23 ms·

IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10% deployment

310 points by nikbackm 11y ago

ilek 11y ago
Since it's based on Google metrics - what are the stats like for countries where Google is not the most popular search engine? E.g China, Russia and Japan.
- netheril96 11y ago
  Is it really based on Google metrics? Google has been blocked by the Great Firewall on IPv4 networks since last year, but is still reachable via IPv6. So a Chinese who accesses Google either does it with a foreign IP (VPN or proxy), or with an IPv6 address within China. That would put the statistics close to 100% IPv6 usage.
  - rahimnathwani 11y ago
    Do any domestic ISPs offer IPv6 addresses?
geocar 11y ago
FFS: MX records didn't take 20 years to get deployed! This is crap. After twenty years, none of the problems with IPv6[1] have resolved, and when you get an IPv6 address from some places (hotels, mostly), much of the Internet turns into a unusable ghetto. There's also zero IPv6 at BT or Virgin Media, two of the largest Internet providers in the UK. We've been hearing we'll get it "next year" for a while, and I'm frankly tired of dealing with the incompatibility. If IPv6 offered a single user-visible feature it would sell like hotcakes: Mobile IP? IPSEC? All just as optional as with IPv4. Heck, if they even nailed auto-configuration or let multicast onto the Internet at least they'd have some customers. Instead, it's sold a twenty-year clusterfuck of doomsday predictions about running out of IPv4 addresses, and the experience has been impossible to learn from because (a) it's spanning three decades now, and (b) everyone disillusioned by IPv6 can't come around without losing face. I'm tired of IPv6 patting itself on the back; This was the worst deployment ever. [1]: https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html
- phicoh 11y ago
  The killer feature of IPv6 is that is has more addresses than IPv4. For anything else, for every good feature of IPv6 there are a couple of bad features. So if you look at it, if you want to delay investments as long as possible, you wait for IPv4 addresses to run out before moving to IPv6. And guess what, ARIN ran out only last summer. APNIC ran out almost 5 years. So for any big company that doesn't really grow, why do IPv6, you have enough IPv4 addresses. For any small company, in many cases you now have to buy addresses on the open market. Doable, but not nice. And small companies wanting to become big companies? They are out of luck. Even if they can buy the addresses they need, it will be insanely fragmented. Even Microsoft found out that for their corporate network, they don't really have enough IPv4 addresses and for some reason they also don't want to buy them in large quantaties. So they are trying to move to IPv6 internally. Of course, this creates a very complex network effect. Big companies have no real incentive to offer IPv6, and small companies cannot switch to IPv6 only if big comanies don't support it. Fortunately, some big companies do run out of IPv4 addresses so they do start using IPv6 to offload their carrier grade nat boxes. For some new markets, say vehicle-to-vehicle communication, IPv4 is not an option. So that is likely to be IPv6 from day one.
  - massysett 11y ago
    I bet that legacy desktops and Web servers will be IPv4 for as long as they exist. There will never be an impetus to convert these. If "Internet of Things" takes off, those things will be IPv6. Then you can give an IP address to every thermostat, every light bulb, every fire sprinkler head, every shelf tag price readout (saw some LCD shelf tags at a Whole Foods near Houston), etc. Those things don't care if they can't talk to some legacy Web site. Then, in twenty years, everything on IPv4 is some creaky obsolete thing...sort of like how we have Windows XP things around now that aren't being replaced for various good reasons.
    - rjsw 11y ago
      Windows XP can have IPv6, works fine.
eknkc 11y ago
Just realised something; I've been developing web applications for a relatively long time now. Maybe in the last 10 years, I had my IP addresses stored in databases etc in IPv6 aware types just in case we had an IPv6 deployment in future. Better be ready. Last month, I was working on something that needed to store IP logs. I packed them in 32 bit unsigned integers. Was not a well thought decision. I think I don't care anymore, just gave up. Anyone doing the opposite of that? Maybe I was naive to jump on the train that early and these are better times. Felt like that 5 years ago too though.
- geocar 11y ago
  I think a 32-bit hash of an IPv6 address will be fine for a long time, and remain much faster to search/sort than a 128-bit value. I also think that if you can't upgrade your database you're going to have other problems as well.
  - IanCal 11y ago
    > I think a 32-bit hash of an IPv6 address will be fine for a long time Be careful with this, a 32 bit hash can see collisions with remarkably low numbers. A 50% chance of a collision is seen with ~75k entries: http://preshing.com/20110504/hash-collision-probabilities/ http://preshing.com/20110504/hash-collision-probabilities/ Depends on your application as to whether this is a problem or not.
    - geocar 11y ago
      50% chance of one collision. Be careful with those maths!
      - IanCal 11y ago
        Yes, thanks for the clarification, it's what I meant with "a collision" but I realise that's ambiguous.
        11y ago
yummybear 11y ago
Jan 4. 2195 will be a glorious day.
verelo 11y ago
Crazy idea. Maybe people just don't understand IPV6? Is there any single good source (i.e. the minimal bullet points on a single page) that helps people make the switch?
- jakobegger 11y ago
  You can't just "make the switch". Most devices already support IPv6 anyway. The problem is that ISPs and hosting providers don't support IPv6.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Pretty much. I use an oldish laptop with some cheap TP-Link router at home, and suddenly I discovered I was connecting to my VPS over IPv6. All my components had been ready for years, waiting for ISP support (which finally came!).
  - verelo 11y ago
    Right, fair enough but things I can do as a consumer are choose a particular ISP, and ensure i'm using up to date OS / network drivers etc. I feel like saying there is nothing we can do to speed up the process is giving in a little too early when I've personally seen very little shared with the public that is understandable and helps people push this forward.
    - zaphoyd 11y ago
      If you live in an area where you have a choice of ISP then at least inquire about whether they support IPv6. Chances are if you have a choice the factors other than IPv6 will make more of a difference. I.e. I'd have a hard time recommending an IPv6 enabled 6Mbit DSL connection over a 100Mbit cable one without. I've certainly kept ISP choices in mind when choosing which community or neighborhood to live in. Ironically I find myself looking for places with Comcast because they've had solid IPv6 support for years. If you are involved in a decision making capacity with a company that offers services over the internet, try to pick equipment, ISPs, SaaS vendors that use IPv6 where possible. With a few notable exceptions (rrrrrrr AWS) its not particularly difficult anymore. If you are at trade shows, quiz vendors about their IPv6 support. Lots of ISPs have gotten on board recently at the cores of their networks but CPE equipment is often old (DOCSIS 2 modems, WRT54G bases). This holiday when I was visiting family I took a few minutes to swap out their ancient router for one that supports IPv6. As a result they'll also get faster and more reliable Wifi now so its often an easy sell for other reasons.
zeristor 11y ago
Isn't it written that once penetration gets past 15% for most new technologies it starts to really ramp up. Putting the 'O' into Ogive.
- zamalek 11y ago
  It rockets to the high percentiles but never quite 100%, that's where the real annoyance lies.
  - laichzeit0 11y ago
    Well off the bat you can already rule out the idea that you'll have 100% IPv6 adoption in the next 20 - 30 years. There are simply too many embedded network appliances that are IPv4.
