4 ms·

I wonder if there will ever come a day when IPv6 will provide a better web experience than IPv4. At the moment pretty much every website is reachable via IPv4

I wonder if there will ever come a day when IPv6 will provide a better web experience than IPv4. At the moment pretty much every website is reachable via IPv4 but a lot not via IPv6. Will there be a day when this turns around?

mritzmann 4mo ago
> a better web experience than IPv4 That's already the case. IPv6 is often faster because most ISPs these days use cgnat for IPv4.
- BadBadJellyBean 4mo ago
  True but not deploying any IPv4 connectivity would be a worse experience than not deploying IPv6.
- mort96 4mo ago
  That fraction of a millisecond doesn't meaningfully translate into a better experience for users.
  - kalleboo 4mo ago
    You're assuming the ISP has dimensioned their CGNAT properly and it's not congested.
  - Hendrikto 4mo ago
    Milliseconds matter for gaming, for example.
    - hdgvhicv 4mo ago
      Vast majority of people gaming are doing it via wifi
    - commandersaki 4mo ago
      We are still talking a fraction of a millisecond, a few hundred microseconds at most. People are blowing out of proportion latency saved with v6, it's negligible at best, or at worst let's not forget IPv6 is two separate island because two tier-1 carriers refuse to peer (Cogent & HE).
      - Dagger2 4mo ago
        Google's stats claim that it's 10-20ms for many countries, for example both the US and Canada show the latency impact of v6 as being -10ms. This is per round trip too -- between the connection handshake, congestion window slow-start and serialized requests it adds up to something significantly bigger than a few hundred microseconds. > let's not forget IPv6 is two separate island because two tier-1 carriers refuse to peer (Cogent & HE). The Cogent island must be very small, because I'm single-homed on HE and had actually forgotten about that. Or perhaps v6 isn't split into two separate islands after all, and this is just yet another weird claim people make about v6 that doesn't match reality.
      - HDBaseT 4mo ago
        Latency wise, I am not noticing any difference (at least in ICMP). ycombinator@Mainframe:~$ ping 8.8.8.8 PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=119 time=24.3 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=119 time=24.1 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=119 time=23.9 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=4 ttl=119 time=23.9 ms ^C --------------- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics -------------------- 4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3004ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 23.901/24.053/24.291/0.157 ms ycombinator@Mainframe:~$ ping6 2001:4860:4860::8844 PING 2001:4860:4860::8844 (2001:4860:4860::8844) 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 2001:4860:4860::8844: icmp_seq=1 ttl=118 time=23.5 ms 64 bytes from 2001:4860:4860::8844: icmp_seq=2 ttl=118 time=24.0 ms 64 bytes from 2001:4860:4860::8844: icmp_seq=3 ttl=118 time=23.9 ms 64 bytes from 2001:4860:4860::8844: icmp_seq=4 ttl=118 time=24.0 ms ^C ------- 2001:4860:4860::8844 ping statistics ------------------- 4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3005ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 23.517/23.845/24.008/0.200 ms
        Hendrikto 4mo ago
- jck86 4mo ago
  In my experience not true in practice cause I have experienced way more issues with the IPv6 endpoints of sites than their IPv4 counterparts. This becomes noticeable when pipelines on IPv6 connected servers suddenly have random request/post failures to public services. Then either the whole service is temporarily having issues or there are a few bad IPv6 endpoints while all the IPv4 endpoints are fine. Seemingly this failure mode can go unnoticed for days while the same won't be true for IPv4 due IPv4-only still being the norm for corporate networks. And no, current form of happy eyeballs v2 won't account for this. Besides bad endpoints it could also be a problem with bgp route advertisements where the IPv6 prefix takes a weird path and ends up being blocked by a CDN at the other side of the ocean. This happens more than you'd think. Obtaining pypi packages was quite a challenge last year for us for a couple of weeks due to this. Not really a fault of IPv6 technology wise, and in general can be solved client side through retry functionality, but in practice it still can lead to a worse outcome due to lackluster IPv6 adoption. I used to think ISPs, organisations, admins and users were just being lazy for not implementing IPv6 or turning it off as the first thing to do when network problems happen, but when this far in the rollout such basic things still lead to difficult troubleshooting sessions then perhaps time has come to say something has gone terribly wrong. It saddens me to say that I totally understand that businesses do not want to pay the price for implementing IPv6 unless absolutely necessary, because until the majority of traffic is IPv6 or even IPv6-only it does not make a lot of sense. The flipping point is nearer than ever, though I fear it will in the short term lead to even worse stability for both protocols until IPv6 truly becomes the norm, whenever that may be.
