[nnain]

One of the earliest attempts to replace the the TCP/IP model (or rather the lower layers of the ISO-OSI model) was the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). Despite being a well-intentioned idea, it failed to see real world usage because of the complexity.

Along the way many developments happened. People learned to live and work with IPv4. Even IPv6 hasn't picked up despite solving some important problems. So when it comes to updating the core networking infrastructure, I don't think TCP/IP is replaceable. It just works very well now -- you can have real time chats, high throughput data lines, has time-tested code libraries, there's vast amounts of knowledge so you can build apps fast and all that.

As I understand, what this 'Named Data Networking' technology is proposing is to replace IP addressing scheme with Names. I'm not sure if the whole internet backbone infrastructure would change it's networking strategy now.

TCP/IP addressing format is very structured and that's its strength. IMHO that's actually how communication should take place; not with names that can have high-variation in format.

[ay]

"Even IPv6 hasn't picked up" - this needs correction.

http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/

You can notice that 9% of the internet users in the US are IPv6-enabled. Germany is over 11%. Belgium is almost 30% (of course due to smaller population it's less in absolute host count).

How many IPv6 users this is in millions, is an exercise left for the reader.

The things are moving very very fast - lots of large SPs have bumped the values within this year from low-mid single digits to nontrivial double-digits, and lots more are in the pipe.

All major CDNs support it, helping IPv6-enable thousands of sites that don't run IPv4 on the server itself. I'm saddened by the fact that HN site, being Cloudflare customer, did not flip the switch - there's really zero excuses today. (http://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-the-last-reasons-to-n...)

(On a side note, there are today millions of users not worrying to have any IPv4 at all - on T-Mobile's network. See: https://conference.apnic.net/data/37/464xlat-apricot-2014_13...)

Here's another data point, from my home gateway (I'm in the remaining 70% of folks in Belgium who yet don't have IPv6 so I am using Hurricane Electric tunnel - and the Vlan50 is the IPv4-only internet connection, so that counter shows IPv4 user traffic + IPv4 tunnel traffic - so you can count it as "aggregate").

  ay-home#sh int Tunnel0 | inc packets|escr
    Description: Hurricane Electric -- Paris
    5 minute input rate 5000 bits/sec, 6 packets/sec
    5 minute output rate 5000 bits/sec, 3 packets/sec
       171400464 packets input, 193001468663 bytes, 0 no buffer
       90187695 packets output, 13837665814 bytes, 0 underruns
  ay-home#sh int Vlan50 | inc packets|escr 
    Description: Outside - internet-facing
    5 minute input rate 143000 bits/sec, 24 packets/sec
    5 minute output rate 34000 bits/sec, 25 packets/sec
       618491041 packets input, 607147678054 bytes, 38 no buffer
       390716032 packets output, 83476555174 bytes, 0 underruns
  ay-home#

Do your math.

[tgflynn]

Yes but <20% adoption 18 years after the protocol was designed seems a bit slow, especially given the pace of overall technological change in this century.

[ay]

Let's take a look at the Internet itself.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc791.txt is dated 1981.

Figure 1 in http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-569.pdf shows that the first time they recorded was in 1997, at 18%. That's 16 years (actually a bit more because my understanding is rfc791 documents the running code), and still under 20% - so by the same metric, the Internet is a failure!

Of course, then we can see the tail of the S-curve: it's doubled in the next three years, then slowed down and the last measurement is 71% of households in 2011. 30% of US households don't have internet at all, in 2011.

Now, let's bring the world-wide IPv6 numbers from the past 6 years, numbers from https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6...:

  0.05% on 7 September 2008
  0.09% on 31 August 2009
  0.15% on 30 August 2010
  0.34% on 1 September 2011
  0.74% on 30 August 2012
  1.84% on 1 September 2013
  4.42% on 31 August 2014

The US figures from http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/cible.php?country=US (available since 2012):

  1.32% on 1 September 2012
  4.03% on 1 September 2013
  9.91% on 1 September 2014

You can see it's been approximately doubling every year - and in the case of US more than doubling.

Understandingly, everything starts from zero or a very small number. A double of a very very small number is still a very small number.

But if you keep doubling, at some point the numbers stop being small.

We're at that point now.

I hope these numbers speak by itself - those who ignore them, are welcome to continue doing so. They make an easier competition for those who don't.

