3 ms·

I am aware of at least 2 telecoms, one publicly traded, that have very little to no IPv6 in their core networks and only use IPv6 when they have to. Personally

I am aware of at least 2 telecoms, one publicly traded, that have very little to no IPv6 in their core networks and only use IPv6 when they have to. Personally I think the design of IPv6 offers very little benefit; supposedly the Dept of Defense/Dept of War holds some 175 million IPv4 addresses, with other companies also holding large allocations - that should have been addressed 25-30 years ago as an administrative matter.

mattstir 6mo ago
To what end though? 4 billion addresses is not enough on its own, even if they were reallocated from hoarders. I think that NAT and especially CGNAT have been very detrimental to the shape of the internet, where it's nearly impossible to self-host a public service without a VPN of some kind. Needing to pay some company for the ability to host a server that isn't behind NAT is a barrier that doesn't need to exist when IPv6 has a nearly limitless number of addresses.
- bananamogul 6mo ago
  You're not wrong, but practically speaking, hosting a VM is so cheap and comes with the advantage of serving from a datacenter that I would never want to host anything off my residential connection anyway. The $1 to $5 a month to have excellent, reliable connectivity (that no residential connection provides), DDoS protection, and isn't tied to my home IP outweighs any home hosting benefit in my experience.
jcranmer 6mo ago
There are 16 /8's in the class E address space that were never allocated, and 19 /8's (by my count) allocated to individual companies. If you waved a wand and returned all of that space to IANA for allocation, you would have staved off IPv4 address exhaustion by... about 3 years.
- neojima 6mo ago
  2.7 - 4.0 years, by my math, so I would agree with your assessment. ...but that's based on pre-IANA-runout rates, though, and doesn't account for the pent-up backpressure of demand. So probably a lot less, in reality. Not even remotely worth the effort, even if there were a legal pretext for "reclaiming" IPv4 space (there isn't; there's already precedent denying it).

mattstir 6mo ago

To what end though? 4 billion addresses is not enough on its own, even if they were reallocated from hoarders. I think that NAT and especially CGNAT have been very detrimental to the shape of the internet, where it's nearly impossible to self-host a public service without a VPN of some kind. Needing to pay some company for the ability to host a server that isn't behind NAT is a barrier that doesn't need to exist when IPv6 has a nearly limitless number of addresses.

bananamogul 6mo ago
You're not wrong, but practically speaking, hosting a VM is so cheap and comes with the advantage of serving from a datacenter that I would never want to host anything off my residential connection anyway. The $1 to $5 a month to have excellent, reliable connectivity (that no residential connection provides), DDoS protection, and isn't tied to my home IP outweighs any home hosting benefit in my experience.

jcranmer 6mo ago

There are 16 /8's in the class E address space that were never allocated, and 19 /8's (by my count) allocated to individual companies. If you waved a wand and returned all of that space to IANA for allocation, you would have staved off IPv4 address exhaustion by... about 3 years.

neojima 6mo ago
2.7 - 4.0 years, by my math, so I would agree with your assessment. ...but that's based on pre-IANA-runout rates, though, and doesn't account for the pent-up backpressure of demand. So probably a lot less, in reality. Not even remotely worth the effort, even if there were a legal pretext for "reclaiming" IPv4 space (there isn't; there's already precedent denying it).