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The ISPs dragging their feet on IPV6 implementation are the biggest culprits in holding back progress. Western governments should step in and mandate IPV6 adopt

The ISPs dragging their feet on IPV6 implementation are the biggest culprits in holding back progress. Western governments should step in and mandate IPV6 adoption for ISPs

eppp 3y ago
No, we keep being required to have ipv4 so our customers can reach the sites they are trying to get to. If it was just as simple as deploying ipv6 and retiring ipv4 we would have done it already. But someone just had to make them not interoperable.
- Dagger2 3y ago
  They're not non-interoperable though? My desktop has no v4 and it has no trouble reaching any sites.
  - eppp 3y ago
    There are still massive amounts of consumer grade equipment that have no ability to deal with ipv6 addresses. How much modern iot stuff even supports it?
    - Dagger2 3y ago
      Yes, and that's unfortunate, but it's not because "someone just had to make them not interoperable", it's because v6 addresses are bigger than v4 addresses and so can't fit into the same APIs/fields/data types, which means new APIs etc are required. It's not v6's fault that people refuse to stop using the old ones.
      - eppp 3y ago
        No its the fault of the architectural astronauts that decided to reinvent the whole thing instead of slowly phasing in the changes needed to add more addresses.
        Dagger2 3y ago
        But they didn't reinvent the whole thing? v6 mostly works the same as v4. There's not even really anything new in it; the biggest new thing is probably SLAAC, which isn't exactly complicated. IPsec was bigger, but immediately backported to v4 and nobody uses it anyway, so I'm not sure it counts. v6 is already designed to be slowly phased in, by allowing deployment of updated software/OSs/devices that support the new addresses in parallel with the old and gradually moving things over. If anything, the reason people can still use the old APIs is because of the approach of slowly phasing it in. That's what you wanted, and it's still not good enough for you?
        eppp 3y ago
        That is a pretty simplistic way of looking at it. If it worked the same then why do I have to duplicate all layers of the stack to make it work? And even if I did, I still have to maintain the ipv4 stuff functionally forever. That's why they should have gradually expanded the existing header and we would be done by now instead of making a competing standard.
        Dagger2 3y ago
        You don't have to; you can make a single IP implementation that handles both. AF_INET6 sockets can handle v4 and v4 can be translated to run over v6. What do you mean by "gradually expand the existing header"? I assume you don't mean "keep making new header versions that increase the address length by one byte until we reach 16 bytes", but I can't think of anything that could be described like that which would have made adoption any quicker or easier. > I still have to maintain the ipv4 stuff functionally forever Consider why this is. What's stopping you from just not doing that -- and would a different design of v6 help at all with this?
        eppp 3y ago
        I am not writing socket code. I am trying to get residential customers to the websites they would like to visit. Maybe it wouldn't have made it any better to expand the header and change the version but then again maybe it would have. Why even have the version value in the header to start with if it is always going to be set to 4? What is the point? I have to keep dealing with ipv4 until companies like amazon and github and every little smb that has a vpn stop. It would have been amazing yes had they designed ipv6 differently and just increased the header and address sizes and added a padding value for the high bits. We could have front padded all of the ipv4 32 bits at the router level and made it almost seamless to the end users.
- SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
  IPv4 didn't provide a variable-length header, so the number of address bits is fixed. Any extension to add more addresses is inherently going to break interoperability.
  - eppp 3y ago
    It didnt 20 years ago. That spec could have been changed and on routers added a default padding for the devices that didn't understand the new variable length. 0.0.0.0.192.168.0.1 or whatever for the legacy ipv4 devices. Im sure there was all kinds of hemming and hawing about why it would be difficult to do on the current hardware of the time and none of that equipment even exists anymore. So instead we decided to reinvent the wheel and make it a major pain instead.
Qwertious 3y ago
ISP have to buy IPv4 addresses proportional to the number of customers who need them. If their customers switch to IPv6 then the ISPs' costs will go down. Slightly. That said, western governments can, should, and (somewhat) do mandate IPv6 adoption. It's slow, though. IIRC it's something like 2-3% a year and we're at 20-30%, so in a decade we should have a majority supporting IPv6 and hopefully that will cause some sort of feedback loop forcing universal IPv6 support for practical reasons.
- zokier 3y ago
  > It's slow, though. IIRC it's something like 2-3% a year and we're at 20-30% Your numbers are off by a factor of 2. We are around 40% now and the growth is more like 4-5% per year. With that we could be at 90% adoption in a decade, and getting to >50% should be just couple of years; many major countries are already past that mark.
esskay 3y ago
The issue is though that even with limited supply its really not a big deal for ISP's. Some have just turned to NAT as a cheap option. It sucks for consumers but the ISP's dont care.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  NAT for an ISP isn't a cheap option -- they need expensive, stateful routers. IPv6 has one-off engineering costs to roll it out, but decreases ongoing costs for NAT.