[tgflynn]

Yes, but I don't think comparing Internet adoption with IPv6 adoption is terribly valid.

The first was a radically new technology and it took years for people to figure out how to best make use of it.

IPv6 was supposed to be a purely technical improvement to deal with some deficiencies of IPv4, notably address space limitations. It should mostly concern only network and systems administrators and systems software developers and be largely transparent to end users.

It's interesting that the two seem to have similar growth curves, but given the very different audiences involved I'm not sure what to make of that observation.

Certainly if you asked knowledgeable people in 1996 how long it would take to achieve near 100% IPv6 adoption I doubt many would have predicted 20 years.

On the other hand in 1981 I suspect few would have predicted that a technology developed by DARPA would be used by people in 2000 to buy books and manage their bank accounts.

[runeks]

> It should mostly concern only network and systems administrators and systems software developers and be largely transparent to end users.

I'm no network engineer, but as I understand it, to support IPv6, companies need to replace their switches. I think it's fair to say that there are literally millions of switches that need replacing. We are talking billions of dollars in total investments. I really don't see how it's surprising that this will take a while. Billions of dollars don't hang on trees, companies need to earn the money before they can spend it.

At the same time, because IPv6 is used less frequently, it is more expensive. The price of electronics is determined by volume: the more you produce the cheaper it gets. This means IPv6 has a price disadvantage to IPv4, which is especially noticeable in the early years (of ~0.1% adoption). A device that is produced at only 0.1% the volume of the most popular devices will be considerably more expensive.

This is, in part, why we see an exponential adoption curve: the more people who buy IPv6 equipment the cheaper it gets, and the cheaper it gets the more people buy it, this chain reaction helps to cause the exponential adoption rate.

I'm not saying everyone will end up using IPv6, although I think it is likely, but I'm saying it should be no surprise that replacing billions of dollars worth of network equipment takes time.

[_cbdev]

>companies need to replace their switches.

Actually, most Switches are just fine and don't need replacing. IPv6 is a Layer 3 Protocol, most "Normal" Switches operate on Layer 2 (The Ethernet Level, which stays the same and (in the best case) does neither know nor care what goes on in Layers above). These can stay and most wouldn't even need to be reconfigured.

As for Layer 3 Switches (The ones that do some amount of Routing, too), most "brand-name" Models purchased in the last 10 Years should support IPv6.

[verroq]

>You can see it's been approximately doubling every year

And by 2018, over 160% of the internet will be running IPv6.

[darklajid]

Wait. Germany's over 11% - I'm probably counted as one of them.

My anecdote: I'm getting a DS-Lite connection here, that's forced on new customers for this (big) ISP. For month the (mandatory) hardware froze whenever the prefix changed or was reannounced. Basically a (silent) dead connection every 2-3 days, for a looong time. Known problem, nothing that can be done about. But .. that's the past and solved.

Currently? I cannot reach ipv6 addresses. Read that again: DS-Lite, cannot reach any ipv6 addresses while my ipv4 traffic (which .. is tunneled) works fine. I tested with quite some sites, mostly with ipv6.google.com.

Customer support says "They're out of capacity" and want to give me a normal/default ipv4 connection again, they claim that they won't even look into this problem at this point. "Won't Fix", basically.

So I do wonder what these 11% mean and if I'm really just an outlier - or if more people like me exist and maybe don't even KNOW that they are supposed to be able to use ipv6 and cannot?

[ay]

No, only the live connections are counted - it's based on what address family content providers see in incoming connections.

So you are in the remaining 89% for now...

Try http://testipv6.com/helpdesk and mail me the result URL ?

EDIT: just realized we did talk some 249 days ago. Did you stay on the same ISP and DS-lite, and have an IPv6 prefix that does not allow you to ping6 towards ipv6.google.com ?

Time permitting I'll be happy to help debug this. Let's coordinate over email if you are interested, and the above assumption about your network setup is correct.

[nnain]

Yes, but considering that the intent of IPv6 is to replace IPv4, not just to work along with it, I would still say that IPv6 hasn't reached the critical mass. Things have started moving fast in the last 2 years, but IPv4 still carries 96% of the world's data. It's interesting that the adoption is 30% in Belgium and 11% in Germany, but in India, UK, Australia, China, Canada and many more countries, it's less than 1% (actually it's typically below .2% in most of these countries): https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

Thanks for all the good information in your comment!

