10 ms·

At some point, some low-hanging companies are just going to start running IPv6 only applications and deal with the fall-out of some nn% of their customer not be

At some point, some low-hanging companies are just going to start running IPv6 only applications and deal with the fall-out of some nn% of their customer not being compatible. Those customers will complain to their ISPs, which will provide incentive to get IPv6 deployed (should have been done 10 years ago honestly at any credible ISP). Getting the number closer to 100% will make it easier for new companies to deploy IPv6 only, until we get to the point that IPv4 is seen as some legacy thing that isn't relevant but used to be important in the dark ages of Web Deployments. I'm very surprised at work and at home how often most of my Internet communications is running over IPv6. There are some surprising exceptions though [1]. I'd be willing to place a wager that there will be a $100mm company that is only IPv6 by 2030. And that the "Default IPv6 only on the Internet unless there is some weird edge case" will occur by 2040. IPv4 as a protocol, though, will never, ever, go away - we'll see it widely deployed for the next 100 years. [1] $ dig news.ycombinator.com AAAA ; <<>> DiG 9.16.1-Ubuntu <<>> news.ycombinator.com AAAA ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 46616 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 65494 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;news.ycombinator.com. IN AAAA ;; Query time: 176 msec ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.53#53(127.0.0.53) ;; WHEN: Thu Dec 09 15:21:09 EST 2021 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 49

