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Because the IPv4 space has ran out. Nowadays they have to use all kind of tricks to share these addresses. With all mobile phones, and millions of new users in

Because the IPv4 space has ran out. Nowadays they have to use all kind of tricks to share these addresses. With all mobile phones, and millions of new users in Africa, Asia and South America, plus the Internet of Things, you simply have to use a new system, and you have to transition to that. In the future, people might not be able to use IPv4 at all, or all the time, and then you need your website to be available via both IPv4 and IPv6.

Symbiote 10y ago
Can anyone from Africa (especially), Asia, South America or a Pacific island comment on the difference with IPv4 and IPv6 sites? Can you measure a difference in speed, and is it noticeable to the average user? We have a /23 of nice IP addresses. There's no ugly NAT or private addressing at our end, so that's not an argument for us to add IPv6 support. They're part of a university's /15 assignment, so it's not realistic to give them up or sell them. We'll get IPv6 support eventually, I'd guess in 2018-19 or so, but I'm curious if the lack of support causes problems for users in Africa in the mean time.
exclusiv 10y ago
How does this matter for the top websites? If a user types in a domain, eventually a root dns responds with an ipv4 A record and resolves to a server the site has configured. Am I missing something?
- daenney 10y ago
  Because the top websites want user traffic too. If you come from a country that doesn't have IPv4 left the usual deployment scenario is a carrier grade DNS64 with NAT64. You're basically stuck behind a huge ISP NAT which makes quite a few things unpleasant and others downright break down. By supplying v6 you ensure anyone in the world can access it regardless of which IP protocol is deployed by your carrier and how they are or aren't translating from one to the other.
  - exclusiv 10y ago
    Thanks for the explanation. I was under the impression all the ISPs would have ipv4 and handle all the translations to ipv6 clients. Sounds like this is mostly the case, but it has some issues and any new ISP on v6 would have a hard time because a lot of the big sites would be unreachable.
    - bluecmd 10y ago
      Any form of NAT is also much much more expensive than just normal routing. For n:m NAT you need to keep track of sessions for example. This is going to hurt things like BitTorrent among a lot of things.
- marcus_holmes 10y ago
  According to my understanding, you are correct and it's new domains that suffer. Of course, this becomes political soon enough. As new countries see mass adoption of the interwebs and find out that they have massively smaller allocations of IP addresses than the existing countries they might feel annoyed and do something about it. Tempers flare, shoes are thrown, everyone gets sulky and unhappy. All this could be avoided if we just flipped a few switches, wrote some code, and all moved to IPv6. It's such an easy, small thing to do. Why not just do that and not irritate the living buggery out of everyone?
- vacri 10y ago
  Because the big hitters drive adoption. Plus they also help adoption, as they are the ones with the most resources to nail down the tricky bits. It's about being a good netizen.
- yaantc 10y ago
  See my comment above on the bad effect of CGNAT on latency and user experience when private IPv4 addresses are used. IPv6 solves this problem and provides the better user experience in this case.
prof_hobart 10y ago
I get why IPv6 is going to be massively important in the future, but we're not (as far as I know) in that future yet, and these sites aren't going to be dropping their v4 addresses as soon as they get V6 ones, so it's not going to be freeing any old addresses up. So - and this is a genuine question - what is the issue right now with, for example, the BBC not yet having an IPv6 address, as long as they have plans in the pipeline for when v6-only clients need to access them?
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  > So - and this is a genuine question - what is the issue right now with, for example, the BBC not yet having an IPv6 address, as long as they have plans in the pipeline for when v6-only clients need to access them? Because of the catch-22 problem. The BBC sees that no consumers use IPv6 exclusively, and don't bother supporting IPv6 "yet". ISPs see that "no" content providers support IPv6 at all, and then claim that it doesn't provide any real benefit over CGNAT bullshit. And so we'll be stuck in this mess for another century at least...

Symbiote 10y ago

Can anyone from Africa (especially), Asia, South America or a Pacific island comment on the difference with IPv4 and IPv6 sites? Can you measure a difference in speed, and is it noticeable to the average user? We have a /23 of nice IP addresses. There's no ugly NAT or private addressing at our end, so that's not an argument for us to add IPv6 support. They're part of a university's /15 assignment, so it's not realistic to give them up or sell them. We'll get IPv6 support eventually, I'd guess in 2018-19 or so, but I'm curious if the lack of support causes problems for users in Africa in the mean time.

exclusiv 10y ago

How does this matter for the top websites? If a user types in a domain, eventually a root dns responds with an ipv4 A record and resolves to a server the site has configured. Am I missing something?

daenney 10y ago
Because the top websites want user traffic too. If you come from a country that doesn't have IPv4 left the usual deployment scenario is a carrier grade DNS64 with NAT64. You're basically stuck behind a huge ISP NAT which makes quite a few things unpleasant and others downright break down. By supplying v6 you ensure anyone in the world can access it regardless of which IP protocol is deployed by your carrier and how they are or aren't translating from one to the other.
- exclusiv 10y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. I was under the impression all the ISPs would have ipv4 and handle all the translations to ipv6 clients. Sounds like this is mostly the case, but it has some issues and any new ISP on v6 would have a hard time because a lot of the big sites would be unreachable.
  - bluecmd 10y ago
    Any form of NAT is also much much more expensive than just normal routing. For n:m NAT you need to keep track of sessions for example. This is going to hurt things like BitTorrent among a lot of things.
marcus_holmes 10y ago
According to my understanding, you are correct and it's new domains that suffer. Of course, this becomes political soon enough. As new countries see mass adoption of the interwebs and find out that they have massively smaller allocations of IP addresses than the existing countries they might feel annoyed and do something about it. Tempers flare, shoes are thrown, everyone gets sulky and unhappy. All this could be avoided if we just flipped a few switches, wrote some code, and all moved to IPv6. It's such an easy, small thing to do. Why not just do that and not irritate the living buggery out of everyone?
vacri 10y ago
Because the big hitters drive adoption. Plus they also help adoption, as they are the ones with the most resources to nail down the tricky bits. It's about being a good netizen.
yaantc 10y ago
See my comment above on the bad effect of CGNAT on latency and user experience when private IPv4 addresses are used. IPv6 solves this problem and provides the better user experience in this case.

prof_hobart 10y ago

I get why IPv6 is going to be massively important in the future, but we're not (as far as I know) in that future yet, and these sites aren't going to be dropping their v4 addresses as soon as they get V6 ones, so it's not going to be freeing any old addresses up. So - and this is a genuine question - what is the issue right now with, for example, the BBC not yet having an IPv6 address, as long as they have plans in the pipeline for when v6-only clients need to access them?

Nullabillity 10y ago
> So - and this is a genuine question - what is the issue right now with, for example, the BBC not yet having an IPv6 address, as long as they have plans in the pipeline for when v6-only clients need to access them? Because of the catch-22 problem. The BBC sees that no consumers use IPv6 exclusively, and don't bother supporting IPv6 "yet". ISPs see that "no" content providers support IPv6 at all, and then claim that it doesn't provide any real benefit over CGNAT bullshit. And so we'll be stuck in this mess for another century at least...