The way I see it, IPv6 is somebody else’s problem.
You can’t make money with IPv6 and nobody wants it. From a customer support perspective, IPv6 is just another problem nobody needs.
We, and all the other ISPs in our market, have enough IPv4 for the foreseeable future.
NAT works where you need to conserve addresses space and those consumers that need a static IPv4 can get it, and what’s better, will pay for it.
IPv6 support on consumer devices is a dumpster fire. No way I am touching that in production.
So, no, I have no plans to deploy IPv6 to customers. I will reconsider when there’s money in it, but preferably not before various vendors have gotten their IPv6 shit together.
In other words, we the current ISPs in the market are good. Sucks to be a new ISP though.
> IPv6 support on consumer devices is a dumpster fire. No way I am touching that in production.
Is it still? I know this was true for a while, but things seem to have been ironed out. I only occasionally have IPv6 (my ISP is doing something weird), but when I do it all seems to work fine.
Good IPv6 host support has been a thing in almost all consumer OSes for over 10 years now. All currently supported versions of Windows, MacOS, Android[1][2] and iOS support IPv6 natively.
And, as I keep reminding HN, Windows freaking XP supported IPv6 (albeit not as a transport for DNS queries).
The problem is simply that some people don’t want to spend a couple weekends to learn a new technology (one that is old enough to purchase alcohol in all 50 states—-this is not like chasing the latest web framework).
[1] There have been various blog posts about how android is “broken by design” because it expects to configure host IP via SLAAC and receive DNS servers via RA, instead of DHCPv6. This is utter nonsense.
[2] Android did, until about 5 years ago, not like to use DNS servers with ULA prefixes (the IPv6 equivalent of IPv4 private network ranges). That’s unfortunate, but hardly a “dumpster fire”.
> Good IPv6 host support has been a thing in almost all consumer OSes for over 10 years now. All currently supported versions of Windows, MacOS, Android[1][2] and iOS support IPv6 natively.
You probably need to care about the last couple unsupported versions, too; 5-year-old Android versions are still in the wild. Thankfully, it's a rolling window and the stuff with poor support is dropping off.
> The problem is simply that some people don’t want to spend a couple weekends to learn a new technology (one that is old enough to purchase alcohol in all 50 states—-this is not like chasing the latest web framework).
The problem, speaking as someone who spent some weekends worth of time on it, is that the technology, which has only been relevant for the last handful of years regardless of when it was first released, is not nearly that simple and works just differently enough to trip you up. (And you can't just do a full replacement and drop v4, so the differences will keep tripping you up)
As far as we can tell from aggregate statistics, consumer devices have been leading IPv6 adoption, not lagging it.
Charts of IPv6 usage such as Google's tend to still show a strong "bathtub curve" with a very noticeable decline during 9-5 work hours making a pretty clear case that corporate/enterprise devices are the ones (greatly) lagging behind.
Consumer devices most directly feel the effects of NAT/CGNAT and feel much more pressured to route around that IPv4 "damage" with IPv6. Some consumer networks, especially mobile carriers in every part of the world, have moved to IPv6-predominant (if not "IPv6-only"; depending on how you feel about IPv6 to IPv4 gateways). The "Happy Eyeballs" algorithm has been in play on most Consumer OSes for several years now and consumer devices generally strongly prefer IPv6 services over IPv4 when given a dual-stack choice.
There are a ton of IP connected devices that aren't running a sophisticated OS. IPv6 may not be available or, even if it is, the codebase is fossilized around handling and storing IPv4 addresses.
Consumer device support is not a major problem, it is ISPs that are the major roadblock. Corporate oriented devices are also a slow to adopt however, which is one reason ISPs have not made the switch.
I don't know the state of IPv6 on consumer devices, but I can imagine from an ISP point of view it's a massive support burden.
IPv6 excels on smartphone handsets since the telecom company has full control of your network/IP stack. Simple to support and manage.
However consider a home network situation, you have the consumer router, and attached to it is a bunch of devices, some which have iffy support for IPv6. They all speak IPv4 well. From an ISP perspective supporting IPv4 only makes sense because it still works and you can count on downstream devices in a home network to support it. With the impending depletion of public IPv4 addresses, ISPs can rely on CGNAT. Less burden.
My sample size of two DSL modems that my ISP supports says yes. The old one would reboot if it received a fragmented IPv6 packet. The newer one is better, it doesn't crash, it just delays more or less all packets for a second if IPv6 was in use.
Wireless router support for IPv6 is iffy too, from what I've heard.
I have a properly set up house network with IPv4 and IPv6 support infrastructure. In December, we used 1.22 TiB total traffic, of which 722.96 GiB was IPv6.
IPv6 traffic has been at least 50% for at least the last year (based on the most convenient statistics I can grab).
