9 ms·

Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]

126 points by okket 9y ago

mino 9y ago
This talk will be presented on Thursday 17th at RIPE76. I assume that as usual, it will be streamed live and the video recording should appear here: https://ripe76.ripe.net/programme/meeting-plan/ipv6-wg/ https://ripe76.ripe.net/programme/meeting-plan/ipv6-wg/ This upcoming RIPE meeting has so many interesting talks... I invite you to "invest" some time going through the program (not all slides are available yet, as it starts tomorrow)!
ahbs66 9y ago
I don't find it surprising that they can't find a correlation between GDP/growing user base/IPv4 stress and IPv6 deployment. IPv6 deployment is a matter of politics. It depends on the opinions of the network personnel, on the hardware they have in their core network, on the hardware their customers have (CPEs), on the support contracts they have, etc. That's what decides whether they put a CGNAT in place, whether they buy more IPv4 addresses, or whether they deploy IPv6.
- cm2187 9y ago
  Also, IPv4 exhaustion doesn’t affect Africa yet, only the American, Asian and European RIR.
- bogomipz 9y ago
  >" It depends on the opinions of the network personnel, on the hardware they have in their core network, on the hardware their customers have (CPEs), on the support contracts they have, etc." Are you saying there are network engineers/management at ISPs who don't believe IPv6 is an imperative? As someone who in a former life worked inside large ISPs on the networking side I can tell you that that view would be quite rare. What would be the politics exactly? Most ISPs run Juniper and Cisco gear in their core, both of these have have been capable of routing v6 for well over a decade now. Additionally if you are running older gear you would have hit the 512K route TCAM limit years ago.[1] None of this would have anything to do with existing support contracts either. You would be pretty hard-pressed to find a rev of JunOS or IOS/NXOS that didn't support v6. It's actually much more efficient to route v6 than v4. The global IPv4 table 719K prefixes now while IPv6 has 52K See: http://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/ http://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/ and http://www.cidr-report.org/v6/as2.0/ http://www.cidr-report.org/v6/as2.0/ Lastly the fee schedule for IPv6 allocations from RIRs are not cost prohibitive for an ISP. Using ARIN as an example here: https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html [1] https://blogs.cisco.com/sp/global-internet-routing-table-reaches-512k-milestone https://blogs.cisco.com/sp/global-internet-routing-table-rea...
  - ahbs66 9y ago
    >Are you saying there are network engineers/management at ISPs who don't believe IPv6 is an imperative? If the rest of your message is true, why are the ipv6 numbers so low, if it's not because of politics?
    - bogomipz 9y ago
      The numbers are not so low, they've simply plateaued recently.
    - Arnt 9y ago
      IPv6 growth has been an almost flat curve for many years. Now suddenly it's not. I personally expected IPv6 growth to slow down gradually. I find it very odd that the growth hit a wall like that. Oversimplifying somewhat: The number of new v6-capable users increased every month, then boom, zero. I also find it odd that politics would have no effect at 13% or 14% deployment and then block growth entirely at 15%.
      - bogomipz 8y ago
        Then please explain exactly what these "politics" are then rather just throwing around the word around in the abstract. I find it odd that people say "oh its politics" without explaining what or how IPv6 is being "politicized."
        Arnt 8y ago
        People appear to use the word "politics" to mean any motivation that's very weakly connected to the matter at hand, but rather instead to another relationship between the parties. Ill will from a previous confrontation, for example. Or a general desire to prevent department x from meeting more of the Quarterly Corporate Targets than department y does. In this context it has to mean something that didn't impede IPv6 growth at all for a while, then suddenly blocked IPv6 growth completely. Can't imagine what it would be. (Sorry, didn't notice the comment until much too long had passed. I realise noone's going to read this. Oh well.)
ktpsns 9y ago
Maybe still ISPs suffer poor field reports. I was client at "Kabel Deutschland, Germany" and they offer native IPv6 for their customers, with "Dual stack lite" as the routing option to reach the IPv4 world. It performed poorly for me, perhaps due to bad load balancing of the IPv4-gateways. I switched to a buisness plan (+10EUR/month) of the same ISP and now have an own static IPv4 adress and not even native access to IPv6 any more. This is a clear statement how they think about their IPv6 support.