The ISPs dragging their feet on IPV6 implementation are the biggest culprits in holding back progress. Western governments should step in and mandate IPV6 adoption for ISPs

eppp 3y ago

No, we keep being required to have ipv4 so our customers can reach the sites they are trying to get to. If it was just as simple as deploying ipv6 and retiring ipv4 we would have done it already. But someone just had to make them not interoperable.

Dagger2 3y ago
They're not non-interoperable though? My desktop has no v4 and it has no trouble reaching any sites.
- eppp 3y ago
  There are still massive amounts of consumer grade equipment that have no ability to deal with ipv6 addresses. How much modern iot stuff even supports it?
  - Dagger2 3y ago
    Yes, and that's unfortunate, but it's not because "someone just had to make them not interoperable", it's because v6 addresses are bigger than v4 addresses and so can't fit into the same APIs/fields/data types, which means new APIs etc are required. It's not v6's fault that people refuse to stop using the old ones.
    - eppp 3y ago
      No its the fault of the architectural astronauts that decided to reinvent the whole thing instead of slowly phasing in the changes needed to add more addresses.
      - Dagger2 3y ago
        But they didn't reinvent the whole thing? v6 mostly works the same as v4. There's not even really anything new in it; the biggest new thing is probably SLAAC, which isn't exactly complicated. IPsec was bigger, but immediately backported to v4 and nobody uses it anyway, so I'm not sure it counts. v6 is already designed to be slowly phased in, by allowing deployment of updated software/OSs/devices that support the new addresses in parallel with the old and gradually moving things over. If anything, the reason people can still use the old APIs is because of the approach of slowly phasing it in. That's what you wanted, and it's still not good enough for you?
        eppp 3y ago
        That is a pretty simplistic way of looking at it. If it worked the same then why do I have to duplicate all layers of the stack to make it work? And even if I did, I still have to maintain the ipv4 stuff functionally forever. That's why they should have gradually expanded the existing header and we would be done by now instead of making a competing standard.
        Dagger2 3y ago
        You don't have to; you can make a single IP implementation that handles both. AF_INET6 sockets can handle v4 and v4 can be translated to run over v6. What do you mean by "gradually expand the existing header"? I assume you don't mean "keep making new header versions that increase the address length by one byte until we reach 16 bytes", but I can't think of anything that could be described like that which would have made adoption any quicker or easier. > I still have to maintain the ipv4 stuff functionally forever Consider why this is. What's stopping you from just not doing that -- and would a different design of v6 help at all with this?
        eppp 3y ago
        I am not writing socket code. I am trying to get residential customers to the websites they would like to visit. Maybe it wouldn't have made it any better to expand the header and change the version but then again maybe it would have. Why even have the version value in the header to start with if it is always going to be set to 4? What is the point? I have to keep dealing with ipv4 until companies like amazon and github and every little smb that has a vpn stop. It would have been amazing yes had they designed ipv6 differently and just increased the header and address sizes and added a padding value for the high bits. We could have front padded all of the ipv4 32 bits at the router level and made it almost seamless to the end users.
SAI_Peregrinus 3y ago
IPv4 didn't provide a variable-length header, so the number of address bits is fixed. Any extension to add more addresses is inherently going to break interoperability.
- eppp 3y ago
  It didnt 20 years ago. That spec could have been changed and on routers added a default padding for the devices that didn't understand the new variable length. 0.0.0.0.192.168.0.1 or whatever for the legacy ipv4 devices. Im sure there was all kinds of hemming and hawing about why it would be difficult to do on the current hardware of the time and none of that equipment even exists anymore. So instead we decided to reinvent the wheel and make it a major pain instead.

Qwertious 3y ago

ISP have to buy IPv4 addresses proportional to the number of customers who need them. If their customers switch to IPv6 then the ISPs' costs will go down. Slightly. That said, western governments can, should, and (somewhat) do mandate IPv6 adoption. It's slow, though. IIRC it's something like 2-3% a year and we're at 20-30%, so in a decade we should have a majority supporting IPv6 and hopefully that will cause some sort of feedback loop forcing universal IPv6 support for practical reasons.

zokier 3y ago
> It's slow, though. IIRC it's something like 2-3% a year and we're at 20-30% Your numbers are off by a factor of 2. We are around 40% now and the growth is more like 4-5% per year. With that we could be at 90% adoption in a decade, and getting to >50% should be just couple of years; many major countries are already past that mark.

esskay 3y ago

The issue is though that even with limited supply its really not a big deal for ISP's. Some have just turned to NAT as a cheap option. It sucks for consumers but the ISP's dont care.

Symbiote 3y ago
NAT for an ISP isn't a cheap option -- they need expensive, stateful routers. IPv6 has one-off engineering costs to roll it out, but decreases ongoing costs for NAT.