www.ipv6experiment.com
Home / Main Page This page is describing the IPv6 experiment itself, and is primarily intended for networking researchers and software professionals to learn about and discuss the experiment. We're not ready for the world to know about this experiment yet, so don't go submitting this to Slashdot or Digg until the actual site is up.
IPv6 has had operating system and router support for years. But, content providers don't want to deploy it because there aren't enough potential viewers to make it worth the effort. There are concerns about compatibility and breaking IPv4 accessibility just by turning IPv6 on. ISPs don't want to provide IPv6 to end users until there is a killer app on IPv6 that will create demand for end users to actually want IPv6. There hasn't been any reason for end users to want IPv6 - nobody's dumb enough to put desirable content on IPv6 that isn't accessible on IPv4. We're taking 10 gigabytes of the most popular "adult entertainment" videos from one of the largest subscription websites on the internet, and giving away access to anyone who can connect to it via IPv6. If you access the site via IPv4, you get a primer on IPv6, instructions on how to set up IPv6 through your ISP, a list of ISPs that support IPv6 natively, and a discussion forum to share tips and troubleshooting. If you access the site via IPv6 you get instant access to "the goods". To make absolutely sure that all interested parties are able to read the technical documentation about this experiment without getting in trouble at work or getting blocked by an over sensitive content filter, we aren't linking directly to the site or mentioning any "adult entertainment" industry words.
Also keep in mind that the experiment is not yet active! We're taking some highly valuable content (tens of thousands of people are paying $30/month to access these videos), and making it available for free on IPv6. If you don't have IPv6 connectivity and try to access the site, you'll be redirected to an IPv4 page with detailed instructions on how to get IPv6. To find out the current state of IPv6 from a content provider's and end user's perspective. Specifically, we're going to analyze: * How many people accessing the IPv4 page eventually get into the IPv6 page.
AAAA records on several very large sites broke connectivity to a non-zero percentage of viewers. A few cases were tracked down to end-users enabling IPv6 without actually having IPv6 connectivity at all, and the OS/browser not realizing it. Other problems included far worse IPv6 performance than IPv4, IPv6 routing instability, not-quite-production-ready IPv6 software and tools, lower than normal MTUs with ICMP 'fragmentation needed' messages getting blocked by firewalls, etc.
posted about my experiences on NANOG, and got a ton of replies. Many helpful, many insisting that my problems were either imaginary or mistaken. Since experimenting on revenue-generating production networks is usually a bad thing, the idea of an experiment like this adds a bit of safety to the equation. The companies and persons involved have no vested stake in the outcome or success of IPv6 either way. I have no emotional or financial investment in IPv6 succeeding or failing. But, I do believe that IPv6 is going to happen whether we're welcoming or avoiding it. I'd rather bring problems to light now, before the IPv4 exhaustion crunch hits us. The networking community as a whole still has plenty of time to resolve and improve the situation before the mad dash in a few years. There is no plan to monetize or profit from this experiment in any way. The end-user sites will have no banners, paid advertisements, subscriptions or anything of the sort. The only exception is a contractual requirement that the content we're giving away be watermarked with a copyright notice including the name of the site/company that they came from. We do not expect that to generate any income for them, but is there only to identify the copyright holder and prevent other sites from "stealing" their content and relabeling it as theirs. Do you really think that end users asking for "adult content" will make ISPs deploy IPv6 for them? No, that isn't the goal at all, and I don't find that a likely outcome, no matter how many people are interested in this experiment. There are lots of contradictory opinions on the readiness of IPv6 for the masses. Some argue that it's ready now, and it's just up to the (content providers|ISPs|hardware vendors|operating system vendors|etc) to take the first step. Others say it's not ready yet, and there are problems that still need to be resolved before IPv6 is pushed to the public. It's important to remember that many sites are using IPv6 right now, many fall strongly towards the "highly technically inclined" viewership - those who have IPv6 turned on know it, and are capable of debugging problems themselves. What would break, and what can a content provider do about it? In late 2005 we attempted publishing IPv6 addresses for a handful of very high traffic "adult industry" websites.
Our own experience suggests that there is a non-zero percentage of non-technically inclined end users who have unknowingly or mistakenly turned on IPv6 on their desktops without having any kind of IPv6 connectivity at all. Some browser/OS combinations recover gracefully from this after a small timeout. Others don't, which caused a non-trivial number of tech support emails to the site asking why it was down. A tiny number of requests did start coming in over IPv6, and many of those nerdy enough to realize what was happening also emailed us saying that download speeds dropped significantly. After discovering these problems, we had to remove the IPv6 records immediately, as this was a potentially revenue-impacting problem. To sell content providers on the idea of supporting IPv6, there needs to be some level of proof that it won't cause problems. If it truly doesn't cause access problems for IPv4 end users who configured their systems incorrectly, and the performance delta for IPv6 users isn't so bad that it ruins their experience on the IPv6 sites, then there isn't much excuse not to turn up IPv6 on the content side. If we can pool the collective intelligence of the IPv6 community during this experiment to conclusively say that we've done everything possible on the content end to make things run smoothly, and there were still problems, it gives the IPv6 world ammunition to go to the NSPs, OS and browser vendors, and network hardware companies with a list of what's still wrong that's outside our control to fix.
names you've selected only going to attract thosealready familiar with IPv6? We can reasonably expect this experiment to get some attention in more mainstream media than IPv6 discussion groups.
I've had contact from several mainstream journalists who were interested in the story. It's safe to say we'll have attention brought to this project outside the normal circle of IPv6-interested parties. It's probably the highest demand, large bandwidth, globally desired content out there. I could easily put up FreeBSD ISOs on IPv6, but that's catering to an already "technologically astute" audience. The target here is Joe Average who wants to get free access to something his neighbor is paying $30/month to reach. The question is, can the average end user obtain IPv6 access now if they really really want to?
Sony refused to allow such content on Beta, giving an advantage to VHS for some early adopters. While I don't think our little experiment is going to turn the tide towards IPv6, it will be useful to see how strong of a motivation it can be. One of our clients runs a network of very large adult oriented sites, who has agreed to "donate" several of their most popular videos from one of their sites for this experiment. The steps we'll take to prevent it go beyond what 99% of the online adult entertainment sites use.
ICRA tags to all the pages, indicating the presence of adult content. This will automatically trigger most in-browser and external content filters, marking it inappropriate for some audiences.
RTA label in use by some content filters, as well as submit our sit...
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