- ahbs66 9y ago
  It's normal, no? They deploy IPv6 because they don't have enough IPv4 addresses. And since most servers in the world are not IPv6 ready and will never be for a long time, if you want to reach an IPv4 server you have to go through their CGNAT which may have a piss-poor performance. I really wish RIPE could force ISPs to release the addresses they don't need :(
  - ktpsns 9y ago
    If their CGNAT would perform better, clients would not even notice a difference. I hardly doubt all that buisness clients (thinking of small non-IT buisinesses such as coffee shops) require native IPv4. An ISP who cannot offer a proper IPv6+IPv4 internet access should not be refered to as an ISP. He supports IPv6<->IPv4 segregation, instead.
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    12% of all web servers have IPv6, including most of the largest sites. https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ce-ipv6/all/all https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ce-ipv6/all/all
    - Dagger2 8y ago
      It's worth noting that many of the highest traffic websites are in that 12%, to the point that an average dual-stacked customer will see about 50% of their traffic by volume go over v6. That's a very relevant stat when it comes to provisioning CGNAT capacity for your customer base.
ohazi 9y ago
I think eventually the only thing that will have any hope of forcing proper IPv6 adoption is some popular service being made available only over IPv6. We can call it "IPv6walling."
- ancarda 9y ago
  There's 3 websites, to my knowledge, that are IPv6 only: * https://loopsofzen.uk/ https://loopsofzen.uk/ * https://42.be/ https://42.be/ * https://ct.filippo.io/ https://ct.filippo.io/ They aren't quite killer applications though, so it won't push many to IPv6. Possibly as the internet gets larger, some hosting providers simply won't have any free IPv4 addresses left? I guess that could be solved by putting CloudFlare in front of the server to provide an IPv4 address. It's strange, I used to do that to provide IPv6 years ago.
  - megous 9y ago
    Also customers would just think the website is offline, because browser's error page doesn't say: "You have IPv4, but you need IPv6. Call your ISP." So there'd be no: "I want this IPv6" calls to the ISP.
    - tzahola 9y ago
      Just redirect your A record to youdonthaveipv6.com
      - zlynx 9y ago
        If you have dual stack, any A record will get used some of the time. It's part of Happy Eyeballs. I suppose that you could add a long artificial delay to the IPv4 service.
        tzahola 9y ago
        Depends on your browser. For example, Safari will always prefer AAAA over A.
jfjjfdjj94 9y ago
Could it also be a way to keep competition out? Established ISPs might have enough IP4 addresses to last them for a while. Meanwhile, as long as most of the internet hasn't switched over, new ISPs can't enter the market because they can't get hold of IP4 addresses anymore?
88e282102ae2e5b 9y ago
Is there a reason ISPs would be reluctant to discuss their motivations for IPv6 deployment? That is, why can't you just ask them?
- privateSFacct 9y ago
  How much would you pay to access the ipv4 internet? How much would you pay to access the ipv6 internet? What are support costs for ipv6 endpoints / compatibility needs / help desk / securing / understanding / training all techs etc vs ipv4? = ISP motivation? ipv4 is relatively well understood, existing infrastructure to serve it, and people are willing to pay MORE to access the ipv4 internet, and basically won't pay anything to access ipv6 only internet. If you've used ipv6 actively, plenty of stuff doesn't play well, lots of weird hangs on connections etc in deployed contexts, and even with ipv6 you can't seem to actually go endpoint to endpoint (ie, printer at work from computer at home easily). My ipv4 based vpn works great though (and doesn't support ipv6 properly). I started down path of hassling vendors, but it's not worth it. You've got your work ISP to hassle, then fix work internet gateway, then get firewall sorted, then get internal network sorted (yes, the copier runs some ancient crap), then get each employees home internet sorted, then all their machines, then all the related software. They couldn't have made the migration path harder if they had tried.
  - Dagger2 8y ago
    It would be more accurate to say that they couldn't have made it any _easier_ if they tried. v4 doesn't have the necessary forward compatibility for that.
ec109685 9y ago