  - lxgr 4mo ago
    > This becomes noticeable when pipelines on IPv6 connected servers suddenly have random request/post failures to public services. Then either the whole service is temporarily having issues or there are a few bad IPv6 endpoints while all the IPv4 endpoints are fine. Do you have examples for this? I've never experienced this, and I've been using IPv6 for years. Also, how can you be sure that the same request to IPv4 would have been fine? Did you actually see consistent failures on v6 and consistent success on v4? Otherwise, if a service has a reasonably low error rate, success on retry is the expected outcome, regardless of the path the retry takes.
- VorpalWay 4mo ago
  I have yet to see any ISP use CGNAT here in Sweden. It seems to be a highly regional problem for some reason. Both on mobile and on broadband I get publicly routable IPv4.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    That's because Sweden joined the internet relatively early when enough addresses were available. It's like that in most 1st-world countries. Places like Argentina, on the other hand, may have to share 8 IPv4 addresses per city.
    - VorpalWay 4mo ago
      That makes sense. However, I also don't get IPv6 on either my broadband or my mobile. So we seem to be far behind there.
  - fundatus 4mo ago
    Wow a publicly routable IPv4 address on a mobile phone? Wouldn't that drain the battery a lot? Or is there some kind of carrier-level firewall still?
  - Hikikomori 4mo ago
    Telia does it for mobile, I think Tele2 and 3 as well? Bahnhof, Bredband2 and other small ones also use it for wired customers, but you can usually get a public if you ask for it.
- hdgvhicv 4mo ago
  That depends on your isp. Mine certainly doesn’t, and I’ve never had an isp on the U.K. which didn’t give me at least a dynamic ipv4 address to my router. Infact the only isp I have seen do it is starlink and I have contacts with ISPs in 60 different counties.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    Note that most ISPs are cellphone networks and most end devices are cellphones.
- commandersaki 4mo ago
  Sparing a few hundred microseconds of latency is tangibly a better experience?
- CrLf 4mo ago
  When CGNAT is present, my guess is that's the case. It would be nice to see a study on that; don't know if there is one already. Users doing speed tests in CGNAT may be seeing numbers that aren't exactly real for a (still) mostly IPv4 Internet.
AndyMcConachie 4mo ago
I would expect online video games to be a more important driver.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  and anything P2P. Maybe that would have been a driver 20 years ago, but now everything is expected to be centralised. Our culture has shifted. Remember when people used to host their game servers? If you're under 16, you don't because it was never in your lifetime.
  - hdgvhicv 4mo ago
    I have to open a hole in my firewall to host any service. Nat doesn’t change that. Unless you want to host multiple minecraft servers on the same port on different servers at home? Indeed hosting anything at home is such a rare workflow that someone wanting it can choose an isp which gives them the facilities they need. Unless you don’t live in a competitive market based economy and just have the single government mandated isp aimed at the lowest common denominator, in which case you’ve got far worse problems.
    - inigyou 4mo ago
      The average person finds port forwarding much more confusing than "allow Minecraft y/n"
    - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
      Or unless you do live in a competitive market based economy, and have a choice of several ISPs with practically equivalent offering aimed at the lowest common denominator, none of whom supports something niche like "giving you facilities for hosting stuff at home". If there's one thing market competition does well, is remove any kind of meaningful variety - because supporting a niche offering costs money, and is not worth it unless it nets positive, otherwise it's just a drag that makes you fall behind your competition.
  - sznio 4mo ago
    it's more like that the IPv6 switchover was so fumbled that we went from fast P2P like with Skype, to shitty, centralized and data-mined Discord. The internet would be much less centralized if IPv6 happened when it was supposed to.
telesilla 4mo ago
Faster webrtc establishments and other negotiated connections. CGNAT means more relayed than P2P connections so it should be possible to have more direct traffic for services that want to save that bandwidth.
vbernat 4mo ago
It already does. With IPv6, you don't go through some CGNAT box, that could misbehave or just break (and since the biggest chunk of content is available through IPv6, this may not be a priority). Also, a shared IPv4 can be banned by various sites if one of the owner misbehaves. This issue is not present with IPv6. More on this: https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2024-why-ipv6 https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2024-why-ipv6

mritzmann 4mo ago

> a better web experience than IPv4 That's already the case. IPv6 is often faster because most ISPs these days use cgnat for IPv4.

