Under IPv6, won't customers just need a hub or a switch? Every IPv6-aware device in the home will just request a unique address directly from the ISP, completely eliminating the need for home routers. Of course, devices still needing IPv4 would need some other solution.
Of course, that doesn't come without a tradeoff (as mentioned in the submission). Those IPv6 devices will need to be aware that they are connected to the Internet at large, and security will need to be addressed accordingly.
No thanks, because unscrupulous ISPs will then start to charge people per device connected. It isn't (or shouldn't be) any of my ISP's business how many devices I have connected, any more than the high-level meaning of the bits I transfer is their business. Their business is to move bits.
FWIW, NAT is typically done by the firewalling code, whereas routing is done in separate code.
So "router" is always correct, but "firewall" does not always apply
I just bought a new consumer router last year (actually, come to think of it, 2). Neither have current support in the admin screens for IPv6 - it's the standard 4 box dotted quad input only. Yes, a firmware upgrade can solve this, but this was 2009 at the time - how much more time do hardware vendors need to put this in consumer products, where we'll see arguably the most pain (in terms of hand-holding service requirements)?
Also, relating to screens, a huge number (large majority?) of software is coded specifically to the dotted-quad format. I think we'd have seen more adoption if the plan we're migrating to had simply added a couple more dots to it. Easier for people to think about at the end, and would have given us a moderately larger pool base, easier way of thinking about new address spaces (visually, I mean).
64.27.78.45.134.240 where you tell people that the first two (or last two) now correspond to new addresses, and 'old' addressed simply have two leading 0s, would have made transition easier to swallow (IMHO).
2001:0f68:0000:0000:0000:0000:1986:69af, in comparison, even if shortened down, looks pretty alien.
Adding two dotted quads would have given us 65k x 4 billion addresses. Yes, it's not IPv6-sized, I know. But in terms of the 'let's measure everything by how many IPs each person on the planet can have!' it would have been sufficient for a while - I think most people would be fine with fewer than 20k addresses each.
I know this is wholly naive of me, and real hackers everywhere can do this stuff in their sleep. However, 'real hackers' aren't going to be dealing with the majority of this transition - it's going to be average joes trying to help their family get back on the internet over the phone after they mistype something on their new DLINK-950v6 router from Best Buy.
We're well past the phase where we can back out, or I think even consider alternatives, but the impact to existing software screens is not to be underestimated.
IPv6 may turn out to be the real Y2k.