Given the wide deployment of nats, necessary because of the shortage of ipv4 addresses, the need for publicly routable ips for client addresses goes way down. A few years ago, there was a mad push to have public IPv6 addresses because “soon” customers would be unable to reach your servers since they were only going to be given IPv6 addresses. Clearly, that hasn’t been the case.
- okket 9y ago
  See the slide "The Changing Internet"
- lmm 9y ago
  NAT is an annoyance. Peer-to-peer gaming or voicechat becomes laggy, or doesn't work at all. With the popular internet becoming more and more centralised, maybe it doesn't matter so much to the average end user, but there will come a point where people notice that gaming is better on ISP A than on ISP B even if you don't know exactly why.
  - ahbs66 9y ago
    >Peer-to-peer gaming or voicechat becomes laggy, or doesn't work at all. It's 2018, nobody would be insane enough to try that
    - lmm 9y ago
      Maybe not the big names, but it's still happening. I have at least one new-in-2018 game that I had to do some port forwarding for (Heart of Crown).
    - zaarn 9y ago
      Ghost Recon Wildlands, a 2017 Game, uses P2P game lobbies. It's still very popular because it's cheaper; no expensive servers to run for customers and they can still play if you eventually shut down your services.
  - toyg 9y ago
    Gaming is hardly a major driver of infrastructure choices, with all due respect. The issue is that most businesses are now so well-acquainted with NAT-ting, they don't really care for IP addresses. In fact, the more opaque your network topology is to the outside, the better from a security point of view. Every app works through http these days (because proxies are mandatory, again for security), so there is little need for real addresses.
pietroglyph 9y ago
See slide 33, "The Changing Internet", for the most interesting insight (IMO). It basically said that when IPv6 was developed, IPs were still pretty good identifiers (it was important everyone had their own), but that now it's not so important that everyone has their own, so there's not much incentive to change.
- simias 9y ago
  Isn't it a self-fulfilling prophecy though? Dynamic IPs and widespread NAT'ing made IP addresses borderline useless to identify endpoints. If everybody had a static /48 IPv6 in the 90's and early 2000's maybe things would have gone in a different direction.
zzzcpan 9y ago
> Let’s measure the “wealth” of an ISP by the aggregate wealth of its customer base You can't measure the wealth of an ISP by the wealth of its customer base. ISP businesses are very different in each country. In one country there could be no ISP-hostile regulations, low barriers of entry, a lot of competition, cheap labor, resulting in like $5 ARPU in urban areas and low margins. In another country ISPs could manage to monopolize the market with regulations creating a lot of burden for smaller players, resulting in like $20 ARPU and very high margins. In some countries it is also possible for rent seekers that provide infrastructure for ISPs to suck all the revenue, still allowing competition and leaving them with big ARPUs but low margins. I suspect the hunch in the title is right though. ISPs from the least competitive markets and therefore rich can afford and do deploy IPv6. While ISPs from the most competitive markets cannot afford bothering with IPv6 and since there is no demand for it yet at all, they don't deploy it. But if demand for IPv6 starts growing for some reason, ISPs from competitive markets will of course deploy it.
shmerl 9y ago
> You need to be a rich ISP to afford IPv6 deployment That's not a guarantee though. Verizon are rich, yet their fiber residential network has been "in the process"[1] of deploying IPv6 for years, and nothing is anywhere in sight still. 1. https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/internet/getting-started/learn-about-ipv6 https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/internet/getting...
cjcampbell 9y ago
Even where ISP's support IPv6, hardware is often the impediment. I've finally enabled IPv6 at home now that Ubiquiti has enabled support. My office is on Meraki hardware, which is not yet IPv6-ready. Can't quite wrap my mind around the latter. I didn't pay for the hardware or initial 3 years, and I certainly won't be extending the license if support isn't ready. As a side note, I'd look closely at router implementations as you deploy in home and other small networks. Too many consumer-grade hardware companies rely on NAT versus proper firewall rules to restrict inbound traffic. I don't expect the majority of them to get the basic protections right as we move to publicly addressed IPv6 networks.
adenner 9y ago
I am on CenturyLink dsl and have ipv6 kinda. I had to go through the trouble of turning on 6rd myself since it is not enabled by default.
RandomInteger4 9y ago