[ay]

Yes, in my reply to tgflynn in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272923 there's an attempt to argue about the numbers.

Also, another factor which will kick in as more and more folks get IPv6 is that maintaining both IPv4 and IPv6 is a bit of a pain.

Considering that you can pack the entire IPv4 internet into a single /96 IPv6 prefix (that's 4 billion times less than the address space available for a single subnet), getting your infra IPv6-only and frontending it with a stateless IPv4->IPv6 translator (or an SLB64 boxes) becomes a more and more interesting option.

More info on this: https://ripe64.ripe.net/presentations/67-20120417-RIPE64-The...

Another company which might be more familiar, moving in a similar direction: http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case-stud...

This is the content side. On the eyeball side, there are also wins to be made by simplifying the infrastructure by running IPv6-only, and running IPv4 atop that as a service.

See https://ripe67.ripe.net/presentations/131-ripe2-2.pdf for a good and public example of this being done.

These are the leaders, but they give the impression of what can and will be done by more and more folks.

Thus, it makes sense to start talking about when the IPv4 will be turned off. Some anecdata: http://www.networkworld.com/article/2168165/tech-primershen-...

And a couple more links with an economic/game theory angle on turning off IPv4:

https://www.nanog.org/sites/default/files/wed.general.howard...

www.asgard.org/images/pricing_v1.3.docx

So, indeed quite an interesting time ahead!

(Sorry for offtopic, BTW, given the thread was about the NDN :-)

[InclinedPlane]

IPv6 is about 15 years old. In technology terms that's ancient. IPv6 is roughly as old as AJAX, it's much, much older than Ruby on Rails. And IPv6 solves a major, catastrophic problem with IPv4. The fact that it still is seeing only very slow uptake in adoption is a testament to its weakness, I'd say, even if it has some otherwise favorable aspects.

[lisper]

My first startup was an attempt to make an ATM-like network that actually worked:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3293

Although mostly of historical interest now, I think the basic ideas are still sound. But the problem (as we learned the hard way) is that deploying a new network architecture is mainly a political problem, not a technical one.

[PinguTS]

That is not right, that ATM failed to see real world usage.

ATM was the backbone of the German infrastructure run mainly by German Telekom for years. It provided a very good service especially for telephony (ISDN). Germany basically had the best telephony network in the world.

But the problem is, that IP does not fit with the 55ms time slot in ATM. That is the why all the backbones are replaced with the so-called Next Generation Networks (NGN), which basically is pure IP traffic and everything will be on top of IP, not anymore in parallel to IP. That basically means, moving to VoIP in the backbone and consequently also for the consumer end.

[dfox]

ATM failed to see the usage predicted by it's proponents in the 90's. The reason for that is that most of such statements about ATM as the new unified network for everything were mostly marketing bullshit disconnected from technical reality.

ATM is essentially circuit-switched technology lying somewhere between L1 and L2 that allows for efficient QoS for different services sharing same wire at the expense of ludicrous framing overhead and creating networks of such channels with reasonably simple and fast switches. The QoS part is mostly irrelevant today as faster interfaces made the problem significantly easier to solve so is the simple and fast switching. ATM's orientation towards end-to-end circuit-switched channels is what allows fast switches but also requires some external control-plane that builds and tears down the virtual channels, which I think is the major reason why ATM (and OSI in general) didn't catch on, on IP, you just send packet with destination address down the wire, with ATM you have to establish connection first (by using something essentially out-of-band and centralized).

In the end, ATM is widely used today, but mostly as pre-existing way of handling QoS and framing on top of some unrelated but relatively slow L1 technology (ATM is the first higher-level layer of both UMTS and xDSL)

[nnain]

Not just German Telekom, several other operators around the globe deployed ATM in the 90s for ISDN services. However, just after a few years, most companies started dropping ATM in favour of IP based networks. By "it failed to see real world usage", I meant, it failed to sustain itself in real world.

[walshemj]

yep if having a better networking stack was going to work we would be using OSI, X.400 and X.500 now and not TCP/IP

Still id have probably still be working for a Telco and have a really cool mail address though cn=uk cn="maurice"