4 ms·

All your criticism is valid in the long run but right now, SpaceX'es focus is to scale up, focus on usability for majority of its customers and become profitabl

by oxplot 4y ago

All your criticism is valid in the long run but right now, SpaceX'es focus is to scale up, focus on usability for majority of its customers and become profitable. Removing any unnecessary feature is a must in order to reduce risk.

the_biot 4y ago
Where did you get that information?
- oxplot 4y ago
  From Elon Musk in numerous interviews. Latest of which is with Tim Dodd.
xxpor 4y ago
CGNAT itself is a enormous risk. It's WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more complex and unstable than v6.
- oxplot 4y ago
  > CGNAT itself is a enormous risk. How? IPv6 isn't a substitution for CGNAT, it's an addition to it. You either have to keep CGNAT or replace it with dedicated IPv4 for each customer. Dedicated IPv4 is most likely too costly given the limited availability. SpaceX is also trying to cut cost aggressively.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    True. As an ISP you are gonna need an IPv4 stack no matter what. Even if that stack is CGNAT'd up the ass. I can't even ping news.ycombinator.com or amazon.com with IPv6. That is the biggest problem with IPv6. Who is gonna be the first ISP to shut off their IPv4 stack? There is always gonna be some random website that is IPv4.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      When all the big services become IPv6, the number of IPv4 megabits will become small. You might just direct all the v4 traffic via a tunnel to another ISP which specializes in legacy services like IPv4, running SMTP/news servers, etc. Now you've saved all the cost of maintaining all the IPv4 peerings and config.
      - phpisthebest 4y ago
        >When all the big services become IPv6, the number of IPv4 megabits will become small. Well I have been hearing about the end of IPv4, and IP exhaustion for about 20 years now, and I fully expect people to still being moaning about it 20+ years from now while the majority of the interment still communicates over ipv4
        oarsinsync 4y ago
        Amen. I dual stacked my home network 10 years ago. 5 years ago I joined an ISP that gave me CGNATv4 and IPv6 and I opted to disable IPv6 at the router.
        lmm 4y ago
        Why? If you have an IPv4 address, even a dynamic one, then IPv6 may not offer you a lot of practical benefit, but CGNAT-only sucks if you're at all technical.
        Dagger2 4y ago
        It sucks if you're non-technical too, it's just harder for non-technical users to figure out the underlying source of any problems they have. v6 also has better measured performance on webpage load times. Perhaps "pages load slightly slower than they could do" isn't a show-stopping problem, but faster would still be better, right?
        4y ago
  - xxpor 4y ago
    It's a partial substitution. What percent of your traffic is youtube, for example?
  - notriddle 4y ago
    It’s stateful. Specifically, if a plain router stops working, BGP will route around it, and all you did was drop packets. If NAT stops working, you don’t just drop packets, you drop whole connections. Applications don’t tend to tolerate dropped connections as well as they tolerate dropped packets.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
randmeerkat 4y ago
> SpaceX'es focus is to scale up > Removing any unnecessary feature is a must in order to reduce risk. You can’t scale a space based planetary ISP without IPv6, this isn’t a feature, it’s a requirement.
- oxplot 4y ago
  IPv6 amounts to a firmware update which the current hardware is and any future hardware will be capable of. The major hurdle in scaling Starlink is fast and cheap deployment of 1000s of satellite hardware. At the moment, the sole focus of SpaceX in relation to Starlink is to get their V2 satellites to orbit in order to keep up with bandwidth demands. V2 requires the Starship system which is yet to make it to orbit. TL;DR bigger fishes to fry ATM - yes you need IPv6 to scale, no you don't need it right now.
  - doublerabbit 4y ago
    > no you don't need it right now. Yes we do. IPv4 exhaustion is a thing.
    - oxplot 4y ago
      That's what CGNAT provides a temporary solution for.
  - tgflynn 4y ago
    I doubt there's much overlap between the people working on IPv6 and those working on getting Starship off the ground.
    - oxplot 4y ago
      It's not a function of overlap. If they've determined IPv6 isn't a priority and instead a risk, then it makes no sense to dedicate resources to it right now. It's not as if everything else about the firmware/software is wrapped up and the software team is sitting on their hands doing nothing.
  - 4y ago

by oxplot 4y ago

the_biot 4y ago

Where did you get that information?