I had IPv6 with Time Warner, but then they merged with Spectrum and my IPv6 magically disappeared. My networking and internet infrastructure knowledge is limited, so I have no clue why they would would be incentivized to do that. This happened some time last year. EDIT: The only reason I know this is because at some point last year I asked google what my IP address was and was surprised to find it was an IPv6 address, but then later on apt broke, because one of the packages (node?) was only checking an IPv6 address and so now whenever I update I have to force apt to use IPv4.
- apearson 9y ago
  I've had Spectrum for the last 4 years. I know they've been slowly rolling it out to their entire network start last year. My connection currently is ipv6 enabled. I might be they are reconfiguring your area to their own ipv4 and ipv6 standards.
brohee 9y ago
Hypothesis: China/Russia are dragging their feet because their censorship/interception infrastructure is holding them off. Freer India gets a nice head start here.
lokedhs 9y ago
Knowing what I know about how corporations are run (which is nothing more than anyone else who has worked for multiple large organisations) the ISPs are dragging their feet on IPv6 because they can get away with it and it saves them money. I switched ISPs for my fibre connection because my previous one had an absolutely terrible IPv6 implementation. I made sure to let them know why they lost me as a customer, but it's very likely that never happened to them before or since. I think IPSs can get away with horrible service and abominations like CGNAT for quite some time before it gets so bad that IPv6 gets properly deployed.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  None of this explains why the growth suddenly slowed down. My best theory is it has to do with adoption of mobile ISPs.
  - dx034 9y ago
    It would appear to me that a lot of the previous growth came from Jio in India which added a lot of users in 2016&2017. That has slowed down now so that the overall growth has slowed. You'd probably need to see very large providers switching over to see further jumps of that size.
- bewo001 9y ago
  To get a project going you need to convince mgmt that it can make or save money. And you need a shiny demo. With IPv6 migration, this was tricky. It costs a lot of money up front to get IPv6 support for all routers and backend systems. There aren't really new products you can show. Being able to give retail customers a fixed IPv6 address will reduce the demand for more profitable business access products. The best argument was that IPv4 address depletion would make it difficult to add customers.
originalsimba 9y ago
The author used blue for india and some orange-ish gold color for USA on purpose, then asks "Can you guess which is the largest?) to trick the readers into thinking the largest slice in the pie chart of adoption was the USA because of course we're all racists who think our country is the only one in the world. In the words of Randall from Clerks "I didn't appreciate your ruse." I stopped scanning the pdf there. IPv6 adoption is up to ISPs. If the users don't have IPv6 at home then it may as well not exist yet. Consumers have to replace their obsolete routers. Why should they when IPv6 isn't required and their router works just fine? ISPs have to upgrade their extroadinarily expensive infrastructures. Why should they when IPv6 isn't required, so on and so forth. I've spoken to various experts about this over the years and the results in the PDF are exactly what they predicted. Partial adoption has relieved the pressure from the immediate crisis of IPv4 exhaustion. Now we see people saving their money because shelter and food is (still) more important than the internet.
dingo_bat 9y ago
Interesting that 40% of IPv6 users in the world belong to just one ISP. It's Reliance Jio if you're wondering.
pojkofd00m 9y ago
Regarding France and the slide about the growth of ISP and the correlation with the IPV6 deployment I can say that sudden user growth in france is very often due to an aggressive offer from one of the ISP, resulting in the migration of a large number of users from one ISP to another, no new clients. I do think this is a valid indicator in "not fully developped yet" countries, but I don't think its very representative for others. As for the slow down some ISP in france started to regroup several clients under the same IPV4 addr, essentially assigning them the said ipv4 and a range of ports, some sort of PAT at the ISP level, I don't know if it is an isolated solution but it might explain part of the slow down. Doesn't explain why they do it tho.
xuande 8y ago
He's written an article on this presentation now: https://blog.apnic.net/2018/05/21/what-drives-ipv6-deployment/ https://blog.apnic.net/2018/05/21/what-drives-ipv6-deploymen...

