8 ms·

The way I see it, IPv6 is somebody else’s problem. You can’t make money with IPv6 and nobody wants it. From a customer support perspective, IPv6 is just anothe

The way I see it, IPv6 is somebody else’s problem. You can’t make money with IPv6 and nobody wants it. From a customer support perspective, IPv6 is just another problem nobody needs. We, and all the other ISPs in our market, have enough IPv4 for the foreseeable future. NAT works where you need to conserve addresses space and those consumers that need a static IPv4 can get it, and what’s better, will pay for it. IPv6 support on consumer devices is a dumpster fire. No way I am touching that in production. So, no, I have no plans to deploy IPv6 to customers. I will reconsider when there’s money in it, but preferably not before various vendors have gotten their IPv6 shit together. In other words, we the current ISPs in the market are good. Sucks to be a new ISP though.

welterde 5y ago
That's part of the problem: Old ISPs usually have plenty of IP addresses hoarded and are less affected by the run-out. It's more newly formed companies that are hit by this, since they have none and have to buy them at ever increasing prices.
- techsupporter 5y ago
  It is the classic example of FYGM. I'm old enough to remember when being a "good netizen" would have meant that medium-sized organizations would be pushing for the new standards and practices that would allow newcomer organizations, maybe even orgs that didn't yet exist, to join and participate on the network. Now we've wound up where IPv4 addresses are like houses: everyone who already has one is quite content with the situation (and even sees them as "investments" to be traded and hoarded and leveraged) while newcomers are absolutely hosed. And doing the right thing of expanding the pool of availability, whether by allowing more housing to be built or by migrating to IPv6, is met with cries of "there's no money in it for me so I'm not interested." And lest anyone thing this is petulant whining on the part of a sysadmin from a new network, where I work has several legacy IPv4 assignments and we own four or five low-digit ASNs. We are set for life for IPv4, yet we've picked up our IPv6 allocations from ARIN and have actively updated our internal network such that all applications can work in a v6-only environment and we've even donated some of our address space to new organizations in our field (medicine) who needed it to get started. That is how the Internet is supposed to work, through cooperation.
  - lanstin 5y ago
    Exactly right. good on you and your org.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    That's because those "good netizen"s remember how hard it was to get the network connected/up and keep it running in the first place. After a while, the new entrants just become parties with the option of some cheap IPv4 blocks and ASNs. Then they see the value of these blocks/AS increase. Then they say "well I have mine and I get no increased value from IPv6 so who cares" and they stay put becoming FYGMs. > That is how the Internet is supposed to work, through cooperation. Unfortunately this just isn't scaling :( Thanks for doing your part, I hope we all do what we can.
  - commandersaki 5y ago
    Eh I'd say the users of IPv6 (that includes ISPs and Enterprises) aren't to blame for not adopting the protocol. The committee in charge of selecting IPng should have demanded interoperability or at least a proper transition plan. Neither happened and we have 25 years of IPv6 with abysmal adoption.
    - Dagger2 5y ago
      What are you talking about? We already have both interoperability and a proper transition plan.
      - commandersaki 5y ago
        No we don't, there's no way for a v4 only network to talk to v6. Basic interoperability failure. Pretty shit transition plan if we've only managed to get 35% of devices on v6 in 25 years.
        Dagger2 5y ago
