Nathan CrauseMusings of a Software Developer

I've been waiting for what seems like an eternity for IPv6 to be rolled out, as I'm sure many others have. I've always wondered what's the hold-up? By all accounts, we're rapidly running out of IPv4 addresses.

I know there have been several experiments to test the Internet's readiness for the switch-over. I've never found any results of these, except for one article which showed the Mac OS X and some Linux distributions had problems. In all honesty, who cares if Mac OS X can't handle it? I'm pretty sure Apple would put it a lot of effort if the switch was forced on us, and Linux has an incredibly fats turn-around time for patching these sorts of things, too.

As an interesting note, I recall a while ago I asked Telus what their plans were for IPv6 - the response was that they (Telus) have no plans for IPv6 roll-out what-so-ever. It's not a consideration for them, and they have no contingency plans in place for handling it.

Wow.

That's shockingly poor on a scale that's hard to fathom.

Now, I hate to play conspiracy theorist here, but I'm wondering if this isn't a profit issue for the ISP's. You cannot charge $25 a month per static IP in the IPv6 world. In fact, addresses would probably be complete free. So, obviously there would be a cut in profitability should ISPs be required to drop IPv4.

Does anyone outside of Canada have different experiences with their ISP's with regards to the IPv6 question?