126 points by okket 9y ago

mino 9y ago

This talk will be presented on Thursday 17th at RIPE76. I assume that as usual, it will be streamed live and the video recording should appear here: https://ripe76.ripe.net/programme/meeting-plan/ipv6-wg/ https://ripe76.ripe.net/programme/meeting-plan/ipv6-wg/ This upcoming RIPE meeting has so many interesting talks... I invite you to "invest" some time going through the program (not all slides are available yet, as it starts tomorrow)!

ahbs66 9y ago

I don't find it surprising that they can't find a correlation between GDP/growing user base/IPv4 stress and IPv6 deployment. IPv6 deployment is a matter of politics. It depends on the opinions of the network personnel, on the hardware they have in their core network, on the hardware their customers have (CPEs), on the support contracts they have, etc. That's what decides whether they put a CGNAT in place, whether they buy more IPv4 addresses, or whether they deploy IPv6.

cm2187 9y ago
Also, IPv4 exhaustion doesn’t affect Africa yet, only the American, Asian and European RIR.
bogomipz 9y ago
>" It depends on the opinions of the network personnel, on the hardware they have in their core network, on the hardware their customers have (CPEs), on the support contracts they have, etc." Are you saying there are network engineers/management at ISPs who don't believe IPv6 is an imperative? As someone who in a former life worked inside large ISPs on the networking side I can tell you that that view would be quite rare. What would be the politics exactly? Most ISPs run Juniper and Cisco gear in their core, both of these have have been capable of routing v6 for well over a decade now. Additionally if you are running older gear you would have hit the 512K route TCAM limit years ago.[1] None of this would have anything to do with existing support contracts either. You would be pretty hard-pressed to find a rev of JunOS or IOS/NXOS that didn't support v6. It's actually much more efficient to route v6 than v4. The global IPv4 table 719K prefixes now while IPv6 has 52K See: http://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/ http://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/ and http://www.cidr-report.org/v6/as2.0/ http://www.cidr-report.org/v6/as2.0/ Lastly the fee schedule for IPv6 allocations from RIRs are not cost prohibitive for an ISP. Using ARIN as an example here: https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html [1] https://blogs.cisco.com/sp/global-internet-routing-table-reaches-512k-milestone https://blogs.cisco.com/sp/global-internet-routing-table-rea...
- ahbs66 9y ago
  >Are you saying there are network engineers/management at ISPs who don't believe IPv6 is an imperative? If the rest of your message is true, why are the ipv6 numbers so low, if it's not because of politics?
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    The numbers are not so low, they've simply plateaued recently.
  - Arnt 9y ago
    IPv6 growth has been an almost flat curve for many years. Now suddenly it's not. I personally expected IPv6 growth to slow down gradually. I find it very odd that the growth hit a wall like that. Oversimplifying somewhat: The number of new v6-capable users increased every month, then boom, zero. I also find it odd that politics would have no effect at 13% or 14% deployment and then block growth entirely at 15%.
    - bogomipz 8y ago
      Then please explain exactly what these "politics" are then rather just throwing around the word around in the abstract. I find it odd that people say "oh its politics" without explaining what or how IPv6 is being "politicized."
      - Arnt 8y ago
        People appear to use the word "politics" to mean any motivation that's very weakly connected to the matter at hand, but rather instead to another relationship between the parties. Ill will from a previous confrontation, for example. Or a general desire to prevent department x from meeting more of the Quarterly Corporate Targets than department y does. In this context it has to mean something that didn't impede IPv6 growth at all for a while, then suddenly blocked IPv6 growth completely. Can't imagine what it would be. (Sorry, didn't notice the comment until much too long had passed. I realise noone's going to read this. Oh well.)

ktpsns 9y ago

Maybe still ISPs suffer poor field reports. I was client at "Kabel Deutschland, Germany" and they offer native IPv6 for their customers, with "Dual stack lite" as the routing option to reach the IPv4 world. It performed poorly for me, perhaps due to bad load balancing of the IPv4-gateways. I switched to a buisness plan (+10EUR/month) of the same ISP and now have an own static IPv4 adress and not even native access to IPv6 any more. This is a clear statement how they think about their IPv6 support.

