The Ethernet adapters you are currently using will have no problem
with IPv6 as the hardware see's only MAC addresses and the physical
line. And they would only be able to push the electrical signal from
30 to 100 meters depending on the card. Even if you have Optical Lan
Cards, they will usually only be able to reach about 2 kilometers
because they use commodity LED LASERS.
IPv4 and IPv6 are a logical layer on top of the hardware, so there are
no physical changes necessary. As far as your kernel, whether it is
BSD/Linux it normally comes with IPv6 already enabled. IPv6 uses a
discovery protocol to determine what it's local IPv6 subnet/mask and
default gateway, it can also handle basic routing on it's own. But
that doesn't add any speed to the actual transfer rate that you will
experience using IPv6.
The speeds you see listed in a lot of these articles coming out
recently are referring to the speed over the WAN or long haul
segments. Previously, due to the processing requirements of TCP/IP,
there were many problems pushing speeds above 622Mbs/OC12. Newer
ASIC's and VLSI's have allowed the industry to push TCP/IP over
2.5Gbps/OC48 and 10Gbps/OC192 with many companies looking to
40Gbps/OC768 in the future.
These speeds/circuits have been in use by the Telecoms for voice
circuits for many years as there is very low processing overhead
involved with circuit-switched voice communications. So they are
actually nothing new, it is just the fact that TCP/IP connections over
thousands of miles are now able to use the same speeds.
The best description I can give you of IPv6 (also called IPng) is RFC2460.
A good resource is
www.rfc-archive.org.
On Mon, 27 Dec 2004 07:57:07 -0700, Nathan England <
plug@the-arcanum.org> wrote:
>
>
> I haven't seen anywhere where they discuss network adapters and their speeds.
> This morning Slashdot has a story about China starting a new IPv6 network and
> the speeds reaching 2.5 to 10 Gbps. I understand that IPv6 is much faster in
> terms of protocol discussion between devices, but is it actually faster as
> far as transfer speeds? OR are they using 10 gbps lan cards?
>
> Would a 10/100 card tx/rc faster on a IPv6 network as opposed to an IPv4
> network?
>
> Or am I missing something...?
>
> Can anyone give us a short description of how it works, and any speed
> differences, or adapters you have to use...?
>
> Please!
>
> Nathan
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