With the Americas running out of IPv4, it’s official: The Internet is full - Ars

The march towards IPv6 continues with Ars reporting that ARIN is started to exhaust its stock of IPv4 as well with only 17 millions unique public IP addresses left in reserve. 

Story here:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/with-the-americas-running-out-of-ipv4-its-official-the-internet-is-full/

Sky buys O2 and BE from Telefonica

Ah the fun and games of the broadband industry.

This does raise some interesting questions such as the more customised services BE provide.
Static IP blocks, bonded lines and I think they also do Annex M, all of which, sky don't offer.

Again, will Telefonica be handing over their RIPE assigned IPv4 blocks? Half a million subscribers isn't a huge amount comparatively (See Sky's growth rate) in terms of market share but it does raise network issues for any provider with IPv4 running out.

Plusnet has recently been looking at carrier grade NAT, BE recently had a BETA firmware suggesting IPv6 support. This will be interesting.

In my opinion Sky does a good job of keeping things simple and this has lead to their success. The majority of people just want a non strings attached simple services for a fixed price.

The problem won't be the migration it's self. These are pretty painless these days (i've been through enough to know). It'll be keeping the customers happy. That shouldn't be too bad as O2 and BE customers definitely want and unlimited service. In fact a lot of customers might actually make savings if they already have Sky TV. The main issue is going to be those static IP's... Lets hope Sky create a third package to suit them. It'll cost more but i'd definitely pay a little more for a static Address.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21627614

More detail:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/03/uk-isp-o2-and-be-unlimited-sell-home-broadband-service-to-bskyb.html

http://www.o2.co.uk/broadband/broadbandchanges

ISPs React to the Dangers of Adopting IPv4 Internet Address Sharing

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/01/uk-isps-react-to-the-pros-and-cons-of-ipv4-internet-address-sharing.html

ISP PlusNet Trials Controversial IPv4 Address Sharing as IPv6 Alternative

Lets hope PlusNet are quite vocal about their findings as it would be an interesting insight.

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/01/isp-plusnet-trials-controversial-ipv4-address-sharing-as-ipv6-alternative.html

RIPE NCC Begins to Allocate IPv4 Address Space From the Last /8

End end is nigh!

http://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/news/ripe-ncc-begins-to-allocate-ipv4-address-space-from-the-last-8

Measuring IPv6 - Country by Country

CircleID: http://www.circleid.com/posts/20120625_measuring_ipv6_country_by_country/

New Sky DSL connection.

My new connection was put in yesterday.

Having checked my postcode on thinkbroad's map against the closest telephone exchange (straight line distance about 500meters) I was hopeful of fast speeds on ADSL. When the connection went live I connected locally into the Sky phase 3 router (Sagem) via a web browser using the internal IP of 192.168.0.1 . On the maintenance page you will find a show statistics button at the bottom which gave me the following:  



Here I could see the downstream attenuation which I could put into a attenuation calculator to see if I was near the theoretical maximum. 21,344kbps was suggested as the absolute maximum so I wasn't massively off.

It's likely that I could improve on my downstream sync speed of 17.7Mbps with a couple of tweaks such as going directly to the master socket's test socket, removing other devices from the line such as the phone and trying a different DSL filter / shorter data cable.

Next up was to try some speed testers which test throughput (Note the sync is the connection to the telephone exchange, throughput is what is passing through that connection and is effected by anything else that maybe using the connection at the same time as the test).

The results were not bad either, 14Mbps during the day is very decent. I'll take some evening reading as well to update the blog but I'm very happy for the time being. FTTC is in my area but I can't really justify the cost with these speeds having some from a long line where I had a sync of 4Mbps. It's a shame Sky don't offer static IP's but at least they have put dynDNS.org functionality into there routers which I'm told is a lot of hassel on Virgin Media who I almost had to sign up to.

Here's hoping for IPv6 functionality as well.


EDIT:
An evening speedtest result around 9pm

Ars Technica - IPv6 coming in force this year!

Article:

With World IPv6 Launch, IPv6 on by default will be the new normal

The Register has a IPv6 rant...

Link: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/31/ipv6_sucks_for_smes/

It very much does sound like a rant and although there are some fair points buried in there, as well as some interesting links, be sure to read the comments as well! It does also neglect the fact that the alternative is sticking with IPv4 and having to deal with large scale NAT (LSN)