oxplot 4y ago
From Elon Musk in numerous interviews. Latest of which is with Tim Dodd.

xxpor 4y ago

CGNAT itself is a enormous risk. It's WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more complex and unstable than v6.

oxplot 4y ago
> CGNAT itself is a enormous risk. How? IPv6 isn't a substitution for CGNAT, it's an addition to it. You either have to keep CGNAT or replace it with dedicated IPv4 for each customer. Dedicated IPv4 is most likely too costly given the limited availability. SpaceX is also trying to cut cost aggressively.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  True. As an ISP you are gonna need an IPv4 stack no matter what. Even if that stack is CGNAT'd up the ass. I can't even ping news.ycombinator.com or amazon.com with IPv6. That is the biggest problem with IPv6. Who is gonna be the first ISP to shut off their IPv4 stack? There is always gonna be some random website that is IPv4.
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    When all the big services become IPv6, the number of IPv4 megabits will become small. You might just direct all the v4 traffic via a tunnel to another ISP which specializes in legacy services like IPv4, running SMTP/news servers, etc. Now you've saved all the cost of maintaining all the IPv4 peerings and config.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      >When all the big services become IPv6, the number of IPv4 megabits will become small. Well I have been hearing about the end of IPv4, and IP exhaustion for about 20 years now, and I fully expect people to still being moaning about it 20+ years from now while the majority of the interment still communicates over ipv4
      - oarsinsync 4y ago
        Amen. I dual stacked my home network 10 years ago. 5 years ago I joined an ISP that gave me CGNATv4 and IPv6 and I opted to disable IPv6 at the router.
        lmm 4y ago
        Why? If you have an IPv4 address, even a dynamic one, then IPv6 may not offer you a lot of practical benefit, but CGNAT-only sucks if you're at all technical.
        Dagger2 4y ago
        It sucks if you're non-technical too, it's just harder for non-technical users to figure out the underlying source of any problems they have. v6 also has better measured performance on webpage load times. Perhaps "pages load slightly slower than they could do" isn't a show-stopping problem, but faster would still be better, right?
        4y ago
- xxpor 4y ago
  It's a partial substitution. What percent of your traffic is youtube, for example?
- notriddle 4y ago
  It’s stateful. Specifically, if a plain router stops working, BGP will route around it, and all you did was drop packets. If NAT stops working, you don’t just drop packets, you drop whole connections. Applications don’t tend to tolerate dropped connections as well as they tolerate dropped packets.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

randmeerkat 4y ago

> SpaceX'es focus is to scale up > Removing any unnecessary feature is a must in order to reduce risk. You can’t scale a space based planetary ISP without IPv6, this isn’t a feature, it’s a requirement.

oxplot 4y ago
IPv6 amounts to a firmware update which the current hardware is and any future hardware will be capable of. The major hurdle in scaling Starlink is fast and cheap deployment of 1000s of satellite hardware. At the moment, the sole focus of SpaceX in relation to Starlink is to get their V2 satellites to orbit in order to keep up with bandwidth demands. V2 requires the Starship system which is yet to make it to orbit. TL;DR bigger fishes to fry ATM - yes you need IPv6 to scale, no you don't need it right now.
- doublerabbit 4y ago
  > no you don't need it right now. Yes we do. IPv4 exhaustion is a thing.
  - oxplot 4y ago
    That's what CGNAT provides a temporary solution for.
- tgflynn 4y ago
  I doubt there's much overlap between the people working on IPv6 and those working on getting Starship off the ground.
  - oxplot 4y ago
    It's not a function of overlap. If they've determined IPv6 isn't a priority and instead a risk, then it makes no sense to dedicate resources to it right now. It's not as if everything else about the firmware/software is wrapped up and the software team is sitting on their hands doing nothing.
- 4y ago