mdaniel 5y ago
> Those customers will complain to their ISPs, which will provide incentive to get IPv6 deployed Your experience with huge ISPs has obviously been different from mine. I am deeply grateful that I've benefited from two "first world" advantages: Comcast has (surprisingly) been very proactive about IPv6 support, and here in the Bay Area I have actual competition available for me to switch to. But in other parts of the country, that's for sure not true --- to address the dig portion of your comment, the AAAA record (err, or lack of it) for github.com likely is a lot more impactful than HN It's not that I think major users are going to switch, but I'll point out that GitLab actually does have AAAA records
- walrus01 5y ago
  fun fact: comcast have been proactive about ipv6 because their management network grew so large and unwieldy, through various acquisitions and long term inefficient use of space, that ipv4 RFC1918 10/8 (and 192.168 etc) was no longer sufficient to address all of their individual netblocks. turns out that if you allocate a private /24 to every POP you can absolutely exhaust 10/8 in a big last mile ISP. they started with ipv6 for their own management network before any public netblocks started getting rolled out to customers.
  - ArchOversight 5y ago
    The issue is that each set top box, cable modem and everything else gets a management IP address on the network as well for allowing configuration changes/validating status/all that fun stuff. The large push for IPv6 was started so that management of set top boxes/cable modems no longer required large islands of RFC1918 space where they had to deploy multiple NAT's to get traffic in/out of those environments.
    - walrus01 5y ago
      yes, from what I've heard, they specified full ipv6 as a non-negotiable "must have" with their CPE vendors (and CMTS) almost 16, 18 years ago. Comcast gets a lot of shit for its poor customer service practices, as does any huge cable company, but the people who run the core IP network knew, and still do know what they're doing.
      - easton 5y ago
        Here’s a deck that describes some of this (2006!): https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog37/presentations/alain-durand.pdf https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog37/presentations/ala... I never thought about the scale of their internal network. It’s nuts.
  - hackbinary 5y ago
    Does that mean they will need to deploy IPv8 with 256 bits of address space? Or will IPv8 go straight to 1024 bits? ;)
aidenn0 5y ago
I think a lot of SMBs are the holdouts for IPv6; their entire IT infrastructure is IPv4, and switching will be expensive because every router, subnet, VLAN, &c. must be upgraded. Small home networks are comparatively easy once all clients support IPv6: switch from a single subnet in the private range to a single /64 and add a stateful firewall. Since SMBs can run a lot of clients with very few (or even one!) public IP, IPv4 addresses will need to become much more expensive (or critical remote services will need to switch to IPv6 only) before it's cheaper to upgrade internal infrastructure to IPv6. Note that NAT64/464XLAT solve the reverse problem. NAT-PT was the theoretical solution, but see RFC 4966 for all the reasons why that was a failure.
- wmf 5y ago
  Many SMBs should probably go full cloud and once that's done they can "downgrade" the office network to zero-trust and maybe deploy IPv6 at the same time.
- labcomputer 5y ago
  Color me skeptical. It’s true that many SMB network infrastructure devices have poor support for IPv6, particularly w.r.t. the management interface. But IPv6 support is old at this point. Very few things have no (as opposed to inconvenient) IPv6 support. For heavens sake, there are versions of IRIX and VMS/VAX with IPv6 support. Those OSes run exclusively on hardware that hasn’t been manufactured for two decades, and the companies that released them have been defunct for almost as long. Windows XP (deprecated over 10 years ago) supports it. MacOS 10.7 (released 10 years ago) supports it. In other words, if you’re willing to run network management from a dual-stack host, you can probably switch over all “regular hosts” today at zero hardware cost. You have to be running seriously old hardware and software to not have IPv6 support today. So old that it should be on an air-gapped network anyway. The only relatively common exception is Cisco Meraki and some cheap consumer-level AIO router/APs.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    I'm not saying there are devices that don't support IPv6 (though there are), I'm saying the IT costs of reconfiguring the infra for IPv6 are higher than the costs of paying many times the current going rate for an IPv4 address.
nikanj 5y ago
That’s an easy bet to make, as today $100m is late-seed, pre-launch valuation for any company that promises both AI and blockchains. Assuming company valuations continue to inflate, by 2030 $100m goes to any team who manage to agree on a business card design
rilindo 5y ago
> I'd be willing to place a wager that there will be a $100mm company that is only IPv6 by 2030. And at 60 percent usage, it will probably be India[1] [1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
- jesterpm 5y ago
  The trend on the "IPv6 Adoption" tab is fascinating. It looks like the inverse of the usual "high traffic during the week, low traffic during the weekend" pattern that I'm used to seeing in traffic graphs. I wonder why? Is IPv6 adoption significantly higher for residential internet connections vs. corporate networks?
  - viraptor 5y ago
    Even if IPv6 is used internally, a lot of enterprise environments have outbound proxies which will use IPv4 by default. For example HP may have a /8, but all outbound is forced through a small number of PoPs with very enterprisey http proxies.
  - excalibur 5y ago
    I mean yes, people who don't know what an IP is use whatever their ISP gives them, and ISPs have mostly rolled out v6 by now (albeit imperfectly). Businesses actually manage their networks actively, and they use what they know, which is almost always v4.
  - dijit 5y ago
    Mobile Network operators have been quite forerunning with regards to ipv6. That is primarily the driver for ipv6- iOS forcing apps to have an ipv6 backend was a huge driver too for services.
    - realityking 5y ago
      > iOS forcing apps to have an ipv6 backend That‘s never been a requirement. What Apple does require is that apps correctly work over an IPv6-only network that uses NAT64/DNS64. Which means not hardcoding any IPv4 addresses and generally not expecting domains to exclusively return IPv4 addresses. https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/ https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/
nly 5y ago
Virgin here in the UK, with 20% of broadband residential market share, one of the top 3, don't seem to give a fuck. Still ipv4 only.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  The obligatory link for that is: https://havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk/ https://havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk/ > Answer: No [crying face emoji] > We've been asking since March 2010.
- soneil 5y ago
  I was on Chorus/UPC in Ireland. I asked them in 2013 when v6 was coming, they told me it was coming in 2014. I asked them in 2014 when it was coming, and they said 2014. I asked them in 2015 when it was coming, and they said 2014. Then Virgin bought them.
miki123211 5y ago
I wonder if it would be commercially viable for Amazon to offer discounts to customers who connect over IPV6. Amazon spends a lot of money on IPV4 blocks for AWS. They would directly benefit from wider IPV 6adoption. This would be a great way to get regular people to care about this technology. That, in turn, would make ISPS care much more than they currently do.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  They still assign a public IPv4 address to every EC2 instance by default and their IPv6 support is still a work-in-progress. So that's unlikely.
moelf 5y ago
>deployed for the next 100 years bold for you to assume we will have active internet for 100 more years /s...
- bee_rider 5y ago
  IPv4 is perfectly sufficient for your bunker community's LAN.
CrLf 5y ago
