[RRG] IPv6 immediate benefits to some end-users?

[Robin Whittle <rw@firstpr.com.au>]

In an off-list message, Fred Templin suggested something which
should have been obvious to me and which prompted this train of
thought - about a way IPv6 could be of immediate benefit to
end-users in a way that IPv4 can't:

Home and SOHO end-users typically have their PCs etc. behind NAT and
can only accept incoming communications directly, or run a server,
by messing with the NAT in their modems and doing other tricky
things.  Then, they would still need a dynamic DNS arrangement,
since their IP address is unstable.

If they had a native IPv6 service over the same DSL, cable modem or
fibre link - and a suitable new modem  - and if they were given a
stable IPv6 prefix that wouldn't change from one month or year to
the next, then they could run their own web servers, game servers
etc.  I know nothing about games and care less, but have been told
that some of them can use IPv6.

Likewise, some people are keen to run massive P2P file sharing apps,
including streaming P2P file sharing with packets coming from
multiple peers.  I guess supernodes for those systems are best on
public addresses, rather than behind NAT.

A problem with this is the limited upstream capacity of DSL and
DOCSIS cable modem services.  Likewise the extra admin and hardware
costs for IPv6 routing, IPv6 traffic counting and billing, IPv6
upstream links etc.  The service would have to cost more to pay for
the cost of getting a real, stable, native IPv6 address and the
separate stream of native IPv6 packets.

Perhaps some of these benefits could come via Teredo or 6to4,
probably with the modem doing the work rather than some PC behind
the IPv4 NAT system.  However, 6to4 and I think Teredo IPv6
addresses depend on the public IPv4 address of the modem.

This semi-permanent public IPv6 address is a direct benefit - for
some end-users - which can't be done with IPv4.  They could have
their own outpost on the frontier of the Net.

But this has been true for years.  If it is attractive, then where
is the evidence that end-users, beyond those with IETF technical
interests, are actually keen to pay for a real IPv6 service?

If there are attractions to at least some ordinary end-users, then
is this happening with free IPv6 tunneled services?

It can't be too hard to get Windows Teredo going, or use a tunnel
broker service.  Within 10 minutes of looking at:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_broker
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IPv6_tunnel_brokers
  http://broker.aarnet.net.au

I had an account and downloaded, compiled and installed the source
code "Gateway6 5.1 Source Code (Linux/Unix/Darwin/BSD) from:

 http://go6.net/4105/download.asp

on my CentOS 5.1 machine which directly handles the fixed IP address
of my DSL service. It went smoothly and I got a semi-permanent /56 .
Firefox on that machine could access http://ipv6.google.com .

  - Robin

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