At my house with about 10 online devices now i have 42 ipv6 entries in the nat table out of 272 total. I have at&T adsl but would see similar results with Comcast business (which i had until a month ago). I have either linux or newish commercial devices and they have slipped ipv6 in over the past few years. no more HE tunnels for me. I suspect if more websites put it in the DNS it would just work. I am just waiting for ipv6 only VPCs in AWS.
I wasn’t making a blanket statement about static IPv4 availability, rather it was an observation from our own market.
That being said, most carriers or major ISPs aren’t actually that hard up for IPv4 space.
By no means will static IPv4s be available on all plans, but merely changing AP or plan type will commonly result in the ability to purchase a static IPv4.
It’s mostly about lubricating with money to find a solution rather than an all out lack of IPv4.
> As an ISP customer, you're the last one I would choose. I highly value ipv6 connectivity in my choice of ISP. I think I'm not alone.
When considering broadband connectivity, the major considerations for the vast majority of consumers, when signing their initial agreement, in order: price, speed, reliability.
Heck, I run BGP from my home, and even I didn't consider IPv6. But then I also have my own /22 of IPv4 (and a /32 of IPv6), so that's probably why.
That’s fine, each to their own. You might not be alone, but you should take into account that you are an atypical customer.
Different customers value different things. In the list of things people value in their broadband, IPv6 doesn’t even register for for the majority. There are markets where you cannot even give away IPv6 connectivity.
Of those showing an interest in IPv6, many just want a static IP. If you give them one then you have solved their problems and are never heard from again.
If you really, really want IPv6 then you can usually get it in most markets. You might have to upgrade to business service or switch to an operator providing service over legacy copper facilities. That is, however, a bridge too far for almost everybody.
As an aside, you don’t indicate that you would pay a premium for IPv6 service. That’s not very enticing from a business perspective. If there was real demand for IPv6 or it could be provided for a premium that would change.
It’s a classical chicken and egg situation. No services require IPv6, so there is no demand for IPv6 and thus no IPv6 offerings either.
I’d be interested to hear why you highly value IPv6 connectivity, especially if you had a static IPv4 allocation.
> Different customers value different things. In the list of things people value in their broadband, IPv6 doesn’t even register for for the majority.
The main issue for me is that it is symptomatic of a certain culture within that ISP. If they are late with IPv6, you can expect them to also be late with other developments, like the move to consumer 10gbit connections.
It is the classic example of FYGM. I'm old enough to remember when being a "good netizen" would have meant that medium-sized organizations would be pushing for the new standards and practices that would allow newcomer organizations, maybe even orgs that didn't yet exist, to join and participate on the network.
Now we've wound up where IPv4 addresses are like houses: everyone who already has one is quite content with the situation (and even sees them as "investments" to be traded and hoarded and leveraged) while newcomers are absolutely hosed. And doing the right thing of expanding the pool of availability, whether by allowing more housing to be built or by migrating to IPv6, is met with cries of "there's no money in it for me so I'm not interested."
And lest anyone thing this is petulant whining on the part of a sysadmin from a new network, where I work has several legacy IPv4 assignments and we own four or five low-digit ASNs. We are set for life for IPv4, yet we've picked up our IPv6 allocations from ARIN and have actively updated our internal network such that all applications can work in a v6-only environment and we've even donated some of our address space to new organizations in our field (medicine) who needed it to get started. That is how the Internet is supposed to work, through cooperation.
That's because those "good netizen"s remember how hard it was to get the network connected/up and keep it running in the first place. After a while, the new entrants just become parties with the option of some cheap IPv4 blocks and ASNs. Then they see the value of these blocks/AS increase. Then they say "well I have mine and I get no increased value from IPv6 so who cares" and they stay put becoming FYGMs.
> That is how the Internet is supposed to work, through cooperation.
Unfortunately this just isn't scaling :( Thanks for doing your part, I hope we all do what we can.
Eh I'd say the users of IPv6 (that includes ISPs and Enterprises) aren't to blame for not adopting the protocol.
The committee in charge of selecting IPng should have demanded interoperability or at least a proper transition plan. Neither happened and we have 25 years of IPv6 with abysmal adoption.
That's not true. For connections initiated from the v4 network, you can deploy v6 on the network, use a proxy, or use 6to4, 6rd or Teredo. For connections initiated from v6, you can use NAT64. There are also various approaches to deploy one protocol over the other, like 6over4, DS-lite, 464xlat, MAP-T/E, 4rd or LW4over6.
Pretty much every interoperability method that can work with v4 is supported by v6. How is that an interoperability failure?
> Pretty shit transition plan if we've only managed to get 35% of devices on v6 in 25 years.
The plan is "start using v6, then stop using v4". What better plan do you suggest?
I'd call it more like 35% in 9 years, since Google's stats say that deployment was <1% in 2013. (The time before that was spent on updating protocols, implementing the updated protocols in software and hardware, and deploying the updates, all of which are necessary prerequisites before users can show up in those stats.)
That seems like pretty decent going, given the sheer scale of what needs to be done.
