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Monday, May 08, 2006

Does IPV6 Have A Future?

One guy thinks not. Todd Underwood, Chief Operations and Security Officer of Renesys Corporation, has some interesting opinions about IPV6. Interestingly enough, some of his observations echo mine.


  • IPv6 is a new network protocol with no interoperability with IPv4 (and no, tunnels don't count).
  • Since virtually every important feature of IPv6 has been back-ported to IPv4 (auto-configuration, security, QoS), there's no compelling reason for any individual user or end-site to want IPv6 service.
  • There are a lot of reasons not to want it. There's no content to look at. This is largely because there are no users. There are no users because there are no other users. And so on.

I became aware of its shortcomings when I tried to assist with a network problem that, in its final analysis, originated from Teredo Tunneling. IPV6 apparently is not compatible with Windows Networking, in Windows XP. Windows Vista has native IPV6 support, built-in to its newly designed IP stack. But I don't think that Vista will drive IPV6, nor vice versa.

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