- andruby 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure IPv6 adoption will follow the standard S-shaped adoption curve [1]. If true, that sucks, because it means that the last 10% will take approximately as long as the first 10%. Intuitively, I feel like that could in fact be the case. The last 10% to switch will probably be small ISP's without resources/knowledge, old devices that don't support IPv4 and old servers/webapps that haven't been updated in years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
  - nly 11y ago
    But won't it reach a point where adoption is so high that major backbones and carriers simply retire their IPv4 equipment? At that point you adopt or die.
    - lmm 11y ago
      Eventually, yeah. E.g. a lot of ISPs have shut down their Usenet servers over the last few years. But it could easily take another 20 years to reach that point.
    - 11y ago
Loic 11y ago
Here in Germany (Telekom as ISP) IPv6 is now provided as a standard dual-stack. Your router/DSL modem gets a given IPv6 and another prefix to distribute IP to the devices. This is working surprisingly well, my last connection to the Cloudflare control panel resulted in a warning: Hi, Your CloudFlare account ... was logged in from an IP address we didn't recognize ... following IP address: 2003:72:4f0e:3600:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx. I had first a kind of "is it a bug?" reaction because I did not catch the IPv6 address at first read. I was expecting an IPv4 address. For the matter, the connection is reliable with no particular latency problems. I cannot distinguish between a site on IPv4 or IPv6 from an end-user experience point of view.
- zorked 11y ago
  I used to complain about IPv6 until I got it. It just works, and per-byte 93% of my data traffic is IPv6 now.
- treenyc 11y ago
  Why can't Time Warner, Verizon, BT do that? Is there a commercial interest for different companies to keep IPv4?
  - tremon 11y ago
    Sadly, there is: IPv6 requires retraining your staff, and running dual-stack inceases the testing and administration workload. IPv6 also brings the additional requirement for ISPs that they can't allocate a single outside address anymore, so no way to enforce one-machine-per-residence limitations (I wouldn't expect an ISP to try this in 2016, but it was still common five years ago).
    - simoncion 11y ago
      > so no way to enforce one-machine-per-residence limitations... Eh? Have you ever seen an ISP that did this and wasn't foiled by attaching a NATting router to the ISP-provided bridge device? [0] (If the ISP is providing the router, then it's trivial to only allow traffic from either the first MAC address you see, or the MAC address configured by the customer during some setup procedure.) [0] DSL or cable modem or whatever.
simgidacav 11y ago
I'm in no way an ipv6 expert, but I'm quite surprised it works bad for China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Next_Generation_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Next_Generation_Internet
- nine_k 11y ago
  I suspect that anything that does not have surveillance and censorship built in does not "work well" for China :(
  - netheril96 11y ago
    IPv4 has no surveillance and censorship built in either. Those are red herrings when it comes to IPv6 deployment.
    - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
      But v6 does :-)
fulafel 11y ago
Wonder if anyone has made a study about the IPv6 retardation as a market failure. Underbelly of network effect comes to mind (first mover ISPs get no advantage/payoff even though the change is sorely needed for the system as a whole).
- tremon 11y ago
  Many have, as it's a staple assignment for technology management courses. Not sure if many have been published though. Partly, IPv6 is currently a solution looking for a problem. Its killer features, larger address space and IPSEC, have been solved in different ways: IPSEC was retrofitted onto IPv4, NAT greatly surpassed its design intent -- it was intended as a stopgap measure only. The other benefits of IPv6 are less critical, or less obvious. The increased direct address space enables much easier p2p solutions, but because of IPv4 we now have an Internet that is mostly client-server based. It is impossible to quantify what "could've been" without NAT. Automatic addressing and peer discovery have been mostly reimplemented, as easy-to-use DHCP servers in all consumer modems, and as UPnP/DLNA/APIPA for media devices. Finally, it took until Windows Vista for ubiquitous consumer-side IPv6 to appear (yes, *BSD and Linux were faster). Until that time, there was zero market incentive for any kind of IPv6 deployment.
  - netheril96 11y ago
    > It is impossible to quantify what "could've been" without NAT. It is, because I have lived with multiple levels of NAT before and without NAT (with both public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses) nowadays. The ability to do P2P is truly amazing. Now I don't have to wait with the abysmal download speed when the server is highly congested. Also amazing is the capability to ssh into machines without any configuration or begging the network administrators who are nowhere to be found.
    - tremon 11y ago
      The ability to do P2P is truly amazing No argument there. But that's not really a quantifiable statement either. In any case, that's not what I meant: I was referring to the different business and distributed computing models we might have had, instead of the heavily centralized models we have now. Maybe we would have had technologies like bitcoin ten years earlier? Maybe IRC would have gained a P2P component, and Twitter would never have happened? That's the kind of things that "could've been" I was thinking of.
zeroxfe 11y ago
Note that adoption in the US is 25% (skewing the world average.) See https://www.google.ca/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption&tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.ca/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-c... Many American ISPs distribute both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to their users, and almost all mobile devices have some sort of IPv6 connectivity. With Happy Eyeballs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs), and the other common transition technologies, IPv6 is largely transparent to most users and works quite well.
Nursie 11y ago
I'm still not convinced by the "NAT is Bad" arguments that people use when it comes to IPv6. Having a public address for a device in my house seems like a potential security problem - it's leaking information about my network to the outside world. And it's a dream come true for traffic-tracking.
- zeroxfe 11y ago
  So, you're mostly concerned about the security aspect? The security you get from NAT is accidental (but still useful.) The problem is that it is an ugly hack and greatly restricts the types of applications that you can build on (and for) the Internet. A good IPv6-capable home router with sane defaults can give you the same level of security as NAT, with much less complexity. You also don't need special NAT logic for applications that aren't simple request-response TCP sessions. > it's leaking information about my network to the outside world With sane defaults the only thing leaked is the IP address, which is already public (same as IPv4 with NAT.) Nothing about your internal network needs to be leaked. In addition, you get a few extra benefits: - With a /64 per network, it is almost impossible for port scanners to find you (inside a search space of 10^19 addresses.) - The privacy extensions (which is supported by almost all operating systems) prevent you from IP-address based tracking, by assigning you a temporary address which can change frequently, and using that for external communications. This coupled with ISP-provided dynamic addresses can actually give you better privacy than IPv4.
  - pilif 11y ago
    in general, I agree 100% with you > With sane defaults the only thing leaked is the IP address, which is already public (same as IPv4 with NAT.) Compared to v4 NAT though, this will leak an address per device behind the firewall whereas before all these devices would not have been distinguishable. This is why devices started to create a whole lot of temporary v6 addresses, but this causes problems for some stateful firewalls as networks grow and the amount of addresses explodes.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
