per address (i.e. raising prices) doesn't really help you; all it does is turn away the cheapest customers. I don't think ISPs are eager to try the Oracle business model of squeezing your existing customers harder instead of getting new customers.
Why do so few (none?) retail stores carry ipv6-capable routers?
> Why do so few (none?) retail stores carry ipv6-capable routers? Maybe because so few ISPs support ipv6? Why don't the ISPs support it? Cause no consumers have the hardware for it?
I have a, um, Netgear WNR3500L, which is supposedly available at places like Office Depot and Walmart. It supports several kinds of IPv6, one of which is "6to4 tunnel" and which test-ipv6.com tells me works just fine on my Comcast connection. According to http://www.comcast6.net/ it looks like Comcast will be providing "real" IPv6 sometime this year.
6rd is an improvisation on the motive of 6to4 and ISATAP: you have IPv4 prefix which you use as a carrier for the tunneled traffic, the synthesized IPv6 addresses have a part within them that allows to know which IPv4 within your domain to forward the tunneled traffic to.
If the IPv6 is outside of your 6rd domain - then the tunneled traffic is sent to the border relay, which decapsulates it and sends to the rest of the IPv6 internet.
Should be implementable with the firmware upgrade - assuming the memory allows for IPv6 code altogether - and, that the supplier decides to do the update (as opposed to shipping a new model).
A whole lot of el-cheapo boxes are supported by openwrt:
A) The entrenched power players "have theirs" B) It will cost a lot of money for the big players to upgrade. C) Instead of spending money, the big players can make money by charging for something that is a scarce resource.
This will be looked at as pure 'market forces' by many and there will be no major push for a long time.
It also requires a heck of a lot of coordination, or so it seems, between major players. Why do so few (none?) retail stores carry ipv6-capable routers? Maybe because so few ISPs support ipv6? Why don't the ISPs support it? Cause no consumers have the hardware for it? Extreme chicken and egg, and the only real downside for the next few years is some orgs are in control of resources that are becoming potentially more valuable by the day. What real incentive do they have to upgrade to ipv6 ASAP?