        That's not true. For connections initiated from the v4 network, you can deploy v6 on the network, use a proxy, or use 6to4, 6rd or Teredo. For connections initiated from v6, you can use NAT64. There are also various approaches to deploy one protocol over the other, like 6over4, DS-lite, 464xlat, MAP-T/E, 4rd or LW4over6. Pretty much every interoperability method that can work with v4 is supported by v6. How is that an interoperability failure? > Pretty shit transition plan if we've only managed to get 35% of devices on v6 in 25 years. The plan is "start using v6, then stop using v4". What better plan do you suggest? I'd call it more like 35% in 9 years, since Google's stats say that deployment was <1% in 2013. (The time before that was spent on updating protocols, implementing the updated protocols in software and hardware, and deploying the updates, all of which are necessary prerequisites before users can show up in those stats.) That seems like pretty decent going, given the sheer scale of what needs to be done.
nousermane 5y ago
> consumers that need a static IPv4 can get it Not necessarily. Some ISPs and majority of cell providers in Europe only give you CGN IPv4. No IPv6, no static option.
- ISP_throwaway 5y ago
  I wasn’t making a blanket statement about static IPv4 availability, rather it was an observation from our own market. That being said, most carriers or major ISPs aren’t actually that hard up for IPv4 space. By no means will static IPv4s be available on all plans, but merely changing AP or plan type will commonly result in the ability to purchase a static IPv4. It’s mostly about lubricating with money to find a solution rather than an all out lack of IPv4.
- pantalaimon 5y ago
  Huh at least in Germany DSLite is the norm, CGN IPv4 but proper IPv6.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> IPv6 support on consumer devices is a dumpster fire. No way I am touching that in production. Is it still? I know this was true for a while, but things seem to have been ironed out. I only occasionally have IPv6 (my ISP is doing something weird), but when I do it all seems to work fine.
- creeble 5y ago
  It’s pretty hard to tell how many “devices” are capable of ipv6 because they typically just ask for ipv4 DHCP addresses and get them from routers. My guess is that it is still a tiny minority of non-computer devices that will use ipv6 on the LAN side of a router.
  - lanstin 5y ago
    At my house with about 10 online devices now i have 42 ipv6 entries in the nat table out of 272 total. I have at&T adsl but would see similar results with Comcast business (which i had until a month ago). I have either linux or newish commercial devices and they have slipped ipv6 in over the past few years. no more HE tunnels for me. I suspect if more websites put it in the DNS it would just work. I am just waiting for ipv6 only VPCs in AWS.
  - dsr_ 5y ago
    I have a properly set up house network with IPv4 and IPv6 support infrastructure. In December, we used 1.22 TiB total traffic, of which 722.96 GiB was IPv6. IPv6 traffic has been at least 50% for at least the last year (based on the most convenient statistics I can grab).
- jandrese 5y ago
  Consumer device support is not a major problem, it is ISPs that are the major roadblock. Corporate oriented devices are also a slow to adopt however, which is one reason ISPs have not made the switch.
  - labcomputer 5y ago
usbqk 5y ago
You can make money off ipv6: it allows for better tracking, which is why Google, Facebook and friends are all ipv6 ready.
- jandrese 5y ago
  I'm not sure that is true. It is true that you don't get aliased by the NAT, but one of the features of IPv6 is that you don't have to stick to a single address. Your system can choose different source addresses for every connection if it wants to. You will of course still be on the same /64, but that is the same amount of tracking as IPv4/NAT provides.
hossbeast 5y ago
As an ISP customer, you're the last one I would choose. I highly value ipv6 connectivity in my choice of ISP. I think I'm not alone.
- ISP_throwaway 5y ago
