[Bloat] the future of the internet?

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Sat, 9 May 2015, Dave Taht wrote:

> This is not really bloat related but it makes my head explode trying
> to figure out how ipv4 will be with us until the heat death of the
> universe.
>
> https://www.nanog.org/meetings/abstract?id=2572

I don't think it will. It'll probably be around for 10-20 years or so, 
though. After that, I think we'll see responsibility for reachability to 
IPv4 only services start falling on the people running those services 
(they'll have to provide IPv6-to-IPv4 reverse proxying or something) 
instead of on eyeball network operators.

In 5-10 years IPv4 will start to experience more problems than IPv6 when 
it comes to reachability, due to middleboxes and other kludges to keep 
IPv4 running, and in 5 years a significant (perhaps even majority) amount 
of people will already have dual stack access so by then it'll be easy for 
IPv4 only shops to motivate enabling IPv6 on their services.

I've stopped hearing people saying "if" when it comes to IPv6, now it's 
just "when".

To bring some bloat-related content into this post, it would be super if 
ECN/AQM-support would exist on the equipment people will upgrade to, to 
get dual stack access. IPv6 took a lot of marketing to get people 
interested, seems to me ECN/AQM has a similar problem but it's even more 
hidden from the general public. What is good, is that instead of IPv6 that 
gives greater benefit to everybody but not immediately to the individual, 
ECN/AQM actually does bring immediate benefits to the individual. I think 
the dslreports kind of test that tries to find bufferbloat is one 
important piece of the puzzle to give greater visibility into the problem.

Btw, I received a new DOCSIS modem (16x4 instead of 8x4) and hooked it up, 
and it's still not bloated. I haven't seen more than 20ms PDV on my 250/50 
connection. It's easier to get these low PDV values at these speeds I 
guess though, compared to 25/5 or even lower speeds.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se