Last week, I received a confirmation from XS4all that my DSL line would be activated on Monday. A technician is scheduled to come to our house on Tuesday to connect the Fritz!Box7360 and measure the line. I will not ask the poor guy to set up IPv6, as XS4all has a very easy do-it-yourself interface.

As I was curious about the level of IPv6 knowledge of the helpdesk, I called them and asked if they could disable IPv4 on the line. The helpdesk employee was very surprised and thought I had no idea what I was talking about: "No madam, that is a very bad idea at this point in time. You would not be able to use the internet as you are used to." I laughed and agreed that this indeed sounded crazy, but that we were doing a project with IPv6 only home automation and it was my intention not to use IPv4 on this line. He checked with his colleagues and explained that they use the IPv4 address of the line for administrative purposes, so he could not disable IPv4 for me.
The employee clearly knew what IPv6 was and he was eager to help me. Kudos for the XS4all helpdesk!

One of the first things on my to-do list was investigate if we could use a similar setup with our current thermostat. We use a Heatmiser (PRS-TS wifi). The documentation on their website didn't give any hits when searching on "IPv6", so I contacted their helpdesk with a webform to ask if any of their products support IPv6 at the moment, if it is on their roadmap and which products will support IPv6 (and when!) I will let you know the outcome, but at the moment I'm looking around for other vendors as well.

After the IPv6 launch, I had a chat with some people about "what is next?" We already had an IPv6 World Day in 2011, a World Launch in 2012 so the only logical question is; what can we do in 2013?
Most ISPs, content providers, data centers and even governments are busy. At least with looking into IPv6. So lets make this the year of the End User!

It is 2013 and still, my cable provider can't provide me with IPv6 connectivity. They also can't tell me when they will! From others I hear that the "last mile" is still a big issue. There are no "eyeballs"
This screams for an experiment :-)

Here is the scenario:
-I live with my soon-to-be husband in a small town near Amsterdam. I am an IPv6 trainer and Ben is a Network Engineer at an ISP.

-The only provider that can deliver native IPv6 in our region is XS4all. The only product available to our house is ADSL. As we are quite far from the DSLAM, the maximum speed we can get is 3Mbps.
This is a bit unfortunate.

-We have a lot of home automation or domotics. Our lights, heating, webcams, coffee machine, media setup all work in some automated way. We have smartphones and apps to control these devices.

The question is: In 2013, what can you do with IPv6 in your house? Does my printer still work? My IP webcam? The app for my heating system, well, you get the idea :-)

I will keep you posted on how we are doing.
Just for the record: We will keep our IPv4 connection for now, we also need to work from home sometimes.....