  That’s fine, each to their own. You might not be alone, but you should take into account that you are an atypical customer. Different customers value different things. In the list of things people value in their broadband, IPv6 doesn’t even register for for the majority. There are markets where you cannot even give away IPv6 connectivity. Of those showing an interest in IPv6, many just want a static IP. If you give them one then you have solved their problems and are never heard from again. If you really, really want IPv6 then you can usually get it in most markets. You might have to upgrade to business service or switch to an operator providing service over legacy copper facilities. That is, however, a bridge too far for almost everybody. As an aside, you don’t indicate that you would pay a premium for IPv6 service. That’s not very enticing from a business perspective. If there was real demand for IPv6 or it could be provided for a premium that would change. It’s a classical chicken and egg situation. No services require IPv6, so there is no demand for IPv6 and thus no IPv6 offerings either. I’d be interested to hear why you highly value IPv6 connectivity, especially if you had a static IPv4 allocation.
  - throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
    > It’s a classical chicken and egg situation. No services require IPv6, so there is no demand for IPv6 and thus no IPv6 offerings either. AKA the ipv6 "blockchain" situation lol
  - Aaargh20318 5y ago
    > Different customers value different things. In the list of things people value in their broadband, IPv6 doesn’t even register for for the majority. The main issue for me is that it is symptomatic of a certain culture within that ISP. If they are late with IPv6, you can expect them to also be late with other developments, like the move to consumer 10gbit connections.
- 5y ago
kstrauser 5y ago
> NAT works Stop right there.
- commandersaki 5y ago
  We should be more appreciative of NAT than we should of IPv6, it's what actually keeps the current Internet running.
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    I don’t appreciate it. It broke so much of the original end-to-end promise of the Internet. Think of how many technologies would be vastly easier if two hosts could directly communicate, like audio and voice chats. I still miss the days when it was trivial to run a web server on your home computer if you wanted to. And now we have abominations like CGNAT that break lesser abominations like UPnP. If we hadn’t had NAT for the last couple of decades, and someone invented it now, they’d be laughed off the stage. You see it as an enabling technology. I see it as a boat anchor that’s kept us on IPv4 way past the sell-by date.
    - commandersaki 5y ago
      NAT has done more than the promise of IPv6. As much as NAT sucks to have at least it's been mostly frictionless to transition to -- that can't be said about IPv6. The design of IPv6 is what has held it back for 25 years, and I don't think we'll ever see a proper transition to it, so I'd say embrace NAT.
      - kstrauser 5y ago
        Hard disagree. The very first NAT broke a lot of cool things that already existed. Again, think of all the serverless things we could’ve had, like truly end-to-end peer-to-peer messaging that wasn’t routed dispatched through a central routing platform. (We’d still need a locator broker, but that’s far different than piping all content through a third-party host). NAT ruined those entire concepts because the whole concept of “every host is a potential server” went out the window. Without NAT, we’ve have already made the transition to IPv6 as the creaky old IPv4 wouldn’t have that critical bandaid that helped it limp along. IPv4+NAT can’t die quickly enough.
jiggawatts 5y ago
> “ We, and all the other ISPs in our market, have enough IPv4 for the foreseeable future.” Yours might but mine ran out years ago. No public cloud provider is able to provide a dedicated IPv4 address per endpoint, making cloud networking absurdly complex unnecessarily. Entire continents are under provisioned and will never get more allocation to meet future demand.
- ISP_throwaway 5y ago
  > Yours might but mine ran out years ago. Out of interest, why didn’t you re-up when you still could? You could still get some two years ago.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    I personally have a dedicated IP, but the ISP's public reports say that no new customers will be able to obtain a dedicated IPs some time after 2024 or maybe 2025. The default for all new customers is CG-NAT, unless they're tech-savvy enough to ask for something better. I do got a /64 IPv6 range however!
    - ISP_throwaway 5y ago
      Ah, I see the reason for the confusion. I thought you were an ISP, not an end user.