wooptoo 11y ago
16% of home subscribers in Romania are connected to the internet via IPv6, most of them without even knowing it. This is largely thanks to the massive deployment effort led by the country's biggest provider - RDS. The connection is a dual-stack one. I've been using this for almost two years and it has worked very well. Most large sites support IPv6 without any hicups. This is a relevant read on how they did it: http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case-study-how-romanias-rcsrds-deployed-ipv6/ http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case-stud...
- erhardm 11y ago
  If you want to see up to date information about RDS IPv6 adoption divided by county in Romania: http://labs.rcs-rds.ro/ http://labs.rcs-rds.ro/ It also includes speed of each county.
mootothemax 11y ago
What's the best way to test and deploy sites hosted on IPv6 addresses? My office connection only has IPv4, and I'm loath to set things up blind. (30 seconds of Googling isn't helping, I keep ending up on sites that test whether my connection is IPv6 or not)
- dan1234 11y ago
  For testing, you can setup a free IPv6 tunnel with Hurricane Electric's tunnel broker service. https://www.tunnelbroker.net https://www.tunnelbroker.net
- marios 11y ago
  tunnelbroker.net, operated by Hurricane Eletric (he.net) ^Register, setup IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling. They can give you a whole /48 if you want to play with your network. Now considering you want to test other sites, all you need is IPv6 connectivity, so the default settings they provide are enough. I recall they had decent docs on how to set things up for all major OSes. There were a few gotchas : * you need to make sure "ip proto 41" is not filtered by your firewall, or you won't be able to setup the tunnel * in the web interface, make sure you provide your public IPv4, and not your NATed address.
- simoncion 11y ago
  In addition to explicit tunnels, you can use a Teredo tunnel. [0] Miredo is the Teredo implementation that everyone uses on Linux. The advantage is that Teredo automagically configures itself. Some of the disadvantages are that it can be really slow or otherwise unreliable, and kinda slow to configure. Having said that, I run Miredo wherever I go so that I can reach my v6 hosts back home, regardless of whether or not the network I'm currently attached to has v6 service. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teredo_tunneling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teredo_tunneling
- revellion 11y ago
  https://www.sixxs.net/tools/gateway/ https://www.sixxs.net/tools/gateway/ A good tip, they provide an IPv6-to-IPv4 Web-proxy. That you can use to test your v6only site from a v4-host. Given that you have a DNS record for your site ofcourse. And just go http://yoursite.tld.sixxs.org http://yoursite.tld.sixxs.org :)
fs111 11y ago
Neither hackernews nor the linked article are reachable via IPv6. That is sad.
alricb 11y ago
How good are IPv6 implementations nowadays? A few years ago there were quite a few bugs in them, no?
- stephen_g 11y ago
  IP stacks have been fine for many years. There was some problems years back where some ISP's networks would have really crap internal IPv6 connectivity, so IPv4 routes had much lower latency than IPv6 - but that was mainly bad network design and operation. All major operating systems have what's called 'happy eyeballs' algorithms to pick the best path for each connection. Apple updated theirs last year and reported that with most networks they tried, IPv6 was selected as the preferred option ~99% of the time it was available[1]. 1. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/v6ops/current/msg22455.html https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/v6ops/current/msg22455...
  - stock_toaster 11y ago
    Apparently many vendors do not yet support RFC 6724, or support it poorly with regard to ULA addresses. As such, I get mixed results with devices that have both a ULA and a global address, with the device trying to use the ULA address (instead of the global address) for global network egress.
- scurvy 11y ago
  There are still bugs in network vendor hardware. That said, you shouldn't let that stop you from deploying IPv6[0]. It's mainly little things like you can't address a serial link as /127 (Hello HP). You should allocate a /64, but address it /127. There's a major bug on A10 load balancers where the ICMP "too big" message is ignored for virtual servers. There is currently no fix. If you run A10, you can't run IPv6. [0] Unless you run A10 gear.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Hey you, HN reader! Do you run a website? Perhaps help to administer a website? Given you're on this site, it's not unlikely you do. Well, does your site work over IPv6? If Yes, great! If you don't know, assume it doesn't. You may just need to add just a single line to your config file (e.g. `listen [::]:80;` for nginx). Go and do it. Beware that a virtual server you're using may not even have IPv6 networking enabled by default. I finally decided to bring my sites into the modern age last month, and went and modified all my config files so I could use IPv6, TLS and PHP 7. Was worth it, I think.
- mahouse 11y ago
  So you're telling me that I have to adapt all of my codebase to work for ipv6 (storing addresses, comparing ranges, sockpuppet detection, throttling, ...) for absolutely no reason? Yeah good luck with that, it will work as well as the python2 to 3 transition worked.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- rconti 11y ago
  And your code, and your load balancers, and.... There's a big difference between "it technically works" and "it does what you want it to do and works at scale"
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    Oh for sure. Don't just flip the switch tomorrow on your large site with a team behind. Even if it's a personal site, test it. But at least try it out, see if it works, see what you need to do to get it working. Too many people stick with the defaults and lock themselves out from the IPv6 world.
sly010 11y ago
That graph with china being red is worrisome. If you extrapolate the trends, in an other 15 years we will have 2 internets, one for China and one for the rest of the world, and you will just have to pay for any routing between the two.
- netheril96 11y ago
  That is already happening even within IPv4 networks. I have to use VPN or shadowsocks to reach much of the Internet outside China nowadays.
SFjulie1 11y ago
IPv6 looks like a the x86 64 bit architecture. On the paper it is better. In real life it brings only headaches that do not worth the trouble. And for those who says memory, I answer that it is easy to make a 32 bit CPU with a 64bit memory adressing. IPv6 still requires IPv4 to do MPLS. IPv6 has no de facto standard to make autoconfiguration. IPv4 CPE are already bloated and hardly work with a fair level of simplicity I hardly know any decent IPv4 sysadmin even in ISP. The IoT will imply constant connection from your device to the manufacturer while being connected to your internal network... this is a leak to me. I don't want my lightbulb to be able to sniff on my mails. What IPv6 is good for? A lot of KPEX, concentration in ISP sector, a lock in effect... else I don't see.
- netheril96 11y ago
  x86-64 is quite successful as it is backwards compatible. Are you thinking about Itanium 64?
  - SFjulie1 11y ago
    No I am thinking of the fact that code gets bigger, since assets get bigger, which results in execution is slower. Actually there is a whole domain of application for which 64bits coding results in slower code. Plus extending memory address space results in slower memory access. L1, L2, L3 caches are hardly accessible from python/ruby/...(ahhh using register is sooo fast). Which in turn results in more watt/instructions. Nowadays, the IT industry might be the leading one in its contribution to fossil energy consumption. Do we need to add coal plants to support the cloud insanity bloating web pages to 16Mb for applications that are hardly more than 8 operation calculators to tell you how "green" you are? I have a degree in ASIC design. Modern x86_64 architecture is insane. It has a lot of hidden complex mechanic built in that are de facto additional CPUs inside the CPU for on the fly optimisations (memory+OOP), "security", buses, plug n'play... And who pays? Actual IT industry is literally taxing the masses for something they neither ask nor need. The IT is locking consumers in arbitrary choices that results in higher costs.