Well, even when ISPs are dilligent in deploying IPv6, they still have to deal with troublesome end-user hardware that can't just be replaced overnight. For example, here in Portugal the largest ISP (MEO) has had a wide deployment of IPv6 for many years. However, it's (up to very recently) main end-user router supplier (Thomson/Technicolor) has also had chronic IPv6 bugs in its firmware(1). MEO enables IPv6 by default nevertheless, but if you're an advanced user you'll have a hard time overlooking the random connection failures to IPv6 destinations. (1) Specifically, it resets the flow label field randomly when it is non-zero (the case with most recent versions of Linux, macOS and, I guess, Windows). Turns out the flow label is taken into consideration by many load balancers so, if it changes mid-connection, your packets may end up in a server that has no knowledge of you and you get a connection reset.
marbu 5y ago
I wonder when (or if) we will see new IPv6 only ISPs. That would be an indication that the transition is actually happening. Even though you note that most of your internet communications are done over IPv6, I doubt that you would be willing to go for IPv6 only ISP. Lack of IPv4 addresses is a problem for new ISPs trying to enter the market, as even with levels of NAT, you need some minimal address space to serve your customers, which is harder and more expensive to get. So on one hand starting with IPv6 only stack would avoid these problems, but on the other hand it also means that every potential customer will be unhappy and in the end, you won't get many customers willing to pay you for IPv6 only connection.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > I wonder when (or if) we will see new IPv6 only ISPs. If you have a mobile device on US T-Mobile you only get a IPv6 address on it: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNMNglk_CvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNMNglk_CvE * https://pc.nanog.org/static/published/meetings/NANOG73/1645/20180625_Lagerholm_T-Mobile_S_Journey_To_v1.pdf https://pc.nanog.org/static/published/meetings/NANOG73/1645/... * https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/case-study-t-mobile-us-goes-ipv6-only-using-464xlat/ https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/cas... Any access to IPv4 is through a proxy.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    As long as your ISP supports 6 to 4 tunneling it is really no problem.
  - marbu 5y ago
    This is very good example how an ISP can move to IPv6, but my comment was mostly speculating about the IPv4 part. Even US T-Mobile needs to have a bunch of IPv4 addresses to maintain it's IPv4 proxy (and the size of IPv4 address space they need is determined by the size of their expected customer base). So I was wondering when/if company in a similar situation would not feel the need to maintain IPv4 proxy or would seriously evaluate whether they still need it wrt of cost of the IPv4 address space necessary and potential loss caused by customers who would not be ok with missing IPv4 internet. But maybe such speculation is missing the point, and cost of the IPv4 addresses is not as bad as keeping dual IPv4/IPv6 stack running in a datacenter. I don't know. That said, you definitely have a point that right now, I should rather wonder how many other ISPs are moving to IPv6 only stack with IPv4 proxy like US T-Mobile did. Here I would definitely expect that telcos today are moving in this direction when planning new infrastructure (eg. for edge).
cogman10 5y ago
The big hold up, IMO, is ISPs. They seem completely unmotivated to upgrade their infrastructure to support IPv6. Until a majority of them do that, I don't think any 100mm company will do a "IPv6 only" thing. The cost of IPv4 addresses is slowly creeping upward, but hasn't hit a point of being prohibitive for a company. Once they hit near the $1k level, that's when I think things will start to change.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Maybe someday Verzion FiOS will support native v6. When I set up a Hurricane Electric tunnel over a decade ago I never thought I would still be using it in the 2020s.
  - luckman212 5y ago
    Verizon is shameful. I guess you've seen this 43 page thread... https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32136440-Networking-IPv6-working https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32136440-Networking-IPv6-w...
    - jandrese 5y ago
      I check it every couple of months but still no IPv6 for me. And I'm supposedly near people who have managed to get it to work.
      - luckman212 5y ago
        The only way they will ever deploy IPv6 on FIOS is if someone forces them, e.g. a major content provider like Netflix goes IPv6 only.
mr_mitm 5y ago
How will large corporate networks transition? I've recently seen a large organization using the 5.0.0.0/8 address space. The decision to use these addresses was made a long time ago and they still didn't switch to an actual private address space and choose to deal with all the issues instead.
- merb 5y ago
  just use 64:ff9b::/96 first if you own a subnet? if not just buy a good firewall that supports v6 (sadly cisco meraki does not work well, tough)
- ghshephard 5y ago
  Dual Stack. Start off with by deploying IPv6 across the network without touching the IPv4 environment. Most modern operating systems will just automatically detect they have an IPv6 router and auto-configure. Big advantage of IPv6 is that address autoconfiguration is built into the protocol itself - no need for DHCP, Static Configuration, etc...
- wmf 5y ago
  They mostly won't.
alerighi 5y ago
IPv6 is a disaster. It's too difficult to understand or configure properly, and it's too different from IPv4. There is a ton of software that breaks with IPv6, and a ton of system administrators that doesn't understand it (and for a reason, it's too complicated for nothing). I would have preferred an IPv4 version 2, and extension to the address space of IPv4, possibly in a backward compatible way, so that applications, routers and equipment not built for the new protocol can continue to work, of course considering only a part of the address (e.g. if the network passes trough some old routers, it's not a problem since they only have to look at the most significant part of the address that is in the same place of the IPv4 address) and can ignore the extension. Having a dual stack network is also a mess, and I don't get how it was considered a good idea. IPv4 this way will never go away, and we will always have two network stacks on every computer. And if you have to choose between two, you will choose the easier one, or the one you know, that is IPv4. A simple extension would have been far more easier to rollout.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > possibly in a backward compatible way Pre-IPv6 all IP code had 32 bits reserved for addresses. For more addresses, you would need >32 bits. How do you squeeze >32 bits of data into 32 bit data structures? You would need to touch every bit of IP code out there to expand the corresponding address filed (e.g., in a struct in_addr)—which is what had to be done for IPv6.
  - patentatt 5y ago
    I'd argue that that's in essence what NAT (especially CGNAT) does by abusing the 16 bit port number: extend the 32-bit assessing space to ~48 bits. And it pretty much works just fine for many many use cases.
    - tinus_hn 5y ago
      Because NAT is really pervasive basically only the use cases that work with it survived.
Hamuko 5y ago
>deal with the fall-out of some nn% of their customer not being compatible Most of their customers in pretty much everywhere. Global IPv6 adaptation is at like 33% and only a couple of countries pass the 50% mark.
wmf 5y ago
You can run a whole company on one IPv4 address (or zero if you use a CDN) so there's no reason to go IPv6-only.
babypuncher 5y ago
Part of the problem is older consumer networking equipment. Comcast has supported IPv6 for quite a while, but many routers I've used are not configured correctly out of the box to work with Comcast's IPv6 implementation. Even getting IPv6 to work with my new UniFi equipment took changing a setting or two away from the defaults, though that is more expected with prosumer and enterprise gear. I bet there are lots of customers with 10 year old gigabit routers that have had no reason to be replaced, and will still be perfectly serviceable for another 10 years, especially if they use a separate wireless access point. Many of these people probably don't even know what any of this means.
syshum 5y ago
It is not just ISP, I would guess a TON of corporate, enterprise, and business networks have no functionality of ipv6, even if their hardware supports it, the first thing the network admin does is disable all that.... I am surprised you say you work has functional IPv6, I know we have not even talked about enabling traffic anywhere for IPv6
stevekemp 5y ago
I setup an IPv6-only server a few years back. At the time the biggest annoyance was that github wasn't available - so I couldn't clone my dotfiles, projects, and things. Having checked just now I see that github is still IPv4-only.