welterde 5y ago

That's part of the problem: Old ISPs usually have plenty of IP addresses hoarded and are less affected by the run-out. It's more newly formed companies that are hit by this, since they have none and have to buy them at ever increasing prices.

techsupporter 5y ago
It is the classic example of FYGM. I'm old enough to remember when being a "good netizen" would have meant that medium-sized organizations would be pushing for the new standards and practices that would allow newcomer organizations, maybe even orgs that didn't yet exist, to join and participate on the network. Now we've wound up where IPv4 addresses are like houses: everyone who already has one is quite content with the situation (and even sees them as "investments" to be traded and hoarded and leveraged) while newcomers are absolutely hosed. And doing the right thing of expanding the pool of availability, whether by allowing more housing to be built or by migrating to IPv6, is met with cries of "there's no money in it for me so I'm not interested." And lest anyone thing this is petulant whining on the part of a sysadmin from a new network, where I work has several legacy IPv4 assignments and we own four or five low-digit ASNs. We are set for life for IPv4, yet we've picked up our IPv6 allocations from ARIN and have actively updated our internal network such that all applications can work in a v6-only environment and we've even donated some of our address space to new organizations in our field (medicine) who needed it to get started. That is how the Internet is supposed to work, through cooperation.
- lanstin 5y ago
  Exactly right. good on you and your org.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  That's because those "good netizen"s remember how hard it was to get the network connected/up and keep it running in the first place. After a while, the new entrants just become parties with the option of some cheap IPv4 blocks and ASNs. Then they see the value of these blocks/AS increase. Then they say "well I have mine and I get no increased value from IPv6 so who cares" and they stay put becoming FYGMs. > That is how the Internet is supposed to work, through cooperation. Unfortunately this just isn't scaling :( Thanks for doing your part, I hope we all do what we can.
- commandersaki 5y ago
  Eh I'd say the users of IPv6 (that includes ISPs and Enterprises) aren't to blame for not adopting the protocol. The committee in charge of selecting IPng should have demanded interoperability or at least a proper transition plan. Neither happened and we have 25 years of IPv6 with abysmal adoption.
  - Dagger2 5y ago
    What are you talking about? We already have both interoperability and a proper transition plan.
    - commandersaki 5y ago
      No we don't, there's no way for a v4 only network to talk to v6. Basic interoperability failure. Pretty shit transition plan if we've only managed to get 35% of devices on v6 in 25 years.
      - Dagger2 5y ago
        That's not true. For connections initiated from the v4 network, you can deploy v6 on the network, use a proxy, or use 6to4, 6rd or Teredo. For connections initiated from v6, you can use NAT64. There are also various approaches to deploy one protocol over the other, like 6over4, DS-lite, 464xlat, MAP-T/E, 4rd or LW4over6. Pretty much every interoperability method that can work with v4 is supported by v6. How is that an interoperability failure? > Pretty shit transition plan if we've only managed to get 35% of devices on v6 in 25 years. The plan is "start using v6, then stop using v4". What better plan do you suggest? I'd call it more like 35% in 9 years, since Google's stats say that deployment was <1% in 2013. (The time before that was spent on updating protocols, implementing the updated protocols in software and hardware, and deploying the updates, all of which are necessary prerequisites before users can show up in those stats.) That seems like pretty decent going, given the sheer scale of what needs to be done.

nousermane 5y ago

> consumers that need a static IPv4 can get it Not necessarily. Some ISPs and majority of cell providers in Europe only give you CGN IPv4. No IPv6, no static option.

ISP_throwaway 5y ago
I wasn’t making a blanket statement about static IPv4 availability, rather it was an observation from our own market. That being said, most carriers or major ISPs aren’t actually that hard up for IPv4 space. By no means will static IPv4s be available on all plans, but merely changing AP or plan type will commonly result in the ability to purchase a static IPv4. It’s mostly about lubricating with money to find a solution rather than an all out lack of IPv4.
pantalaimon 5y ago
Huh at least in Germany DSLite is the norm, CGN IPv4 but proper IPv6.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

> IPv6 support on consumer devices is a dumpster fire. No way I am touching that in production. Is it still? I know this was true for a while, but things seem to have been ironed out. I only occasionally have IPv6 (my ISP is doing something weird), but when I do it all seems to work fine.

creeble 5y ago
It’s pretty hard to tell how many “devices” are capable of ipv6 because they typically just ask for ipv4 DHCP addresses and get them from routers. My guess is that it is still a tiny minority of non-computer devices that will use ipv6 on the LAN side of a router.
- lanstin 5y ago
  At my house with about 10 online devices now i have 42 ipv6 entries in the nat table out of 272 total. I have at&T adsl but would see similar results with Comcast business (which i had until a month ago). I have either linux or newish commercial devices and they have slipped ipv6 in over the past few years. no more HE tunnels for me. I suspect if more websites put it in the DNS it would just work. I am just waiting for ipv6 only VPCs in AWS.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  I have a properly set up house network with IPv4 and IPv6 support infrastructure. In December, we used 1.22 TiB total traffic, of which 722.96 GiB was IPv6. IPv6 traffic has been at least 50% for at least the last year (based on the most convenient statistics I can grab).
jandrese 5y ago
Consumer device support is not a major problem, it is ISPs that are the major roadblock. Corporate oriented devices are also a slow to adopt however, which is one reason ISPs have not made the switch.
- labcomputer 5y ago

usbqk 5y ago

You can make money off ipv6: it allows for better tracking, which is why Google, Facebook and friends are all ipv6 ready.

jandrese 5y ago
I'm not sure that is true. It is true that you don't get aliased by the NAT, but one of the features of IPv6 is that you don't have to stick to a single address. Your system can choose different source addresses for every connection if it wants to. You will of course still be on the same /64, but that is the same amount of tracking as IPv4/NAT provides.

hossbeast 5y ago

As an ISP customer, you're the last one I would choose. I highly value ipv6 connectivity in my choice of ISP. I think I'm not alone.

