FTTC, IPv6 and other ramblings

Basic assumption behind this post is that BT actually do run fibre to my cabinet in September

I'm pretty sure that my 3Com router won't use one of its Ethernet ports as a WAN port, so I'll need a new router. When I went to the 3Com page to see what else they had I found that they'd been bought by Hewlett Packard back in April, and as I've never found HP to be very Mac-friendly (even the website doesn't work properly!) I decided to look elsewhere.

And whilst I was about it, a bit of future-proofing with IPv6 seemed to make sense.

Obvious possibility is an AirPort Extreme... a bit pricey but a nice piece of kit. Anybody care to give opinions, pros, cons... whatever?

(I'm aware that it's only got a NAT firewall, not SPI.)

In particular, the spec says IPv6 (6to4 and manual tunnels), does this mean it can/will work transparently with both v4 and v6 on the WAN? I don't know much about IPv6

(Main machines on the LAN will be an iMac and a MacBook, both running Snow Leopard, there's also a few PCs/laptops running various flavours of Windows, Airport Express, AppleTV, two printers and a PS3.)

Not much can be said to work transparently with IPv6 at the moment because almost everyone provides the service as 'beta'. It's quite a big thing to be beta testing because IPv6 covers an ill-defined and ever changing part of the Internet.

I reckon it would be better to hold back, wait for IPv6 networks to be a bit more reliable, and wait for consumer IPv6 hardware to come down in price.

How is the last leg of FTTC delivered to your home? xDSL over the telephone?

I used to use an Airport Extreme and thought they were great.. Easy to use, stable, etc but yes, pricey...

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/02/7063.ars
^ That article's a bit negative.. the flip side is that the airport extreme will seamlessly connect you to the IPv6 internet

http://www.tunnelbroker.net/forums/index.php?topic=6...
^ Might be useful reference

http://revk.www.me.uk/2010/03/nat-is-evil.html
http://revk.www.me.uk/2010/03/icmpv6.html
^ Hopefully this kind of industrial strength IPv6->IPv4 proxy will spell the end for the need to have IPv4

In reply to a post by xela:

How is the last leg of FTTC delivered to your home? xDSL over the telephone?

At the moment it's not, but it will be VDSL over the phone line. BT willing

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/02/7063.ars
^ That article's a bit negative.. the flip side is that the airport extreme will seamlessly connect you to the IPv6 internet

http://www.tunnelbroker.net/forums/index.php?topic=6...
^ Might be useful reference

http://revk.www.me.uk/2010/03/nat-is-evil.html
http://revk.www.me.uk/2010/03/icmpv6.html
^ Hopefully this kind of industrial strength IPv6->IPv4 proxy will spell the end for the need to have IPv4

Thanks for those links... I don't run ftp or ssh servers so shouldn't be a problem there. If I ever feel the need I'll worry about it then

IPv6

I remember about 8yrs ago being on a call about it saying we needed it in the next year as we are running out of 4 addresses here we are years later and no further forward it was in the news again the other day that the remaining 12million 4 addresses will be used up in a year.