mdaniel 5y ago

> Those customers will complain to their ISPs, which will provide incentive to get IPv6 deployed Your experience with huge ISPs has obviously been different from mine. I am deeply grateful that I've benefited from two "first world" advantages: Comcast has (surprisingly) been very proactive about IPv6 support, and here in the Bay Area I have actual competition available for me to switch to. But in other parts of the country, that's for sure not true --- to address the dig portion of your comment, the AAAA record (err, or lack of it) for github.com likely is a lot more impactful than HN It's not that I think major users are going to switch, but I'll point out that GitLab actually does have AAAA records

walrus01 5y ago
fun fact: comcast have been proactive about ipv6 because their management network grew so large and unwieldy, through various acquisitions and long term inefficient use of space, that ipv4 RFC1918 10/8 (and 192.168 etc) was no longer sufficient to address all of their individual netblocks. turns out that if you allocate a private /24 to every POP you can absolutely exhaust 10/8 in a big last mile ISP. they started with ipv6 for their own management network before any public netblocks started getting rolled out to customers.
- ArchOversight 5y ago
  The issue is that each set top box, cable modem and everything else gets a management IP address on the network as well for allowing configuration changes/validating status/all that fun stuff. The large push for IPv6 was started so that management of set top boxes/cable modems no longer required large islands of RFC1918 space where they had to deploy multiple NAT's to get traffic in/out of those environments.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    yes, from what I've heard, they specified full ipv6 as a non-negotiable "must have" with their CPE vendors (and CMTS) almost 16, 18 years ago. Comcast gets a lot of shit for its poor customer service practices, as does any huge cable company, but the people who run the core IP network knew, and still do know what they're doing.
    - easton 5y ago
      Here’s a deck that describes some of this (2006!): https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog37/presentations/alain-durand.pdf https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog37/presentations/ala... I never thought about the scale of their internal network. It’s nuts.
- hackbinary 5y ago
  Does that mean they will need to deploy IPv8 with 256 bits of address space? Or will IPv8 go straight to 1024 bits? ;)