- tremon 11y ago
  And for those who says memory, I answer that it is easy to make a 32 bit CPU with a 64bit memory adressing. Except when it isn't. How do you propose to calculate 64bit addresses with a 32bit alu?
fivesigma 11y ago
I bet most of those users are on mobile networks. The need is very apparent: every mobile device needs to have internet access, and there's a lot of them with more being activated every day. Mobile providers don't have enough IPv4 addresses to support that and carrier-grade NAT is even more messy than IPv6. Most residential ISPs that support IPv6 make you go through hoops to enable it.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
SFjulie1 11y ago
Figures are like bikinis: they show almost all, except the essential. This is a unique source from Google that is a stake holder in IPv6 deployment that has interests in you adopting this technology. Does anyone else with critical sense would like to have more information to corroborate these claim? Like, what is the top 100 AS percent of IPv6 exchange? What are the devices? (mainly android on 4G networks) What is the traffic per protocols? (is it only android phones pushing your secret data to NSA or does it have the signature of residential use too?) Could we have for TCP/UDP a distribution graph for speed of connection/failures compared to IPv4? How much SIP invites get dropped between v6 to v4 and the opposite? ... One source of information, with only one metric does not tell us much more that google want us to know this.
- zaphoyd 11y ago
  Google is not the only group whose statistics show this trend. Here are a bunch more, including measurements from CDNs, ISPs, network exchanges, RIRs, the US government, and other large content providers, as well as analysis of publicly available information like AS tables, DNS records, Alexa lists: http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/ http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/ http://bgp.he.net/ipv6-progress-report.cgi http://bgp.he.net/ipv6-progress-report.cgi My own personal measurements support these claims. I worked on a small academic conference website not too long ago and the percentage of signups from IPv6 addresses approximately matched the traffic % that Google published for that time period. My own website statistics see a higher level of IPv6 traffic than Google shows, though it caters to a more technical crowd so I am not surprised. 10% global IPv6 deployment is not a Google conspiracy. =)
  - SFjulie1 11y ago
    What are the user agents? Only 4G devices? Does IPv6 speeds up connections? Does it fail more or less? What is the cost? A single magical digit for me is no answer. It is the same reason that makes me dislike the GIEC. Average are also failing to capture the non linearity of the adoption like "uneven distributions". I have been working in real science, these figures are lacking everything that makes them serious: methodology, an abstract, estimation of the errors, the limits of the measure, a precise title ...
protomyth 11y ago
Why didn't we expand IPv4 to take 64 or 128-bit addresses and instead created IPv6?
- lmm 11y ago
  Did you read the article? Every router... routes, so every router needs to speak the new protocol. If you tried to send packets in an IPv4-compatible way, what would you put for their addresses? They'd end up in nondeterministic routing loops which would be terrible to debug.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    I'm asking why did the create IPv6 instead of a version of IPv4 with an expanded address (IPv4-version 2)? Why did they not do an incremental change instead of a whole new thing?
    - teraflop 11y ago
      It's a distinction without a difference. Any protocol with addresses larger than 32 bits will necessarily be incompatible with IPv4, so what does it matter whether there's a "4" or a "6" in the name?
      - protomyth 11y ago
        IPv6 seems to be a whole lot more complicated than just upping the number of bits used for addresses. Its like they were trying to solve a bunch of things in addition to the address range.
        lmm 11y ago
        Per the article it mostly has the same headers. What other things are you thinking of? Stateless autoconfig is complex but IPv4 has that option too. Privacy extensions are complex but they are extensions, not the core spec.
takeda 11y ago
So there's something that is worse than Python 3 adoption ;)
mixmastamyk 11y ago
I'm not a big fan of 128 bit addresses with ipv6, they are too long to read and write. Does anyone know why 64 bits was not good enough? 64 bit addresses aren't just twice as good as 32, but 4 billion times more numerous.
- RIMR 11y ago
  But then you wouldn't have 60,000 addresses for every square centimeter of land on Earth! /s
- skrause 11y ago
  The main reason for 128 bit addresses is stateless auto configuration which wouldn't be possible with 64 bit long addresses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Stateless_address_autoconfiguration_.28SLAAC.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Stateless_address_autocon...
  - mixmastamyk 11y ago
    Hmm, I believe IPX could do that and had 80 bit addresses. It still seems too large, but there's likely something I'm missing.
- simoncion 11y ago
  In most cases: * Only the last 64 bits of the address matter. The first 64 bits are routing information. * You have total control of the last 64. You can number your hosts however you like, in addition to -or instead of- using SLAAC and/or DHCPv6. * If you're not using "Privacy Addresses", the last 64 remains stable even if your upstream changes your IPv6 allocation. So, host identification is trivial even if your assigned allocation changes.
  - scurvy 11y ago
    Yep. Only the first 64 bits matter. Almost every router out there is doing hardware forwarding in ASIC based on /64 and /128. In between /64 and /128 gets broken down into multiple /128's. That's what I've heard (and read) in a few places. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
fapjacks 11y ago
So basically: "IPv6 still totally unusable."
rconti 11y ago
Isn't there a consequence to letting each "subnet" (and I'm not sure at what level this is defined... ISP?) have its own 64-bit prefix that every client uses, and then sharing 64-bit space underneath it? Can someone help me understand the consequences of this, and how it ends up limiting the usable address space to some fraction of what 128bit would imply?
- simoncion 11y ago
  I don't understand what you're asking. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#IPv6_address_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#IPv6_address_spac... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#Stateless_address_autoconfiguration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#Stateless_address... . If you've more questions after reading those sections, feel free to ask.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
  The /64 boundary is the standard boundary for each LAN. An "end site" (that is, a customer of an ISP) was originally intended to receive one /48 each, so enough space for 65536 /64 LANs. You have to forget the idea that addresses are scarce. They were with IPv4, with IPv6, they are not. The whole point of the design is to make sure they are not scarce. Never, ever, anywhere. Conserving address space is not a virtue. Making sure that everyone has addresses available whenever they need some, with minimal delay and minimal administrative overhead, and with little fragmentation in routing tables, that is the goal of IPv6. And there is no real risk that this will lead to address exhaustion, there is enough space for about 40000 /48 per person currently alive.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

