On Mon, Sep 04, 2000 at 04:54:48PM -0400, Gregg C Levine wrote:
> Hello from Gregg C Levine writing for myself
> How many of you attend the continuing education seminars that Cisco
> provides? I do. It happens that, yes they do have such hardware, and yes it
> is expensive, but probably not as much as you want to think. 
Do you mean a little 100Mbs home-router here, or a 15Mps Cisco 6500
switching router or a 80Gbs-switching Cisco-12000 GSR? I'm talking
about the latter two switching at full multi-Gbs linespeeds.

> Also, most of the opinions that were posted here, are both right, and wrong, 
> for all of the same reasons. 
I think you are wrong here ;-}

> Renumbering for example: Forget it. It really is not a
> problem, unless you are that guy who does it, at the ISP level. 
We're not talking about renumbering your dial-up machine at home here.
Most dial-up users effectively renumber each time they call in. No
problem there. The renumbering nightmare is for those network
operators hosting 1000s or tens of thousands of host machines with
static IP-addresses assigned to them (although deploying DHCP in such
networks can be of great help here too), and for those having to
renumber routers in a network of non-trivial size.

> My ISP is aware of it, (IPv6), but at the dynamically addressed, level, they 
> do not want to try it, for diallups, which is what I use currently. I should say,
> that being aware is the only thing they are, they have not told me directly
> of any plans to participate.

If your ISP would hire me for advise on deploying IPv6, I'd say don't
do it even though I'm a bit of an IPv6 advocate, as it does not make much
sense for a dial-up service in most cases. But over here, I'd also add
that if they stick with providing dial-up telephone/ISDN service
they will be out of business within 5 years. Telephony over IP is the
(near) future, the other way around is a dinosaur waiting to become
fossilized. Come on, what would you chose if offered at approx. the
same monthly cost; 10 to 100Mbs 24 hour a day at a fixed rate with
millisecond latency to your providers WWW/ftp/video/game-servers or
your plain old telephone dial-up (or a patched up version of it like
ISDN or ADSL). My next mobile-phone/palm/whatever will already have
2Mbs connectivity, a year or two from now.

Gosh, I don't even have a fixed-phone line anymore since last time I moved 
house 2 years ago; a mobile phone and a 3Mbs radiolink at home 
are a quite nice replacement already. Still, 3Mbs with 20ms latency 
even cannot compete with full 10Mbs Ether into my home. This will be
the choice for many if not most of the people in the western world and
the far east within the next three to five years. I live basically at
the end of the world (about 800 kilometers within the polar circle ;),
and I'm pretty sure I'll have that 10Mbs or 100Mbs in my home within
three years. You all probably live in much more densely populated,
less remote and more civilized parts of the world than I do, and you
expect less than this to enter your home over this time period? Ok, I
live in a country with more mobile phones in use than fixed-phones and
more meters of fiber per citizen in the ground than most others, and
work and worked with ISPs whose biggest problem is to find enough
manpower to put all that fiber in the ground and setup all those
routers to get those customers in the wait-queue connected. I
just don't see much reason to believe the rest of the world is moving
in a different direction, quite the contrary... And on this path any
solution that complicates network maintenance is evil and NATPT 
is way beyond that. These ISPs are definately interested in IPv6, and their
greatest worry is where to find competent manpower in time to make the
transition feasible.

3Mbs is nice for traditional applications and I love it being able to
listen to my mp3-ified CD-collection stored on my home-machine when
I'm at work, doing off-site backups over it, and comfortably using CVS
over it in both directions (oh yeah, this radionet is IPv6 only). But
it's just not quite enough for more demanding new applications, like
good-quality telephony, TV and video.

It's really quite amazing how fast you get used to decent connectivity.
Every time I'm traveling and need to use a regular modem dial-in
service with my laptop, I find it increasingly difficult to believe
how people can be comfortable with such speeds for daily usage, even
for just fetching your email. ;-}

So, again, for the success of IPv6 I think it is quite irrelevant
whether dial-up ISPs will ever deploy IPv6 or not.

In my timezone it's way past bedtime now, so time to shut up for me. 

Goodnight,

Feico.