aidenn0 5y ago

I think a lot of SMBs are the holdouts for IPv6; their entire IT infrastructure is IPv4, and switching will be expensive because every router, subnet, VLAN, &c. must be upgraded. Small home networks are comparatively easy once all clients support IPv6: switch from a single subnet in the private range to a single /64 and add a stateful firewall. Since SMBs can run a lot of clients with very few (or even one!) public IP, IPv4 addresses will need to become much more expensive (or critical remote services will need to switch to IPv6 only) before it's cheaper to upgrade internal infrastructure to IPv6. Note that NAT64/464XLAT solve the reverse problem. NAT-PT was the theoretical solution, but see RFC 4966 for all the reasons why that was a failure.

wmf 5y ago
Many SMBs should probably go full cloud and once that's done they can "downgrade" the office network to zero-trust and maybe deploy IPv6 at the same time.
labcomputer 5y ago
Color me skeptical. It’s true that many SMB network infrastructure devices have poor support for IPv6, particularly w.r.t. the management interface. But IPv6 support is old at this point. Very few things have no (as opposed to inconvenient) IPv6 support. For heavens sake, there are versions of IRIX and VMS/VAX with IPv6 support. Those OSes run exclusively on hardware that hasn’t been manufactured for two decades, and the companies that released them have been defunct for almost as long. Windows XP (deprecated over 10 years ago) supports it. MacOS 10.7 (released 10 years ago) supports it. In other words, if you’re willing to run network management from a dual-stack host, you can probably switch over all “regular hosts” today at zero hardware cost. You have to be running seriously old hardware and software to not have IPv6 support today. So old that it should be on an air-gapped network anyway. The only relatively common exception is Cisco Meraki and some cheap consumer-level AIO router/APs.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  I'm not saying there are devices that don't support IPv6 (though there are), I'm saying the IT costs of reconfiguring the infra for IPv6 are higher than the costs of paying many times the current going rate for an IPv4 address.

nikanj 5y ago

That’s an easy bet to make, as today $100m is late-seed, pre-launch valuation for any company that promises both AI and blockchains. Assuming company valuations continue to inflate, by 2030 $100m goes to any team who manage to agree on a business card design

rilindo 5y ago

> I'd be willing to place a wager that there will be a $100mm company that is only IPv6 by 2030. And at 60 percent usage, it will probably be India[1] [1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

jesterpm 5y ago
The trend on the "IPv6 Adoption" tab is fascinating. It looks like the inverse of the usual "high traffic during the week, low traffic during the weekend" pattern that I'm used to seeing in traffic graphs. I wonder why? Is IPv6 adoption significantly higher for residential internet connections vs. corporate networks?
- viraptor 5y ago
  Even if IPv6 is used internally, a lot of enterprise environments have outbound proxies which will use IPv4 by default. For example HP may have a /8, but all outbound is forced through a small number of PoPs with very enterprisey http proxies.
- excalibur 5y ago
  I mean yes, people who don't know what an IP is use whatever their ISP gives them, and ISPs have mostly rolled out v6 by now (albeit imperfectly). Businesses actually manage their networks actively, and they use what they know, which is almost always v4.
- dijit 5y ago
  Mobile Network operators have been quite forerunning with regards to ipv6. That is primarily the driver for ipv6- iOS forcing apps to have an ipv6 backend was a huge driver too for services.
  - realityking 5y ago
    > iOS forcing apps to have an ipv6 backend That‘s never been a requirement. What Apple does require is that apps correctly work over an IPv6-only network that uses NAT64/DNS64. Which means not hardcoding any IPv4 addresses and generally not expecting domains to exclusively return IPv4 addresses. https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/ https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/

nly 5y ago

Virgin here in the UK, with 20% of broadband residential market share, one of the top 3, don't seem to give a fuck. Still ipv4 only.

