Some of you may have seen slightly panicky facebook post yesterday but here’s a quick update.
I’m now back in Japan at my parents place in Tokyo. I’ll be around Tokyo till mid January then back to PhD again! (Not that I won’t be logging into my machines remotely over my mum’s computer as I left CS laptop in UK)
Despite the 30-45 min delay on Edinburg -> Brussels flight, I made it to NH 232 for Tokyo, Narita with my check-in baggage.
In the context of going home, as computer science student, I will be asked to take a look around things at home. Like your mum’s computer and home network devices. And when I did so, there was some discovery I wanted to address with regards to the topic of the Internet. So here we go (sorry for the long intro):
In Japan, OCN has the largest share as ISP for home users, which actually is Tier-1 network operator. They’ve been announcing rollout of IPv6 for good 5 years and its actually going forward. This year, they have actually rolled out as double stack IPv4/IPv6 network and I was curious how well it would happen in a fairly standard home network.
Turns out, it is doing perfectly well. Any device at home has both IPv4 and IPv6 address, managing to access my blog and handful of other places via IPv6. I have once heard “IPv6 migration would fail because ‘my parents in 70s won’t understand IPv6′” But in reality, all operating systems nowadays are IPv6 ready, network devices are ready, it all came down to the home gateway router configuration distributed by ISP. (And to be honest, 90% of people using internet nowadays also do not understand IPv4 anyways)
In Britain, I’m aware that Sky and BT is rolling out IPv4/IPv6 Dual Stack setups. Sky mentioned 80%+ of their customer has already migrated in the summer 2016. So they (OCN and Sky) are another examples of “IPv6 migration is happening in HUGE scale” and it all comes down to those who serve services on the internet (Web servers etc.) and those who serve the connectivity (ISP, Mobile carrier). As someone who puts content on the internet, I run this server dual stacked to contribute to this push for IPv6. (Please tell me if you ever have a problem accessing my blog/sites with IPv6 as, in St Andrews, I don’t have ANY IPv6 connectivity) And I am now more convinced of the opinion that “IPv6 roll out to homes will fail” theory I kept hearing.
Maybe it’s time to push the university to enable IPv6 network for us, lol. Can’t really understand why they didn’t.
The main problem here probably is the control plane. They have to maintain IPv4 regardless, and that is already complex enough to be handled by very few network engineers. So the access control/routing/any other tweaking applied to IPv4 needs to be reflected to IPv6. And IPv6 by it’s nature is a complicated one so I believe that is the main reason why. I won’t say this is a ‘good reason’ not to do IPv6 and still think this sends a terrible message to the world as research institution. But I could imagine them turning and say so if we ask this.