How much time will the IPv6 tunnel service will last?

[prodigeinfo]

Hello,

My ISP is in beta phase for it's IPv6 support. They will provide us with one single IPv6 dynamic address managed with DHCPv6. The price they will charge for a /64 or /48 static address range will probably be unafordable for me. This made me wonder how long will the HE tunnel service last, and thus, how long will we benefit of the free IPv6 network address range that comes with it? This is almost to good to be true, so I guess someday you will take theses back, or charge for them?

Thanks,

Stephane Russell

[broquea]

There are no plans to dismantle the tunnelbroker.net service, until that far off distant day tunnels are no longer needed and native is everywhere.

[prodigeinfo]

Great!  ;D

Thanks for this answer!

[snarked]

Considering the general lack of deployment of IPv6, even with ISPs and transit carriers that got allocations more than 5 years ago and haven't used them, I'd say we will reach 2020 before IPv6 tunnel brokers become obsolete.  True IPv4 exhaustion (by end users) is a couple of years off still, and even when that happens, NAT will be used (as an excuse) not to deploy IPv6.

[kasperd]

An ISP that won't give you at least a /60 shouldn't be taken seriously. Start looking for an ISP that will give you more addresses. It may take a while before such an ISP shows up, but they will eventually.

It should be doable for the ISP to set up a /64 from which you can get as many IPs as you need without even using a router, but you may have to share that /64 with other customers in that case. On top of that it should be easy to allow you to have as many routers as you need, each of which can request a /56, /60, or /64 for devices behind it. There is not much of a reason to stop such allocations.

The point where it is sensible for the ISP to think about IPv6 address consumption is if you could set up multiple routers, each of which would automatically request a /48. In that case I think it would be reasonable for the ISP to tell you to make do with a single /48 or tell you to use longer prefixes.

It may also be sensible for the ISP to limit you to a single router connected to the shared segment in order to keep broadcast traffic down. But in that case they should of course give that router a static prefix, which is short enough to do subnetting.

I disagree with the assertion that IPv4 exhaustion isn't affecting end users. The existence of NAT is enough to affect end users. Even those ISPs that give users enough IPv4 addresses to have all their devices connected without NAT still tend to give the users dynamic IPs, and most often they come from different ranges such that communication between them will end up going back and forth over a congested link.

I hope this tunnel service will stay active until the IPv4 backbone is abandoned.