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There’s already a lot of FUD around IPv6 and I’m not sure that an article which seems to amount to a survey on Twitter really moves the conversation forward muc

by tolien 5y ago

There’s already a lot of FUD around IPv6 and I’m not sure that an article which seems to amount to a survey on Twitter really moves the conversation forward much. Clearly there’s pain points to rolling out v6 (although I’d question how many of them are still an issue outside the glacial pace of Enterprise IT) and we’d be better trying to address that than re-hash the same old arguments. Edit: not much more than 2 weeks ago we had this chestnut [1] where Nintendo was telling you to forward thousands of UDP ports to a Switch in order to play online but still we hear “but NAT works fine for me”. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29919228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29919228

zamadatix 5y ago
I think the decades of dominance of UDP/TCP over IPv4 over Ethernet (which comes with the pre-existing knowledge in everyone, the years of experience working with it for any IT person, the additional workarounds like NAT and UPnP and so on, and even the oldest hardware still reasonably running having full support) has made people think it was all just always easy and obvious from the get-go. Where some of these protocol assumptions and ingrained history didn't exist, like the mobile carrier space, we see by far the most adoption of IPv6 out of any area and even a few non-dual stack players. The truth is like most topics in computing after 20 or 30 years of using one protocol/interface the baggage, limitations, or cost of the old keep piling up and eventually the new thing is going to seem like less work/cost/baggage than the old. The thing that seems to be moving it forward the most nowadays is cost and baggage (= complexity = long way around to more cost). The direct cost is per IPv4 prices going from ~$25/per to ~$45/per in the last year alone. The baggage/complexity cost is particularly on the carrier or large enterprise side where ever growing device counts and ever growing public address costs combine to make NAT needs larger and sometimes multi-staged (e.g. CG-NAT). I think the breaking point will be when we start to see most hosting providers and carriers continue to either push consumers to more IPv6 to reduce NAT load or cost incentivize hosted services to do the same. There are limited instances of this now, an occasional hosting provider offering IPv6 only for a lower monthly cost or a mobile carrier that migrates all of it's users to IPv6 transparently, but there are still more providers/carriers that don't do anything IPv6 than there are that incentivize IPv6. Definitely moving in that direction these last few years though. What I don't think we'll see is a sudden "aha" moment where people give up IPv4 and stop being uncertain about v6 just because they read about it more or were told some detail.
- tolien 5y ago
  > I think the decades of dominance of UDP/TCP over IPv4 over Ethernet (which comes with the pre-existing knowledge in everyone, the years of experience working with it for any IT person, the additional workarounds like NAT and UPnP and so on, and even the oldest hardware still reasonably running having full support) has made people think it was all just always easy and obvious from the get-go. Yeah, it doesn't feel like that long ago when consumer routers with tiny translation tables would crash hard when anything opened a load of connections (think games but especially BitTorrent) because they didn't have much RAM. I think for most people the switching moment will be something they don't even see - their ISP enables it and off they go.

by tolien 5y ago

zamadatix 5y ago

I think the decades of dominance of UDP/TCP over IPv4 over Ethernet (which comes with the pre-existing knowledge in everyone, the years of experience working with it for any IT person, the additional workarounds like NAT and UPnP and so on, and even the oldest hardware still reasonably running having full support) has made people think it was all just always easy and obvious from the get-go. Where some of these protocol assumptions and ingrained history didn't exist, like the mobile carrier space, we see by far the most adoption of IPv6 out of any area and even a few non-dual stack players. The truth is like most topics in computing after 20 or 30 years of using one protocol/interface the baggage, limitations, or cost of the old keep piling up and eventually the new thing is going to seem like less work/cost/baggage than the old. The thing that seems to be moving it forward the most nowadays is cost and baggage (= complexity = long way around to more cost). The direct cost is per IPv4 prices going from ~$25/per to ~$45/per in the last year alone. The baggage/complexity cost is particularly on the carrier or large enterprise side where ever growing device counts and ever growing public address costs combine to make NAT needs larger and sometimes multi-staged (e.g. CG-NAT). I think the breaking point will be when we start to see most hosting providers and carriers continue to either push consumers to more IPv6 to reduce NAT load or cost incentivize hosted services to do the same. There are limited instances of this now, an occasional hosting provider offering IPv6 only for a lower monthly cost or a mobile carrier that migrates all of it's users to IPv6 transparently, but there are still more providers/carriers that don't do anything IPv6 than there are that incentivize IPv6. Definitely moving in that direction these last few years though. What I don't think we'll see is a sudden "aha" moment where people give up IPv4 and stop being uncertain about v6 just because they read about it more or were told some detail.

tolien 5y ago
> I think the decades of dominance of UDP/TCP over IPv4 over Ethernet (which comes with the pre-existing knowledge in everyone, the years of experience working with it for any IT person, the additional workarounds like NAT and UPnP and so on, and even the oldest hardware still reasonably running having full support) has made people think it was all just always easy and obvious from the get-go. Yeah, it doesn't feel like that long ago when consumer routers with tiny translation tables would crash hard when anything opened a load of connections (think games but especially BitTorrent) because they didn't have much RAM. I think for most people the switching moment will be something they don't even see - their ISP enables it and off they go.