ahbs66 9y ago
It's normal, no? They deploy IPv6 because they don't have enough IPv4 addresses. And since most servers in the world are not IPv6 ready and will never be for a long time, if you want to reach an IPv4 server you have to go through their CGNAT which may have a piss-poor performance. I really wish RIPE could force ISPs to release the addresses they don't need :(
- ktpsns 9y ago
  If their CGNAT would perform better, clients would not even notice a difference. I hardly doubt all that buisness clients (thinking of small non-IT buisinesses such as coffee shops) require native IPv4. An ISP who cannot offer a proper IPv6+IPv4 internet access should not be refered to as an ISP. He supports IPv6<->IPv4 segregation, instead.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  12% of all web servers have IPv6, including most of the largest sites. https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ce-ipv6/all/all https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ce-ipv6/all/all
  - Dagger2 8y ago
    It's worth noting that many of the highest traffic websites are in that 12%, to the point that an average dual-stacked customer will see about 50% of their traffic by volume go over v6. That's a very relevant stat when it comes to provisioning CGNAT capacity for your customer base.

ohazi 9y ago

I think eventually the only thing that will have any hope of forcing proper IPv6 adoption is some popular service being made available only over IPv6. We can call it "IPv6walling."

ancarda 9y ago
There's 3 websites, to my knowledge, that are IPv6 only: * https://loopsofzen.uk/ https://loopsofzen.uk/ * https://42.be/ https://42.be/ * https://ct.filippo.io/ https://ct.filippo.io/ They aren't quite killer applications though, so it won't push many to IPv6. Possibly as the internet gets larger, some hosting providers simply won't have any free IPv4 addresses left? I guess that could be solved by putting CloudFlare in front of the server to provide an IPv4 address. It's strange, I used to do that to provide IPv6 years ago.
- megous 9y ago
  Also customers would just think the website is offline, because browser's error page doesn't say: "You have IPv4, but you need IPv6. Call your ISP." So there'd be no: "I want this IPv6" calls to the ISP.
  - tzahola 9y ago
    Just redirect your A record to youdonthaveipv6.com
    - zlynx 9y ago
      If you have dual stack, any A record will get used some of the time. It's part of Happy Eyeballs. I suppose that you could add a long artificial delay to the IPv4 service.
      - tzahola 9y ago
        Depends on your browser. For example, Safari will always prefer AAAA over A.

jfjjfdjj94 9y ago

Could it also be a way to keep competition out? Established ISPs might have enough IP4 addresses to last them for a while. Meanwhile, as long as most of the internet hasn't switched over, new ISPs can't enter the market because they can't get hold of IP4 addresses anymore?

88e282102ae2e5b 9y ago

Is there a reason ISPs would be reluctant to discuss their motivations for IPv6 deployment? That is, why can't you just ask them?

privateSFacct 9y ago
How much would you pay to access the ipv4 internet? How much would you pay to access the ipv6 internet? What are support costs for ipv6 endpoints / compatibility needs / help desk / securing / understanding / training all techs etc vs ipv4? = ISP motivation? ipv4 is relatively well understood, existing infrastructure to serve it, and people are willing to pay MORE to access the ipv4 internet, and basically won't pay anything to access ipv6 only internet. If you've used ipv6 actively, plenty of stuff doesn't play well, lots of weird hangs on connections etc in deployed contexts, and even with ipv6 you can't seem to actually go endpoint to endpoint (ie, printer at work from computer at home easily). My ipv4 based vpn works great though (and doesn't support ipv6 properly). I started down path of hassling vendors, but it's not worth it. You've got your work ISP to hassle, then fix work internet gateway, then get firewall sorted, then get internal network sorted (yes, the copier runs some ancient crap), then get each employees home internet sorted, then all their machines, then all the related software. They couldn't have made the migration path harder if they had tried.
- Dagger2 8y ago
  It would be more accurate to say that they couldn't have made it any _easier_ if they tried. v4 doesn't have the necessary forward compatibility for that.