310 points by nikbackm 11y ago

ilek 11y ago

Since it's based on Google metrics - what are the stats like for countries where Google is not the most popular search engine? E.g China, Russia and Japan.

netheril96 11y ago
Is it really based on Google metrics? Google has been blocked by the Great Firewall on IPv4 networks since last year, but is still reachable via IPv6. So a Chinese who accesses Google either does it with a foreign IP (VPN or proxy), or with an IPv6 address within China. That would put the statistics close to 100% IPv6 usage.
- rahimnathwani 11y ago
  Do any domestic ISPs offer IPv6 addresses?

geocar 11y ago

FFS: MX records didn't take 20 years to get deployed! This is crap. After twenty years, none of the problems with IPv6[1] have resolved, and when you get an IPv6 address from some places (hotels, mostly), much of the Internet turns into a unusable ghetto. There's also zero IPv6 at BT or Virgin Media, two of the largest Internet providers in the UK. We've been hearing we'll get it "next year" for a while, and I'm frankly tired of dealing with the incompatibility. If IPv6 offered a single user-visible feature it would sell like hotcakes: Mobile IP? IPSEC? All just as optional as with IPv4. Heck, if they even nailed auto-configuration or let multicast onto the Internet at least they'd have some customers. Instead, it's sold a twenty-year clusterfuck of doomsday predictions about running out of IPv4 addresses, and the experience has been impossible to learn from because (a) it's spanning three decades now, and (b) everyone disillusioned by IPv6 can't come around without losing face. I'm tired of IPv6 patting itself on the back; This was the worst deployment ever. [1]: https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html

phicoh 11y ago
The killer feature of IPv6 is that is has more addresses than IPv4. For anything else, for every good feature of IPv6 there are a couple of bad features. So if you look at it, if you want to delay investments as long as possible, you wait for IPv4 addresses to run out before moving to IPv6. And guess what, ARIN ran out only last summer. APNIC ran out almost 5 years. So for any big company that doesn't really grow, why do IPv6, you have enough IPv4 addresses. For any small company, in many cases you now have to buy addresses on the open market. Doable, but not nice. And small companies wanting to become big companies? They are out of luck. Even if they can buy the addresses they need, it will be insanely fragmented. Even Microsoft found out that for their corporate network, they don't really have enough IPv4 addresses and for some reason they also don't want to buy them in large quantaties. So they are trying to move to IPv6 internally. Of course, this creates a very complex network effect. Big companies have no real incentive to offer IPv6, and small companies cannot switch to IPv6 only if big comanies don't support it. Fortunately, some big companies do run out of IPv4 addresses so they do start using IPv6 to offload their carrier grade nat boxes. For some new markets, say vehicle-to-vehicle communication, IPv4 is not an option. So that is likely to be IPv6 from day one.
- massysett 11y ago
  I bet that legacy desktops and Web servers will be IPv4 for as long as they exist. There will never be an impetus to convert these. If "Internet of Things" takes off, those things will be IPv6. Then you can give an IP address to every thermostat, every light bulb, every fire sprinkler head, every shelf tag price readout (saw some LCD shelf tags at a Whole Foods near Houston), etc. Those things don't care if they can't talk to some legacy Web site. Then, in twenty years, everything on IPv4 is some creaky obsolete thing...sort of like how we have Windows XP things around now that aren't being replaced for various good reasons.
  - rjsw 11y ago
    Windows XP can have IPv6, works fine.

eknkc 11y ago

Just realised something; I've been developing web applications for a relatively long time now. Maybe in the last 10 years, I had my IP addresses stored in databases etc in IPv6 aware types just in case we had an IPv6 deployment in future. Better be ready. Last month, I was working on something that needed to store IP logs. I packed them in 32 bit unsigned integers. Was not a well thought decision. I think I don't care anymore, just gave up. Anyone doing the opposite of that? Maybe I was naive to jump on the train that early and these are better times. Felt like that 5 years ago too though.

geocar 11y ago
I think a 32-bit hash of an IPv6 address will be fine for a long time, and remain much faster to search/sort than a 128-bit value. I also think that if you can't upgrade your database you're going to have other problems as well.
- IanCal 11y ago
  > I think a 32-bit hash of an IPv6 address will be fine for a long time Be careful with this, a 32 bit hash can see collisions with remarkably low numbers. A 50% chance of a collision is seen with ~75k entries: http://preshing.com/20110504/hash-collision-probabilities/ http://preshing.com/20110504/hash-collision-probabilities/ Depends on your application as to whether this is a problem or not.
  - geocar 11y ago
    50% chance of one collision. Be careful with those maths!
    - IanCal 11y ago
      Yes, thanks for the clarification, it's what I meant with "a collision" but I realise that's ambiguous.
      - 11y ago

yummybear 11y ago

Jan 4. 2195 will be a glorious day.

verelo 11y ago

Crazy idea. Maybe people just don't understand IPV6? Is there any single good source (i.e. the minimal bullet points on a single page) that helps people make the switch?

jakobegger 11y ago
You can't just "make the switch". Most devices already support IPv6 anyway. The problem is that ISPs and hosting providers don't support IPv6.
- icebraining 11y ago
  Pretty much. I use an oldish laptop with some cheap TP-Link router at home, and suddenly I discovered I was connecting to my VPS over IPv6. All my components had been ready for years, waiting for ISP support (which finally came!).
- verelo 11y ago
  Right, fair enough but things I can do as a consumer are choose a particular ISP, and ensure i'm using up to date OS / network drivers etc. I feel like saying there is nothing we can do to speed up the process is giving in a little too early when I've personally seen very little shared with the public that is understandable and helps people push this forward.
  - zaphoyd 11y ago
    If you live in an area where you have a choice of ISP then at least inquire about whether they support IPv6. Chances are if you have a choice the factors other than IPv6 will make more of a difference. I.e. I'd have a hard time recommending an IPv6 enabled 6Mbit DSL connection over a 100Mbit cable one without. I've certainly kept ISP choices in mind when choosing which community or neighborhood to live in. Ironically I find myself looking for places with Comcast because they've had solid IPv6 support for years. If you are involved in a decision making capacity with a company that offers services over the internet, try to pick equipment, ISPs, SaaS vendors that use IPv6 where possible. With a few notable exceptions (rrrrrrr AWS) its not particularly difficult anymore. If you are at trade shows, quiz vendors about their IPv6 support. Lots of ISPs have gotten on board recently at the cores of their networks but CPE equipment is often old (DOCSIS 2 modems, WRT54G bases). This holiday when I was visiting family I took a few minutes to swap out their ancient router for one that supports IPv6. As a result they'll also get faster and more reliable Wifi now so its often an easy sell for other reasons.

