6 ms·

The IPv6 Adoption Curve

54 points by Sami_Lehtinen 9y ago

sebazzz 9y ago
I like to change to IPv6 and my current ISP can make it happen (Ziggo, The Netherlands). However, I have currently my own externally accessible IPv4 address and I will lose that when I opt-in to IPv6 because Ziggo only offers IPv6 with DS-lite. DS-lite means I cannot access my network anymore over IPv4, so I will not change to IPv6.
jzl 9y ago
Seems like one of the largest sources of IPv6 adoption is mobile phone networks. I'm on AT&T in the US and if I check "what is my ip" when on LTE it shows me an IPv6 address. Mobile now accounts for well over half of all web traffic, so if/when mobile networks are universally IPv6 then we'll basically be over the hump.
- pfranz 9y ago
  What's weird is what you're seeing doesn't just apply to IPv6 adoption https://xkcd.com/1865/ https://xkcd.com/1865/
  - jzl 9y ago
    Hadn't seen that one. Brilliant, and absolutely true.
liberte82 9y ago
A few years ago I remember hearing all about the IPv4 crisis and how we were going to run out of addresses very soon. How did we misjudge this so badly? It seems like it should be some pretty simple mathematics to figure out when exhaustion would occur?
- bsder 9y ago
  Everybody used the band-aid known as NAT and broke everything in the universe in order to not deploy IPv6 for a couple of years. Now, we're adopting IPv6 in earnest, but everybody is whining that they want to hang onto NAT. So, before IPv6 got deployed, everybody shot themselves in the left foot by deploying NAT. And, now that IPv6 is deployed, they continue shooting themselves in the right foot by hanging onto NAT.
  - danudey 9y ago
    Not just NAT, but CGNAT, which allows ISPs to oversubscribe your IP address for you. https://www.a10networks.com/resources/glossary/carrier-grade-network-address-translation https://www.a10networks.com/resources/glossary/carrier-grade...
- ianburrell 9y ago
  We have already run out of IPv4 addresses. IANA allocated all blocks in 2011, Asia ran out in 2011, Europe 2012, Latin America 2014, and North America in 2015. The address exhaustion predictions were pretty accurate.
- cptskippy 9y ago
  How do you figure things were misjudged? There's a fixed pool of IP Addresses that can be allocated. When that allocation pool runs out, no more can be allocated. Allocation occurs in blocks at a very high level and then at subsequent levels more sub block allocation happens. The INAN ran out of IPs to hand out. That doesn't mean that all of the IPs have been assigned to physical devices attached to the internet. For example the US Government Agencies have tons of IPs they aren't using but that had been previously allocated to them decades ago and can't be taken back.
- jzl 9y ago
  There was no misjudgement. IPv4 addresses are still running out. Adoption of IPv6 has helped the issue. Some parts of the world are aggressively going IPv6 only. IPv6 adoption has seen a massive uptick in the last year. Check the google graphs. Also some under-utilized IPv4 address blocks have been recently re-claimed. MIT recently sold off half of its class A to Amazon: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3191503/internet/mit-selling-8-million-coveted-ipv4-addresses-amazon-a-buyer.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3191503/internet/mit-se...
noinsight 9y ago
Microsoft is also experimenting with IPv6-only networks internally: https://blog.apnic.net/2017/01/19/ipv6-only-at-microsoft/ https://blog.apnic.net/2017/01/19/ipv6-only-at-microsoft/
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
AceJohnny2 9y ago
(Hopefully obsolete) anecdote: in France, the ISP 'Free' offered IPv6 ahead of the competition (2009? I forget). I was glad to hop onto the bandwagon and enable that. A while later (2014?), I was annoyed by my poor bandwidth. A bit of sleuthing revealed that IPv6 was the culprit: turning that off in the ISP's control panel doubled my bandwidth! I know that a lot of internet routers didn't have IPv6 acceleration. IPv6 packets jumped out of the (fast) data plane to be processed by the (slower) control plane. At the time this made sense considering the rarity of IPv6. I suppose Free, being a cheap ISP, were still using these older routers. In 2013, the telephony-focused router company I worked for still hadn't implemented data-plane processing of IPv6, because there was no requirement from it. Hopefully in 2017, driven by Comcast or other IPv6-dependant phone operators, most routers do IPv6 acceleration.
- samplonius 9y ago
  I'm not aware of any routers that can forward IPv4 in hardware, but pass IPv6 to the control plane. Even the discontinued Catalyst 6500, which was used (and still is) by a lot of ISPs with the SUP720 supervisor, can do native IPv6. I think you are completely wrong about this. Routers with native IPv6 were available 15 years ago, and are already getting pulled out to be replaced by the new stuff. The reality is that, that ISP tier 1s use either Juniper MX or Cisco ASR9000 routers. These routers have good IPv6 performance.
  - jauer 9y ago
    Off the top of my head, Cisco routers with the PXF chipset (7304/NSE-100) had this problem for much of their service life
- danudey 9y ago
  Even worse, there are often huge bugs in routers or switches with regards to IPv6 that aren't often discovered because IPv6 is so rarely used. I remember reading about Facebook's migration as a great case study. One example problem they had was that their switches couldn't handle getting a BGP feed with IPv6 addresses when they had not been configured for IPv6. In other words, when they added IPv6 to their BGP feeds they crashed an entire network segment worth of switches. This is another massive headache w.r.t IPv6 switchover: all the bugs and edge cases we've found with IPv4 thirty years ago are all brand new wild country problem with IPv6.
chrissnell 9y ago
I decided to commit to using IPv6 a couple of years ago and got my personal servers serving my sites in a dual-stack. I also got my home router set up for it, getting my subnet from my ISP and making sure that all of my home devices were getting addresses. It was only after doing this that I realized the problem with IPv6 adoption in the US: the network sucks! Most ISPs (including mine) are using 6rd gateways to get their customers onto the IPv6 backbone. The gateway servers are poorly placed (rarely local) and totally overloaded. The performance was so bad that it was making my everyday web browsing experience feel broken. I killed v6 at home and haven't looked back. Maybe some day ISPs will do a proper deployment with real routing and I will try it again.
- mangix 9y ago
  Why not set up your own tunnel with Hurricane Electric instead?
  - wmf 9y ago
    That's the same problem: your IPv6 is worse than your IPv4. The lesson learned from 6bone, HE, 6to4, 6rd, and Teredo is that we need native IPv6 or nothing. Tunneled IPv6 is worse than no IPv6 due to its unreliability.
    - vetinari 9y ago
      I'm actually quite impressed with HE. They are essentially donating IPv6 bandwidth to the tune of 50Mbit per tunnel.
  - danudey 9y ago
    For home users, Netflix blocks Hurricane Electric (sometimes?) because it can serve as a proxy for non-US users. I haven't had it happen in every case, but it blocked users at work from connecting and at home I got US Netflix instead of Canadian.
  - chrissnell 9y ago
    Tunneled IPv6 through HE is more reliable than the average big ISP 6rd gateway but it doesn't solve the problem of latency. More than likely, you're still crossing a significant amount of network distance just to get to their gateway and then however much farther to your destination. The latency just isn't worth it.

