[arin-ppml] Use of "reserved" address space.

[George, Wes E IV [NTK]]

-----Original Message-----
From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net] On Behalf Of Leo Bicknell
Sent: Friday, June 25, 2010 4:30 PM
To: arin-ppml at arin.net
Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] Use of "reserved" address space.

I think upgrading all of the routers, including both backbone and
more importantly home gateways is the larger challenge, they don't
have that facility.

But, everyone already has to upgrade those to support IPv6.  Might as
well get an image that gets you IPv6 + reserved space for the price of
one upgrade.

[[WEG]] I don't know about you, but I haven't seen a lot of effort to back-port old SOHO routers (like my Linksys WRT350N) to support IPv6. Mostly, the vendors seem content to abandon these once they get a little beyond warranty (basically, they're cheap, and cheap = disposable). Case in point, my "draft N" device has not gotten an updated version of software that is truly compliant with the final 802.11n standard. Maybe they guessed right and no update was needed, but either way, the last software update was in 2008. Manufacturers are primarily assuming that if support for IPv6 becomes critical, either the upstream provider will simply give their customer a new box or require them to buy a new one, or that if the owner of said box is sufficiently savvy, they will use something like OpenWRT. The response I have been getting when I directly ask representatives of [company] about this is to hide behind support/development costs, device (planned) obsolescence, and hardware limits.

So I agree that "while you have the hood open" is a valid point, but the problem is that no one is actually doing this for a significant subset of the consumer devices. They fall into the same chasm as the Win98/ME/2K boxes that are no longer technically supported and extremely unlikely to be updated, regardless of the need.

Wes George

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