zeristor 11y ago

Isn't it written that once penetration gets past 15% for most new technologies it starts to really ramp up. Putting the 'O' into Ogive.

zamalek 11y ago
It rockets to the high percentiles but never quite 100%, that's where the real annoyance lies.
- laichzeit0 11y ago
  Well off the bat you can already rule out the idea that you'll have 100% IPv6 adoption in the next 20 - 30 years. There are simply too many embedded network appliances that are IPv4.
andruby 11y ago
I'm pretty sure IPv6 adoption will follow the standard S-shaped adoption curve [1]. If true, that sucks, because it means that the last 10% will take approximately as long as the first 10%. Intuitively, I feel like that could in fact be the case. The last 10% to switch will probably be small ISP's without resources/knowledge, old devices that don't support IPv4 and old servers/webapps that haven't been updated in years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations
- nly 11y ago
  But won't it reach a point where adoption is so high that major backbones and carriers simply retire their IPv4 equipment? At that point you adopt or die.
  - lmm 11y ago
    Eventually, yeah. E.g. a lot of ISPs have shut down their Usenet servers over the last few years. But it could easily take another 20 years to reach that point.
  - 11y ago

Loic 11y ago

Here in Germany (Telekom as ISP) IPv6 is now provided as a standard dual-stack. Your router/DSL modem gets a given IPv6 and another prefix to distribute IP to the devices. This is working surprisingly well, my last connection to the Cloudflare control panel resulted in a warning: Hi, Your CloudFlare account ... was logged in from an IP address we didn't recognize ... following IP address: 2003:72:4f0e:3600:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx. I had first a kind of "is it a bug?" reaction because I did not catch the IPv6 address at first read. I was expecting an IPv4 address. For the matter, the connection is reliable with no particular latency problems. I cannot distinguish between a site on IPv4 or IPv6 from an end-user experience point of view.

zorked 11y ago
I used to complain about IPv6 until I got it. It just works, and per-byte 93% of my data traffic is IPv6 now.
treenyc 11y ago
Why can't Time Warner, Verizon, BT do that? Is there a commercial interest for different companies to keep IPv4?
- tremon 11y ago
  Sadly, there is: IPv6 requires retraining your staff, and running dual-stack inceases the testing and administration workload. IPv6 also brings the additional requirement for ISPs that they can't allocate a single outside address anymore, so no way to enforce one-machine-per-residence limitations (I wouldn't expect an ISP to try this in 2016, but it was still common five years ago).
  - simoncion 11y ago
    > so no way to enforce one-machine-per-residence limitations... Eh? Have you ever seen an ISP that did this and wasn't foiled by attaching a NATting router to the ISP-provided bridge device? [0] (If the ISP is providing the router, then it's trivial to only allow traffic from either the first MAC address you see, or the MAC address configured by the customer during some setup procedure.) [0] DSL or cable modem or whatever.

simgidacav 11y ago

I'm in no way an ipv6 expert, but I'm quite surprised it works bad for China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Next_Generation_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Next_Generation_Internet

nine_k 11y ago
I suspect that anything that does not have surveillance and censorship built in does not "work well" for China :(
- netheril96 11y ago
  IPv4 has no surveillance and censorship built in either. Those are red herrings when it comes to IPv6 deployment.
  - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    But v6 does :-)

fulafel 11y ago

Wonder if anyone has made a study about the IPv6 retardation as a market failure. Underbelly of network effect comes to mind (first mover ISPs get no advantage/payoff even though the change is sorely needed for the system as a whole).

tremon 11y ago
Many have, as it's a staple assignment for technology management courses. Not sure if many have been published though. Partly, IPv6 is currently a solution looking for a problem. Its killer features, larger address space and IPSEC, have been solved in different ways: IPSEC was retrofitted onto IPv4, NAT greatly surpassed its design intent -- it was intended as a stopgap measure only. The other benefits of IPv6 are less critical, or less obvious. The increased direct address space enables much easier p2p solutions, but because of IPv4 we now have an Internet that is mostly client-server based. It is impossible to quantify what "could've been" without NAT. Automatic addressing and peer discovery have been mostly reimplemented, as easy-to-use DHCP servers in all consumer modems, and as UPnP/DLNA/APIPA for media devices. Finally, it took until Windows Vista for ubiquitous consumer-side IPv6 to appear (yes, *BSD and Linux were faster). Until that time, there was zero market incentive for any kind of IPv6 deployment.
- netheril96 11y ago
  > It is impossible to quantify what "could've been" without NAT. It is, because I have lived with multiple levels of NAT before and without NAT (with both public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses) nowadays. The ability to do P2P is truly amazing. Now I don't have to wait with the abysmal download speed when the server is highly congested. Also amazing is the capability to ssh into machines without any configuration or begging the network administrators who are nowhere to be found.
  - tremon 11y ago
    The ability to do P2P is truly amazing No argument there. But that's not really a quantifiable statement either. In any case, that's not what I meant: I was referring to the different business and distributed computing models we might have had, instead of the heavily centralized models we have now. Maybe we would have had technologies like bitcoin ten years earlier? Maybe IRC would have gained a P2P component, and Twitter would never have happened? That's the kind of things that "could've been" I was thinking of.

zeroxfe 11y ago

Note that adoption in the US is 25% (skewing the world average.) See https://www.google.ca/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption&tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.ca/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-c... Many American ISPs distribute both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to their users, and almost all mobile devices have some sort of IPv6 connectivity. With Happy Eyeballs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs), and the other common transition technologies, IPv6 is largely transparent to most users and works quite well.

Nursie 11y ago

I'm still not convinced by the "NAT is Bad" arguments that people use when it comes to IPv6. Having a public address for a device in my house seems like a potential security problem - it's leaking information about my network to the outside world. And it's a dream come true for traffic-tracking.

zeroxfe 11y ago
So, you're mostly concerned about the security aspect? The security you get from NAT is accidental (but still useful.) The problem is that it is an ugly hack and greatly restricts the types of applications that you can build on (and for) the Internet. A good IPv6-capable home router with sane defaults can give you the same level of security as NAT, with much less complexity. You also don't need special NAT logic for applications that aren't simple request-response TCP sessions. > it's leaking information about my network to the outside world With sane defaults the only thing leaked is the IP address, which is already public (same as IPv4 with NAT.) Nothing about your internal network needs to be leaked. In addition, you get a few extra benefits: - With a /64 per network, it is almost impossible for port scanners to find you (inside a search space of 10^19 addresses.) - The privacy extensions (which is supported by almost all operating systems) prevent you from IP-address based tracking, by assigning you a temporary address which can change frequently, and using that for external communications. This coupled with ISP-provided dynamic addresses can actually give you better privacy than IPv4.
- pilif 11y ago
  in general, I agree 100% with you > With sane defaults the only thing leaked is the IP address, which is already public (same as IPv4 with NAT.) Compared to v4 NAT though, this will leak an address per device behind the firewall whereas before all these devices would not have been distinguishable. This is why devices started to create a whole lot of temporary v6 addresses, but this causes problems for some stateful firewalls as networks grow and the amount of addresses explodes.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago

wooptoo 11y ago

16% of home subscribers in Romania are connected to the internet via IPv6, most of them without even knowing it. This is largely thanks to the massive deployment effort led by the country's biggest provider - RDS. The connection is a dual-stack one. I've been using this for almost two years and it has worked very well. Most large sites support IPv6 without any hicups. This is a relevant read on how they did it: http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case-study-how-romanias-rcsrds-deployed-ipv6/ http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case-stud...