54 points by Sami_Lehtinen 9y ago

I like to change to IPv6 and my current ISP can make it happen (Ziggo, The Netherlands). However, I have currently my own externally accessible IPv4 address and I will lose that when I opt-in to IPv6 because Ziggo only offers IPv6 with DS-lite. DS-lite means I cannot access my network anymore over IPv4, so I will not change to IPv6.

jzl 9y ago

Seems like one of the largest sources of IPv6 adoption is mobile phone networks. I'm on AT&T in the US and if I check "what is my ip" when on LTE it shows me an IPv6 address. Mobile now accounts for well over half of all web traffic, so if/when mobile networks are universally IPv6 then we'll basically be over the hump.

pfranz 9y ago
What's weird is what you're seeing doesn't just apply to IPv6 adoption https://xkcd.com/1865/ https://xkcd.com/1865/
- jzl 9y ago
  Hadn't seen that one. Brilliant, and absolutely true.

liberte82 9y ago

A few years ago I remember hearing all about the IPv4 crisis and how we were going to run out of addresses very soon. How did we misjudge this so badly? It seems like it should be some pretty simple mathematics to figure out when exhaustion would occur?

bsder 9y ago
Everybody used the band-aid known as NAT and broke everything in the universe in order to not deploy IPv6 for a couple of years. Now, we're adopting IPv6 in earnest, but everybody is whining that they want to hang onto NAT. So, before IPv6 got deployed, everybody shot themselves in the left foot by deploying NAT. And, now that IPv6 is deployed, they continue shooting themselves in the right foot by hanging onto NAT.
- danudey 9y ago
  Not just NAT, but CGNAT, which allows ISPs to oversubscribe your IP address for you. https://www.a10networks.com/resources/glossary/carrier-grade-network-address-translation https://www.a10networks.com/resources/glossary/carrier-grade...
ianburrell 9y ago
We have already run out of IPv4 addresses. IANA allocated all blocks in 2011, Asia ran out in 2011, Europe 2012, Latin America 2014, and North America in 2015. The address exhaustion predictions were pretty accurate.
cptskippy 9y ago
How do you figure things were misjudged? There's a fixed pool of IP Addresses that can be allocated. When that allocation pool runs out, no more can be allocated. Allocation occurs in blocks at a very high level and then at subsequent levels more sub block allocation happens. The INAN ran out of IPs to hand out. That doesn't mean that all of the IPs have been assigned to physical devices attached to the internet. For example the US Government Agencies have tons of IPs they aren't using but that had been previously allocated to them decades ago and can't be taken back.
jzl 9y ago
There was no misjudgement. IPv4 addresses are still running out. Adoption of IPv6 has helped the issue. Some parts of the world are aggressively going IPv6 only. IPv6 adoption has seen a massive uptick in the last year. Check the google graphs. Also some under-utilized IPv4 address blocks have been recently re-claimed. MIT recently sold off half of its class A to Amazon: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3191503/internet/mit-selling-8-million-coveted-ipv4-addresses-amazon-a-buyer.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3191503/internet/mit-se...