dane-pgp 5y ago
The obligatory link for that is: https://havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk/ https://havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk/ > Answer: No [crying face emoji] > We've been asking since March 2010.
soneil 5y ago
I was on Chorus/UPC in Ireland. I asked them in 2013 when v6 was coming, they told me it was coming in 2014. I asked them in 2014 when it was coming, and they said 2014. I asked them in 2015 when it was coming, and they said 2014. Then Virgin bought them.

miki123211 5y ago

I wonder if it would be commercially viable for Amazon to offer discounts to customers who connect over IPV6. Amazon spends a lot of money on IPV4 blocks for AWS. They would directly benefit from wider IPV 6adoption. This would be a great way to get regular people to care about this technology. That, in turn, would make ISPS care much more than they currently do.

Sebb767 5y ago
They still assign a public IPv4 address to every EC2 instance by default and their IPv6 support is still a work-in-progress. So that's unlikely.

moelf 5y ago

>deployed for the next 100 years bold for you to assume we will have active internet for 100 more years /s...

bee_rider 5y ago
IPv4 is perfectly sufficient for your bunker community's LAN.

CrLf 5y ago

Well, even when ISPs are dilligent in deploying IPv6, they still have to deal with troublesome end-user hardware that can't just be replaced overnight. For example, here in Portugal the largest ISP (MEO) has had a wide deployment of IPv6 for many years. However, it's (up to very recently) main end-user router supplier (Thomson/Technicolor) has also had chronic IPv6 bugs in its firmware(1). MEO enables IPv6 by default nevertheless, but if you're an advanced user you'll have a hard time overlooking the random connection failures to IPv6 destinations. (1) Specifically, it resets the flow label field randomly when it is non-zero (the case with most recent versions of Linux, macOS and, I guess, Windows). Turns out the flow label is taken into consideration by many load balancers so, if it changes mid-connection, your packets may end up in a server that has no knowledge of you and you get a connection reset.

marbu 5y ago

I wonder when (or if) we will see new IPv6 only ISPs. That would be an indication that the transition is actually happening. Even though you note that most of your internet communications are done over IPv6, I doubt that you would be willing to go for IPv6 only ISP. Lack of IPv4 addresses is a problem for new ISPs trying to enter the market, as even with levels of NAT, you need some minimal address space to serve your customers, which is harder and more expensive to get. So on one hand starting with IPv6 only stack would avoid these problems, but on the other hand it also means that every potential customer will be unhappy and in the end, you won't get many customers willing to pay you for IPv6 only connection.

throw0101a 5y ago
> I wonder when (or if) we will see new IPv6 only ISPs. If you have a mobile device on US T-Mobile you only get a IPv6 address on it: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNMNglk_CvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNMNglk_CvE * https://pc.nanog.org/static/published/meetings/NANOG73/1645/20180625_Lagerholm_T-Mobile_S_Journey_To_v1.pdf https://pc.nanog.org/static/published/meetings/NANOG73/1645/... * https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/case-study-t-mobile-us-goes-ipv6-only-using-464xlat/ https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/deploy360/2014/cas... Any access to IPv4 is through a proxy.
- jandrese 5y ago
  As long as your ISP supports 6 to 4 tunneling it is really no problem.
- marbu 5y ago
  This is very good example how an ISP can move to IPv6, but my comment was mostly speculating about the IPv4 part. Even US T-Mobile needs to have a bunch of IPv4 addresses to maintain it's IPv4 proxy (and the size of IPv4 address space they need is determined by the size of their expected customer base). So I was wondering when/if company in a similar situation would not feel the need to maintain IPv4 proxy or would seriously evaluate whether they still need it wrt of cost of the IPv4 address space necessary and potential loss caused by customers who would not be ok with missing IPv4 internet. But maybe such speculation is missing the point, and cost of the IPv4 addresses is not as bad as keeping dual IPv4/IPv6 stack running in a datacenter. I don't know. That said, you definitely have a point that right now, I should rather wonder how many other ISPs are moving to IPv6 only stack with IPv4 proxy like US T-Mobile did. Here I would definitely expect that telcos today are moving in this direction when planning new infrastructure (eg. for edge).

cogman10 5y ago

The big hold up, IMO, is ISPs. They seem completely unmotivated to upgrade their infrastructure to support IPv6. Until a majority of them do that, I don't think any 100mm company will do a "IPv6 only" thing. The cost of IPv4 addresses is slowly creeping upward, but hasn't hit a point of being prohibitive for a company. Once they hit near the $1k level, that's when I think things will start to change.