erhardm 11y ago
If you want to see up to date information about RDS IPv6 adoption divided by county in Romania: http://labs.rcs-rds.ro/ http://labs.rcs-rds.ro/ It also includes speed of each county.

mootothemax 11y ago

What's the best way to test and deploy sites hosted on IPv6 addresses? My office connection only has IPv4, and I'm loath to set things up blind. (30 seconds of Googling isn't helping, I keep ending up on sites that test whether my connection is IPv6 or not)

dan1234 11y ago
For testing, you can setup a free IPv6 tunnel with Hurricane Electric's tunnel broker service. https://www.tunnelbroker.net https://www.tunnelbroker.net
marios 11y ago
tunnelbroker.net, operated by Hurricane Eletric (he.net) ^Register, setup IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling. They can give you a whole /48 if you want to play with your network. Now considering you want to test other sites, all you need is IPv6 connectivity, so the default settings they provide are enough. I recall they had decent docs on how to set things up for all major OSes. There were a few gotchas : * you need to make sure "ip proto 41" is not filtered by your firewall, or you won't be able to setup the tunnel * in the web interface, make sure you provide your public IPv4, and not your NATed address.
simoncion 11y ago
In addition to explicit tunnels, you can use a Teredo tunnel. [0] Miredo is the Teredo implementation that everyone uses on Linux. The advantage is that Teredo automagically configures itself. Some of the disadvantages are that it can be really slow or otherwise unreliable, and kinda slow to configure. Having said that, I run Miredo wherever I go so that I can reach my v6 hosts back home, regardless of whether or not the network I'm currently attached to has v6 service. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teredo_tunneling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teredo_tunneling
revellion 11y ago
https://www.sixxs.net/tools/gateway/ https://www.sixxs.net/tools/gateway/ A good tip, they provide an IPv6-to-IPv4 Web-proxy. That you can use to test your v6only site from a v4-host. Given that you have a DNS record for your site ofcourse. And just go http://yoursite.tld.sixxs.org http://yoursite.tld.sixxs.org :)

fs111 11y ago

Neither hackernews nor the linked article are reachable via IPv6. That is sad.

alricb 11y ago

How good are IPv6 implementations nowadays? A few years ago there were quite a few bugs in them, no?

stephen_g 11y ago
IP stacks have been fine for many years. There was some problems years back where some ISP's networks would have really crap internal IPv6 connectivity, so IPv4 routes had much lower latency than IPv6 - but that was mainly bad network design and operation. All major operating systems have what's called 'happy eyeballs' algorithms to pick the best path for each connection. Apple updated theirs last year and reported that with most networks they tried, IPv6 was selected as the preferred option ~99% of the time it was available[1]. 1. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/v6ops/current/msg22455.html https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/v6ops/current/msg22455...
- stock_toaster 11y ago
  Apparently many vendors do not yet support RFC 6724, or support it poorly with regard to ULA addresses. As such, I get mixed results with devices that have both a ULA and a global address, with the device trying to use the ULA address (instead of the global address) for global network egress.
scurvy 11y ago
There are still bugs in network vendor hardware. That said, you shouldn't let that stop you from deploying IPv6[0]. It's mainly little things like you can't address a serial link as /127 (Hello HP). You should allocate a /64, but address it /127. There's a major bug on A10 load balancers where the ICMP "too big" message is ignored for virtual servers. There is currently no fix. If you run A10, you can't run IPv6. [0] Unless you run A10 gear.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

Hey you, HN reader! Do you run a website? Perhaps help to administer a website? Given you're on this site, it's not unlikely you do. Well, does your site work over IPv6? If Yes, great! If you don't know, assume it doesn't. You may just need to add just a single line to your config file (e.g. `listen [::]:80;` for nginx). Go and do it. Beware that a virtual server you're using may not even have IPv6 networking enabled by default. I finally decided to bring my sites into the modern age last month, and went and modified all my config files so I could use IPv6, TLS and PHP 7. Was worth it, I think.

mahouse 11y ago
So you're telling me that I have to adapt all of my codebase to work for ipv6 (storing addresses, comparing ranges, sockpuppet detection, throttling, ...) for absolutely no reason? Yeah good luck with that, it will work as well as the python2 to 3 transition worked.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
rconti 11y ago
And your code, and your load balancers, and.... There's a big difference between "it technically works" and "it does what you want it to do and works at scale"
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Oh for sure. Don't just flip the switch tomorrow on your large site with a team behind. Even if it's a personal site, test it. But at least try it out, see if it works, see what you need to do to get it working. Too many people stick with the defaults and lock themselves out from the IPv6 world.

sly010 11y ago

That graph with china being red is worrisome. If you extrapolate the trends, in an other 15 years we will have 2 internets, one for China and one for the rest of the world, and you will just have to pay for any routing between the two.

netheril96 11y ago
That is already happening even within IPv4 networks. I have to use VPN or shadowsocks to reach much of the Internet outside China nowadays.

SFjulie1 11y ago

IPv6 looks like a the x86 64 bit architecture. On the paper it is better. In real life it brings only headaches that do not worth the trouble. And for those who says memory, I answer that it is easy to make a 32 bit CPU with a 64bit memory adressing. IPv6 still requires IPv4 to do MPLS. IPv6 has no de facto standard to make autoconfiguration. IPv4 CPE are already bloated and hardly work with a fair level of simplicity I hardly know any decent IPv4 sysadmin even in ISP. The IoT will imply constant connection from your device to the manufacturer while being connected to your internal network... this is a leak to me. I don't want my lightbulb to be able to sniff on my mails. What IPv6 is good for? A lot of KPEX, concentration in ISP sector, a lock in effect... else I don't see.

