Question Concerning IPV6

I got a pop-up when I was at the Yahoo Web Site the other day. It said I could check to make sure that I had IPV6 capability.

When I tested it, Yahoo said that I had a problem. But, I DO have the IPV6 protocol [Win XP] enabled on my computer.

I then checked Microsoft and it ran an automatic program that said my computer was IPV6 ready, but that I only had IPV4 connectivity.

Am I correct in assuming that it is my ISP that is limiting me to IPV4 at the moment?

WinXP is not competely IPv6 ready, never was, and never will be. There was only a patch for a limited IPv6 support. It may be sufficient for your needs, or may not be.

Regardless, it is rocket science to set up a working, routable, firewalled IPv6 LAN today. I suggest you don't even go there. If you must, PFSense is one way to do it; but you need to be a computer scientist to even read that Web site.

Eventually IPv6 will be delivered to us all by our ISPs, through routers that they will provide to us. At this time it isn't happening. The latest router from 2Wire, used by AT&T U-Verse and installed a week ago, doesn't deal in IPv6, as far as I can tell.

Your computer, your network card, your router, your cable modem, your entire cable company infrastructure, the backbone internet provider, all the way up to Yahoo needs to be IPv6 in order to work.

Converting the whole Internet to IPv6 will probably cost billions, as millions of very expensive pro-level routers and firewalls need to be switched out, along with hundreds of millions of cable modems, DSL boxes and home routers.

Your computer, your network card, your router, your cable modem, your entire cable company infrastructure, the backbone internet provider, all the way up to Yahoo needs to be IPv6 in order to work.

I must add one more item to that list: All your expensive computer SOFTWARE needs to support IPv6 in order to work.

This is something many people overlook. It is not obvious what software supports what. Does Adobe Reader support IPv6? Apparently yes. Does Skype support IPv6? Seems like no, it doesn't. Well, Skype is a requirement in many households. Does WebEx support IPv6? Looks like no - and that is a requirement in many businesses.

There are millions of pieces of software out there, some obscure, some invisible to the user. Many of them are out of maintenance, and it would cost big bucks to upgrade. Some of those software packages cost tens of thousands of dollars per copy! It is a real nightmare to go through your list of software and figure out what works and what doesn't. Even if some ISV claims IPv6 support it doesn't mean that it really works - they couldn't possibly test it well when the software was written and licensed to you. A whole bunch of software (and hardware) can't be replaced and can't be on an IPv6 network.

The current approach is "the dual stack" - meaning that IPv4 remains the main workhorse, and IPv6 is also enabled to allow migration of services from IPv4. Once the majority of people are comfortable with IPv6 they may drop the IPv4 service completely. If you ask me, it may easily take a decade to get to that point even if we start today, which isn't really happening either.

Outside of the hardware and software upgrade, an upgrade of skills is also required. The NAT that is bread and butter of household routers is supposed to be cast away as a bad dream. We are supposed to have routable IP addresses on each of our devices, and we are supposed to get special IPv6 firewalls for that. If you want one today you probably need to build one yourself. In other words, it's not easy, and it requires massive support by the industry. Today it's pretty hard even for an experienced software engineer to put together a working IPv6 solution for his own home - he has to do all the legwork himself, unless his ISP offers it in a box.

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