ISP_throwaway 5y ago
That’s fine, each to their own. You might not be alone, but you should take into account that you are an atypical customer. Different customers value different things. In the list of things people value in their broadband, IPv6 doesn’t even register for for the majority. There are markets where you cannot even give away IPv6 connectivity. Of those showing an interest in IPv6, many just want a static IP. If you give them one then you have solved their problems and are never heard from again. If you really, really want IPv6 then you can usually get it in most markets. You might have to upgrade to business service or switch to an operator providing service over legacy copper facilities. That is, however, a bridge too far for almost everybody. As an aside, you don’t indicate that you would pay a premium for IPv6 service. That’s not very enticing from a business perspective. If there was real demand for IPv6 or it could be provided for a premium that would change. It’s a classical chicken and egg situation. No services require IPv6, so there is no demand for IPv6 and thus no IPv6 offerings either. I’d be interested to hear why you highly value IPv6 connectivity, especially if you had a static IPv4 allocation.
- throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
  > It’s a classical chicken and egg situation. No services require IPv6, so there is no demand for IPv6 and thus no IPv6 offerings either. AKA the ipv6 "blockchain" situation lol
- Aaargh20318 5y ago
  > Different customers value different things. In the list of things people value in their broadband, IPv6 doesn’t even register for for the majority. The main issue for me is that it is symptomatic of a certain culture within that ISP. If they are late with IPv6, you can expect them to also be late with other developments, like the move to consumer 10gbit connections.
5y ago

kstrauser 5y ago

> NAT works Stop right there.

commandersaki 5y ago
We should be more appreciative of NAT than we should of IPv6, it's what actually keeps the current Internet running.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  I don’t appreciate it. It broke so much of the original end-to-end promise of the Internet. Think of how many technologies would be vastly easier if two hosts could directly communicate, like audio and voice chats. I still miss the days when it was trivial to run a web server on your home computer if you wanted to. And now we have abominations like CGNAT that break lesser abominations like UPnP. If we hadn’t had NAT for the last couple of decades, and someone invented it now, they’d be laughed off the stage. You see it as an enabling technology. I see it as a boat anchor that’s kept us on IPv4 way past the sell-by date.
  - commandersaki 5y ago
    NAT has done more than the promise of IPv6. As much as NAT sucks to have at least it's been mostly frictionless to transition to -- that can't be said about IPv6. The design of IPv6 is what has held it back for 25 years, and I don't think we'll ever see a proper transition to it, so I'd say embrace NAT.
    - kstrauser 5y ago
      Hard disagree. The very first NAT broke a lot of cool things that already existed. Again, think of all the serverless things we could’ve had, like truly end-to-end peer-to-peer messaging that wasn’t routed dispatched through a central routing platform. (We’d still need a locator broker, but that’s far different than piping all content through a third-party host). NAT ruined those entire concepts because the whole concept of “every host is a potential server” went out the window. Without NAT, we’ve have already made the transition to IPv6 as the creaky old IPv4 wouldn’t have that critical bandaid that helped it limp along. IPv4+NAT can’t die quickly enough.

jiggawatts 5y ago

> “ We, and all the other ISPs in our market, have enough IPv4 for the foreseeable future.” Yours might but mine ran out years ago. No public cloud provider is able to provide a dedicated IPv4 address per endpoint, making cloud networking absurdly complex unnecessarily. Entire continents are under provisioned and will never get more allocation to meet future demand.

ISP_throwaway 5y ago
> Yours might but mine ran out years ago. Out of interest, why didn’t you re-up when you still could? You could still get some two years ago.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  I personally have a dedicated IP, but the ISP's public reports say that no new customers will be able to obtain a dedicated IPs some time after 2024 or maybe 2025. The default for all new customers is CG-NAT, unless they're tech-savvy enough to ask for something better. I do got a /64 IPv6 range however!
  - ISP_throwaway 5y ago
    Ah, I see the reason for the confusion. I thought you were an ISP, not an end user.