> That's not true. For connections initiated from the v4 network, you can deploy v6 on the network
Having a v6 address on a v4 network doesn't make it a v4 only network. The vast majority of networks are v4 only. If the designers cared enough about interoperability and migration they would've spent time working on a plan to have these v4 only networks talk to v6. The transition plan would be seamless since the inherent value of a v4 address and a v6 address would be the same. If you look at the ngtrans mailing list, they pretty much gave up on a transition plan in the end, and there's still a bunch of deployment guides, even "best practices", but there's still no transition plan except this "get on v6, get off v4" rubbish.
The only reason the numbers are so high is because of Mobile since the telecom carriers have full control of the IP stack on the handset.
Again, what plan do you suggest? v6 already does everything that can be done with v4, yet that's not good enough for you. What more could they have done?
It's not fair to blame them for not being able to do the impossible.
The other choices for IPng at least tried to have an actual transition plan that would involve IPv4-only networks connecting to IPng. In fact the IPng criteria requirements outlined there be a straightforward transition plan from IPv4 that was simple and realistic. Then they settled for IPv6 which had no transition plan and still doesn't have one that meets the criteria set forth in the IPng requirements -- to this day.
The selection committee and ngtrans are to blame for not ever coming up with a transition plan that included interoperability with IPv4 as a basic tenet. They've effectively made IPv6 a second class protocol and will probably end up being like this forever.
IPv6 is effectively a waste of time, and that's how it's seen by most enterprise and ISPs. I'm holding out hope for research in future Internet architectures that will hopefully not make the same mistake as IPng and instead come up with actual transition plans with their designs.
What were those other choices/what transition plan did they have?
v6 does have a transition plan, and as far as I can tell it's not really possible to do any better than it's already doing. v6 is as interoperable with v4 as is possible to be, given the design of v4.
Can you explain how it could have been better? What transition plan would meet your requirements?
There is as good interoperability as is possible with various transition technologies allowing IPv4 and IPv6 hosts to reach other, with various variants of NATs or tunneling of IPv4 over IPv6 and vice-versa, mapping individual IPv6 addresses to IPv4, mapping the IPv4 space into IPv6, etc. etc.
The basic problem is though that IPv4 has no forward compatibility.
There is no way to build anything that has a larger address space than IPv4 and remain reachable for an IPv4-only host, since the IPv4 header has fixed 32-bit address fields.
This alone is the main limiting factor of the transition (combined with people refusing to dual-stack).
I personally have a dedicated IP, but the ISP's public reports say that no new customers will be able to obtain a dedicated IPs some time after 2024 or maybe 2025.
The default for all new customers is CG-NAT, unless they're tech-savvy enough to ask for something better.
I don’t appreciate it. It broke so much of the original end-to-end promise of the Internet. Think of how many technologies would be vastly easier if two hosts could directly communicate, like audio and voice chats. I still miss the days when it was trivial to run a web server on your home computer if you wanted to. And now we have abominations like CGNAT that break lesser abominations like UPnP.
If we hadn’t had NAT for the last couple of decades, and someone invented it now, they’d be laughed off the stage. You see it as an enabling technology. I see it as a boat anchor that’s kept us on IPv4 way past the sell-by date.
NAT has done more than the promise of IPv6. As much as NAT sucks to have at least it's been mostly frictionless to transition to -- that can't be said about IPv6. The design of IPv6 is what has held it back for 25 years, and I don't think we'll ever see a proper transition to it, so I'd say embrace NAT.
Hard disagree. The very first NAT broke a lot of cool things that already existed. Again, think of all the serverless things we could’ve had, like truly end-to-end peer-to-peer messaging that wasn’t routed dispatched through a central routing platform. (We’d still need a locator broker, but that’s far different than piping all content through a third-party host). NAT ruined those entire concepts because the whole concept of “every host is a potential server” went out the window.
Without NAT, we’ve have already made the transition to IPv6 as the creaky old IPv4 wouldn’t have that critical bandaid that helped it limp along. IPv4+NAT can’t die quickly enough.
I'm not sure that is true. It is true that you don't get aliased by the NAT, but one of the features of IPv6 is that you don't have to stick to a single address. Your system can choose different source addresses for every connection if it wants to. You will of course still be on the same /64, but that is the same amount of tracking as IPv4/NAT provides.
You can’t make money with IPv6 and nobody wants it. From a customer support perspective, IPv6 is just another problem nobody needs.
We, and all the other ISPs in our market, have enough IPv4 for the foreseeable future.
NAT works where you need to conserve addresses space and those consumers that need a static IPv4 can get it, and what’s better, will pay for it.
IPv6 support on consumer devices is a dumpster fire. No way I am touching that in production.
So, no, I have no plans to deploy IPv6 to customers. I will reconsider when there’s money in it, but preferably not before various vendors have gotten their IPv6 shit together.
In other words, we the current ISPs in the market are good. Sucks to be a new ISP though.