jandrese 5y ago
Maybe someday Verzion FiOS will support native v6. When I set up a Hurricane Electric tunnel over a decade ago I never thought I would still be using it in the 2020s.
- luckman212 5y ago
  Verizon is shameful. I guess you've seen this 43 page thread... https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32136440-Networking-IPv6-working https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32136440-Networking-IPv6-w...
  - jandrese 5y ago
    I check it every couple of months but still no IPv6 for me. And I'm supposedly near people who have managed to get it to work.
    - luckman212 5y ago
      The only way they will ever deploy IPv6 on FIOS is if someone forces them, e.g. a major content provider like Netflix goes IPv6 only.

mr_mitm 5y ago

How will large corporate networks transition? I've recently seen a large organization using the 5.0.0.0/8 address space. The decision to use these addresses was made a long time ago and they still didn't switch to an actual private address space and choose to deal with all the issues instead.

merb 5y ago
just use 64:ff9b::/96 first if you own a subnet? if not just buy a good firewall that supports v6 (sadly cisco meraki does not work well, tough)
ghshephard 5y ago
Dual Stack. Start off with by deploying IPv6 across the network without touching the IPv4 environment. Most modern operating systems will just automatically detect they have an IPv6 router and auto-configure. Big advantage of IPv6 is that address autoconfiguration is built into the protocol itself - no need for DHCP, Static Configuration, etc...
wmf 5y ago
They mostly won't.

alerighi 5y ago

IPv6 is a disaster. It's too difficult to understand or configure properly, and it's too different from IPv4. There is a ton of software that breaks with IPv6, and a ton of system administrators that doesn't understand it (and for a reason, it's too complicated for nothing). I would have preferred an IPv4 version 2, and extension to the address space of IPv4, possibly in a backward compatible way, so that applications, routers and equipment not built for the new protocol can continue to work, of course considering only a part of the address (e.g. if the network passes trough some old routers, it's not a problem since they only have to look at the most significant part of the address that is in the same place of the IPv4 address) and can ignore the extension. Having a dual stack network is also a mess, and I don't get how it was considered a good idea. IPv4 this way will never go away, and we will always have two network stacks on every computer. And if you have to choose between two, you will choose the easier one, or the one you know, that is IPv4. A simple extension would have been far more easier to rollout.

throw0101a 5y ago
> possibly in a backward compatible way Pre-IPv6 all IP code had 32 bits reserved for addresses. For more addresses, you would need >32 bits. How do you squeeze >32 bits of data into 32 bit data structures? You would need to touch every bit of IP code out there to expand the corresponding address filed (e.g., in a struct in_addr)—which is what had to be done for IPv6.
- patentatt 5y ago
  I'd argue that that's in essence what NAT (especially CGNAT) does by abusing the 16 bit port number: extend the 32-bit assessing space to ~48 bits. And it pretty much works just fine for many many use cases.
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    Because NAT is really pervasive basically only the use cases that work with it survived.

Hamuko 5y ago

>deal with the fall-out of some nn% of their customer not being compatible Most of their customers in pretty much everywhere. Global IPv6 adaptation is at like 33% and only a couple of countries pass the 50% mark.

wmf 5y ago

You can run a whole company on one IPv4 address (or zero if you use a CDN) so there's no reason to go IPv6-only.

babypuncher 5y ago

Part of the problem is older consumer networking equipment. Comcast has supported IPv6 for quite a while, but many routers I've used are not configured correctly out of the box to work with Comcast's IPv6 implementation. Even getting IPv6 to work with my new UniFi equipment took changing a setting or two away from the defaults, though that is more expected with prosumer and enterprise gear. I bet there are lots of customers with 10 year old gigabit routers that have had no reason to be replaced, and will still be perfectly serviceable for another 10 years, especially if they use a separate wireless access point. Many of these people probably don't even know what any of this means.

syshum 5y ago

It is not just ISP, I would guess a TON of corporate, enterprise, and business networks have no functionality of ipv6, even if their hardware supports it, the first thing the network admin does is disable all that.... I am surprised you say you work has functional IPv6, I know we have not even talked about enabling traffic anywhere for IPv6

stevekemp 5y ago

I setup an IPv6-only server a few years back. At the time the biggest annoyance was that github wasn't available - so I couldn't clone my dotfiles, projects, and things. Having checked just now I see that github is still IPv4-only.