ec109685 9y ago

Given the wide deployment of nats, necessary because of the shortage of ipv4 addresses, the need for publicly routable ips for client addresses goes way down. A few years ago, there was a mad push to have public IPv6 addresses because “soon” customers would be unable to reach your servers since they were only going to be given IPv6 addresses. Clearly, that hasn’t been the case.

okket 9y ago
See the slide "The Changing Internet"
lmm 9y ago
NAT is an annoyance. Peer-to-peer gaming or voicechat becomes laggy, or doesn't work at all. With the popular internet becoming more and more centralised, maybe it doesn't matter so much to the average end user, but there will come a point where people notice that gaming is better on ISP A than on ISP B even if you don't know exactly why.
- ahbs66 9y ago
  >Peer-to-peer gaming or voicechat becomes laggy, or doesn't work at all. It's 2018, nobody would be insane enough to try that
  - lmm 9y ago
    Maybe not the big names, but it's still happening. I have at least one new-in-2018 game that I had to do some port forwarding for (Heart of Crown).
  - zaarn 9y ago
    Ghost Recon Wildlands, a 2017 Game, uses P2P game lobbies. It's still very popular because it's cheaper; no expensive servers to run for customers and they can still play if you eventually shut down your services.
- toyg 9y ago
  Gaming is hardly a major driver of infrastructure choices, with all due respect. The issue is that most businesses are now so well-acquainted with NAT-ting, they don't really care for IP addresses. In fact, the more opaque your network topology is to the outside, the better from a security point of view. Every app works through http these days (because proxies are mandatory, again for security), so there is little need for real addresses.

pietroglyph 9y ago

See slide 33, "The Changing Internet", for the most interesting insight (IMO). It basically said that when IPv6 was developed, IPs were still pretty good identifiers (it was important everyone had their own), but that now it's not so important that everyone has their own, so there's not much incentive to change.

simias 9y ago
Isn't it a self-fulfilling prophecy though? Dynamic IPs and widespread NAT'ing made IP addresses borderline useless to identify endpoints. If everybody had a static /48 IPv6 in the 90's and early 2000's maybe things would have gone in a different direction.

zzzcpan 9y ago

> Let’s measure the “wealth” of an ISP by the aggregate wealth of its customer base You can't measure the wealth of an ISP by the wealth of its customer base. ISP businesses are very different in each country. In one country there could be no ISP-hostile regulations, low barriers of entry, a lot of competition, cheap labor, resulting in like $5 ARPU in urban areas and low margins. In another country ISPs could manage to monopolize the market with regulations creating a lot of burden for smaller players, resulting in like $20 ARPU and very high margins. In some countries it is also possible for rent seekers that provide infrastructure for ISPs to suck all the revenue, still allowing competition and leaving them with big ARPUs but low margins. I suspect the hunch in the title is right though. ISPs from the least competitive markets and therefore rich can afford and do deploy IPv6. While ISPs from the most competitive markets cannot afford bothering with IPv6 and since there is no demand for it yet at all, they don't deploy it. But if demand for IPv6 starts growing for some reason, ISPs from competitive markets will of course deploy it.

shmerl 9y ago

> You need to be a rich ISP to afford IPv6 deployment That's not a guarantee though. Verizon are rich, yet their fiber residential network has been "in the process"[1] of deploying IPv6 for years, and nothing is anywhere in sight still. 1. https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/internet/getting-started/learn-about-ipv6 https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/internet/getting...

cjcampbell 9y ago

Even where ISP's support IPv6, hardware is often the impediment. I've finally enabled IPv6 at home now that Ubiquiti has enabled support. My office is on Meraki hardware, which is not yet IPv6-ready. Can't quite wrap my mind around the latter. I didn't pay for the hardware or initial 3 years, and I certainly won't be extending the license if support isn't ready. As a side note, I'd look closely at router implementations as you deploy in home and other small networks. Too many consumer-grade hardware companies rely on NAT versus proper firewall rules to restrict inbound traffic. I don't expect the majority of them to get the basic protections right as we move to publicly addressed IPv6 networks.

adenner 9y ago

I am on CenturyLink dsl and have ipv6 kinda. I had to go through the trouble of turning on 6rd myself since it is not enabled by default.