noinsight 9y ago

Microsoft is also experimenting with IPv6-only networks internally: https://blog.apnic.net/2017/01/19/ipv6-only-at-microsoft/ https://blog.apnic.net/2017/01/19/ipv6-only-at-microsoft/

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

AceJohnny2 9y ago

(Hopefully obsolete) anecdote: in France, the ISP 'Free' offered IPv6 ahead of the competition (2009? I forget). I was glad to hop onto the bandwagon and enable that. A while later (2014?), I was annoyed by my poor bandwidth. A bit of sleuthing revealed that IPv6 was the culprit: turning that off in the ISP's control panel doubled my bandwidth! I know that a lot of internet routers didn't have IPv6 acceleration. IPv6 packets jumped out of the (fast) data plane to be processed by the (slower) control plane. At the time this made sense considering the rarity of IPv6. I suppose Free, being a cheap ISP, were still using these older routers. In 2013, the telephony-focused router company I worked for still hadn't implemented data-plane processing of IPv6, because there was no requirement from it. Hopefully in 2017, driven by Comcast or other IPv6-dependant phone operators, most routers do IPv6 acceleration.

samplonius 9y ago
I'm not aware of any routers that can forward IPv4 in hardware, but pass IPv6 to the control plane. Even the discontinued Catalyst 6500, which was used (and still is) by a lot of ISPs with the SUP720 supervisor, can do native IPv6. I think you are completely wrong about this. Routers with native IPv6 were available 15 years ago, and are already getting pulled out to be replaced by the new stuff. The reality is that, that ISP tier 1s use either Juniper MX or Cisco ASR9000 routers. These routers have good IPv6 performance.
- jauer 9y ago
  Off the top of my head, Cisco routers with the PXF chipset (7304/NSE-100) had this problem for much of their service life
danudey 9y ago
Even worse, there are often huge bugs in routers or switches with regards to IPv6 that aren't often discovered because IPv6 is so rarely used. I remember reading about Facebook's migration as a great case study. One example problem they had was that their switches couldn't handle getting a BGP feed with IPv6 addresses when they had not been configured for IPv6. In other words, when they added IPv6 to their BGP feeds they crashed an entire network segment worth of switches. This is another massive headache w.r.t IPv6 switchover: all the bugs and edge cases we've found with IPv4 thirty years ago are all brand new wild country problem with IPv6.

chrissnell 9y ago

I decided to commit to using IPv6 a couple of years ago and got my personal servers serving my sites in a dual-stack. I also got my home router set up for it, getting my subnet from my ISP and making sure that all of my home devices were getting addresses. It was only after doing this that I realized the problem with IPv6 adoption in the US: the network sucks! Most ISPs (including mine) are using 6rd gateways to get their customers onto the IPv6 backbone. The gateway servers are poorly placed (rarely local) and totally overloaded. The performance was so bad that it was making my everyday web browsing experience feel broken. I killed v6 at home and haven't looked back. Maybe some day ISPs will do a proper deployment with real routing and I will try it again.

mangix 9y ago
Why not set up your own tunnel with Hurricane Electric instead?
- wmf 9y ago
  That's the same problem: your IPv6 is worse than your IPv4. The lesson learned from 6bone, HE, 6to4, 6rd, and Teredo is that we need native IPv6 or nothing. Tunneled IPv6 is worse than no IPv6 due to its unreliability.
  - vetinari 9y ago
    I'm actually quite impressed with HE. They are essentially donating IPv6 bandwidth to the tune of 50Mbit per tunnel.
- danudey 9y ago
  For home users, Netflix blocks Hurricane Electric (sometimes?) because it can serve as a proxy for non-US users. I haven't had it happen in every case, but it blocked users at work from connecting and at home I got US Netflix instead of Canadian.
- chrissnell 9y ago
  Tunneled IPv6 through HE is more reliable than the average big ISP 6rd gateway but it doesn't solve the problem of latency. More than likely, you're still crossing a significant amount of network distance just to get to their gateway and then however much farther to your destination. The latency just isn't worth it.