netheril96 11y ago
x86-64 is quite successful as it is backwards compatible. Are you thinking about Itanium 64?
- SFjulie1 11y ago
  No I am thinking of the fact that code gets bigger, since assets get bigger, which results in execution is slower. Actually there is a whole domain of application for which 64bits coding results in slower code. Plus extending memory address space results in slower memory access. L1, L2, L3 caches are hardly accessible from python/ruby/...(ahhh using register is sooo fast). Which in turn results in more watt/instructions. Nowadays, the IT industry might be the leading one in its contribution to fossil energy consumption. Do we need to add coal plants to support the cloud insanity bloating web pages to 16Mb for applications that are hardly more than 8 operation calculators to tell you how "green" you are? I have a degree in ASIC design. Modern x86_64 architecture is insane. It has a lot of hidden complex mechanic built in that are de facto additional CPUs inside the CPU for on the fly optimisations (memory+OOP), "security", buses, plug n'play... And who pays? Actual IT industry is literally taxing the masses for something they neither ask nor need. The IT is locking consumers in arbitrary choices that results in higher costs.
tremon 11y ago
And for those who says memory, I answer that it is easy to make a 32 bit CPU with a 64bit memory adressing. Except when it isn't. How do you propose to calculate 64bit addresses with a 32bit alu?

fivesigma 11y ago

I bet most of those users are on mobile networks. The need is very apparent: every mobile device needs to have internet access, and there's a lot of them with more being activated every day. Mobile providers don't have enough IPv4 addresses to support that and carrier-grade NAT is even more messy than IPv6. Most residential ISPs that support IPv6 make you go through hoops to enable it.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

SFjulie1 11y ago

Figures are like bikinis: they show almost all, except the essential. This is a unique source from Google that is a stake holder in IPv6 deployment that has interests in you adopting this technology. Does anyone else with critical sense would like to have more information to corroborate these claim? Like, what is the top 100 AS percent of IPv6 exchange? What are the devices? (mainly android on 4G networks) What is the traffic per protocols? (is it only android phones pushing your secret data to NSA or does it have the signature of residential use too?) Could we have for TCP/UDP a distribution graph for speed of connection/failures compared to IPv4? How much SIP invites get dropped between v6 to v4 and the opposite? ... One source of information, with only one metric does not tell us much more that google want us to know this.

zaphoyd 11y ago
Google is not the only group whose statistics show this trend. Here are a bunch more, including measurements from CDNs, ISPs, network exchanges, RIRs, the US government, and other large content providers, as well as analysis of publicly available information like AS tables, DNS records, Alexa lists: http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/ http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/ http://bgp.he.net/ipv6-progress-report.cgi http://bgp.he.net/ipv6-progress-report.cgi My own personal measurements support these claims. I worked on a small academic conference website not too long ago and the percentage of signups from IPv6 addresses approximately matched the traffic % that Google published for that time period. My own website statistics see a higher level of IPv6 traffic than Google shows, though it caters to a more technical crowd so I am not surprised. 10% global IPv6 deployment is not a Google conspiracy. =)
- SFjulie1 11y ago
  What are the user agents? Only 4G devices? Does IPv6 speeds up connections? Does it fail more or less? What is the cost? A single magical digit for me is no answer. It is the same reason that makes me dislike the GIEC. Average are also failing to capture the non linearity of the adoption like "uneven distributions". I have been working in real science, these figures are lacking everything that makes them serious: methodology, an abstract, estimation of the errors, the limits of the measure, a precise title ...

protomyth 11y ago

Why didn't we expand IPv4 to take 64 or 128-bit addresses and instead created IPv6?

lmm 11y ago
Did you read the article? Every router... routes, so every router needs to speak the new protocol. If you tried to send packets in an IPv4-compatible way, what would you put for their addresses? They'd end up in nondeterministic routing loops which would be terrible to debug.
- protomyth 11y ago
  I'm asking why did the create IPv6 instead of a version of IPv4 with an expanded address (IPv4-version 2)? Why did they not do an incremental change instead of a whole new thing?
  - teraflop 11y ago
    It's a distinction without a difference. Any protocol with addresses larger than 32 bits will necessarily be incompatible with IPv4, so what does it matter whether there's a "4" or a "6" in the name?
    - protomyth 11y ago
      IPv6 seems to be a whole lot more complicated than just upping the number of bits used for addresses. Its like they were trying to solve a bunch of things in addition to the address range.
      - lmm 11y ago
        Per the article it mostly has the same headers. What other things are you thinking of? Stateless autoconfig is complex but IPv4 has that option too. Privacy extensions are complex but they are extensions, not the core spec.

takeda 11y ago

So there's something that is worse than Python 3 adoption ;)

mixmastamyk 11y ago

I'm not a big fan of 128 bit addresses with ipv6, they are too long to read and write. Does anyone know why 64 bits was not good enough? 64 bit addresses aren't just twice as good as 32, but 4 billion times more numerous.

RIMR 11y ago
But then you wouldn't have 60,000 addresses for every square centimeter of land on Earth! /s
skrause 11y ago
The main reason for 128 bit addresses is stateless auto configuration which wouldn't be possible with 64 bit long addresses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Stateless_address_autoconfiguration_.28SLAAC.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Stateless_address_autocon...
- mixmastamyk 11y ago
  Hmm, I believe IPX could do that and had 80 bit addresses. It still seems too large, but there's likely something I'm missing.
simoncion 11y ago
In most cases: * Only the last 64 bits of the address matter. The first 64 bits are routing information. * You have total control of the last 64. You can number your hosts however you like, in addition to -or instead of- using SLAAC and/or DHCPv6. * If you're not using "Privacy Addresses", the last 64 remains stable even if your upstream changes your IPv6 allocation. So, host identification is trivial even if your assigned allocation changes.
- scurvy 11y ago
  Yep. Only the first 64 bits matter. Almost every router out there is doing hardware forwarding in ASIC based on /64 and /128. In between /64 and /128 gets broken down into multiple /128's. That's what I've heard (and read) in a few places. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

fapjacks 11y ago

So basically: "IPv6 still totally unusable."

rconti 11y ago

Isn't there a consequence to letting each "subnet" (and I'm not sure at what level this is defined... ISP?) have its own 64-bit prefix that every client uses, and then sharing 64-bit space underneath it? Can someone help me understand the consequences of this, and how it ends up limiting the usable address space to some fraction of what 128bit would imply?

simoncion 11y ago
I don't understand what you're asking. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#IPv6_address_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#IPv6_address_spac... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#Stateless_address_autoconfiguration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#Stateless_address... . If you've more questions after reading those sections, feel free to ask.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
The /64 boundary is the standard boundary for each LAN. An "end site" (that is, a customer of an ISP) was originally intended to receive one /48 each, so enough space for 65536 /64 LANs. You have to forget the idea that addresses are scarce. They were with IPv4, with IPv6, they are not. The whole point of the design is to make sure they are not scarce. Never, ever, anywhere. Conserving address space is not a virtue. Making sure that everyone has addresses available whenever they need some, with minimal delay and minimal administrative overhead, and with little fragmentation in routing tables, that is the goal of IPv6. And there is no real risk that this will lead to address exhaustion, there is enough space for about 40000 /48 per person currently alive.

deleted 11y ago

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