RandomInteger4 9y ago

I had IPv6 with Time Warner, but then they merged with Spectrum and my IPv6 magically disappeared. My networking and internet infrastructure knowledge is limited, so I have no clue why they would would be incentivized to do that. This happened some time last year. EDIT: The only reason I know this is because at some point last year I asked google what my IP address was and was surprised to find it was an IPv6 address, but then later on apt broke, because one of the packages (node?) was only checking an IPv6 address and so now whenever I update I have to force apt to use IPv4.

apearson 9y ago
I've had Spectrum for the last 4 years. I know they've been slowly rolling it out to their entire network start last year. My connection currently is ipv6 enabled. I might be they are reconfiguring your area to their own ipv4 and ipv6 standards.

brohee 9y ago

Hypothesis: China/Russia are dragging their feet because their censorship/interception infrastructure is holding them off. Freer India gets a nice head start here.

lokedhs 9y ago

Knowing what I know about how corporations are run (which is nothing more than anyone else who has worked for multiple large organisations) the ISPs are dragging their feet on IPv6 because they can get away with it and it saves them money. I switched ISPs for my fibre connection because my previous one had an absolutely terrible IPv6 implementation. I made sure to let them know why they lost me as a customer, but it's very likely that never happened to them before or since. I think IPSs can get away with horrible service and abominations like CGNAT for quite some time before it gets so bad that IPv6 gets properly deployed.

scrollaway 9y ago
None of this explains why the growth suddenly slowed down. My best theory is it has to do with adoption of mobile ISPs.
- dx034 9y ago
  It would appear to me that a lot of the previous growth came from Jio in India which added a lot of users in 2016&2017. That has slowed down now so that the overall growth has slowed. You'd probably need to see very large providers switching over to see further jumps of that size.
bewo001 9y ago
To get a project going you need to convince mgmt that it can make or save money. And you need a shiny demo. With IPv6 migration, this was tricky. It costs a lot of money up front to get IPv6 support for all routers and backend systems. There aren't really new products you can show. Being able to give retail customers a fixed IPv6 address will reduce the demand for more profitable business access products. The best argument was that IPv4 address depletion would make it difficult to add customers.

originalsimba 9y ago

The author used blue for india and some orange-ish gold color for USA on purpose, then asks "Can you guess which is the largest?) to trick the readers into thinking the largest slice in the pie chart of adoption was the USA because of course we're all racists who think our country is the only one in the world. In the words of Randall from Clerks "I didn't appreciate your ruse." I stopped scanning the pdf there. IPv6 adoption is up to ISPs. If the users don't have IPv6 at home then it may as well not exist yet. Consumers have to replace their obsolete routers. Why should they when IPv6 isn't required and their router works just fine? ISPs have to upgrade their extroadinarily expensive infrastructures. Why should they when IPv6 isn't required, so on and so forth. I've spoken to various experts about this over the years and the results in the PDF are exactly what they predicted. Partial adoption has relieved the pressure from the immediate crisis of IPv4 exhaustion. Now we see people saving their money because shelter and food is (still) more important than the internet.

dingo_bat 9y ago

Interesting that 40% of IPv6 users in the world belong to just one ISP. It's Reliance Jio if you're wondering.

pojkofd00m 9y ago

Regarding France and the slide about the growth of ISP and the correlation with the IPV6 deployment I can say that sudden user growth in france is very often due to an aggressive offer from one of the ISP, resulting in the migration of a large number of users from one ISP to another, no new clients. I do think this is a valid indicator in "not fully developped yet" countries, but I don't think its very representative for others. As for the slow down some ISP in france started to regroup several clients under the same IPV4 addr, essentially assigning them the said ipv4 and a range of ports, some sort of PAT at the ISP level, I don't know if it is an isolated solution but it might explain part of the slow down. Doesn't explain why they do it tho.

xuande 8y ago

He's written an article on this presentation now: https://blog.apnic.net/2018/05/21/what-drives-ipv6-deployment/ https://blog.apnic.net/2018/05/21/what-drives-ipv6-deploymen...