BadBadJellyBean 4mo ago
True but not deploying any IPv4 connectivity would be a worse experience than not deploying IPv6.
mort96 4mo ago
That fraction of a millisecond doesn't meaningfully translate into a better experience for users.
- kalleboo 4mo ago
  You're assuming the ISP has dimensioned their CGNAT properly and it's not congested.
- Hendrikto 4mo ago
  Milliseconds matter for gaming, for example.
  - hdgvhicv 4mo ago
    Vast majority of people gaming are doing it via wifi
  - commandersaki 4mo ago
    We are still talking a fraction of a millisecond, a few hundred microseconds at most. People are blowing out of proportion latency saved with v6, it's negligible at best, or at worst let's not forget IPv6 is two separate island because two tier-1 carriers refuse to peer (Cogent & HE).
    - Dagger2 4mo ago
      Google's stats claim that it's 10-20ms for many countries, for example both the US and Canada show the latency impact of v6 as being -10ms. This is per round trip too -- between the connection handshake, congestion window slow-start and serialized requests it adds up to something significantly bigger than a few hundred microseconds. > let's not forget IPv6 is two separate island because two tier-1 carriers refuse to peer (Cogent & HE). The Cogent island must be very small, because I'm single-homed on HE and had actually forgotten about that. Or perhaps v6 isn't split into two separate islands after all, and this is just yet another weird claim people make about v6 that doesn't match reality.
    - HDBaseT 4mo ago
      Latency wise, I am not noticing any difference (at least in ICMP). ycombinator@Mainframe:~$ ping 8.8.8.8 PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=119 time=24.3 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=119 time=24.1 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=119 time=23.9 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=4 ttl=119 time=23.9 ms ^C --------------- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics -------------------- 4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3004ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 23.901/24.053/24.291/0.157 ms ycombinator@Mainframe:~$ ping6 2001:4860:4860::8844 PING 2001:4860:4860::8844 (2001:4860:4860::8844) 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 2001:4860:4860::8844: icmp_seq=1 ttl=118 time=23.5 ms 64 bytes from 2001:4860:4860::8844: icmp_seq=2 ttl=118 time=24.0 ms 64 bytes from 2001:4860:4860::8844: icmp_seq=3 ttl=118 time=23.9 ms 64 bytes from 2001:4860:4860::8844: icmp_seq=4 ttl=118 time=24.0 ms ^C ------- 2001:4860:4860::8844 ping statistics ------------------- 4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3005ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 23.517/23.845/24.008/0.200 ms
      - Hendrikto 4mo ago
jck86 4mo ago
In my experience not true in practice cause I have experienced way more issues with the IPv6 endpoints of sites than their IPv4 counterparts. This becomes noticeable when pipelines on IPv6 connected servers suddenly have random request/post failures to public services. Then either the whole service is temporarily having issues or there are a few bad IPv6 endpoints while all the IPv4 endpoints are fine. Seemingly this failure mode can go unnoticed for days while the same won't be true for IPv4 due IPv4-only still being the norm for corporate networks. And no, current form of happy eyeballs v2 won't account for this. Besides bad endpoints it could also be a problem with bgp route advertisements where the IPv6 prefix takes a weird path and ends up being blocked by a CDN at the other side of the ocean. This happens more than you'd think. Obtaining pypi packages was quite a challenge last year for us for a couple of weeks due to this. Not really a fault of IPv6 technology wise, and in general can be solved client side through retry functionality, but in practice it still can lead to a worse outcome due to lackluster IPv6 adoption. I used to think ISPs, organisations, admins and users were just being lazy for not implementing IPv6 or turning it off as the first thing to do when network problems happen, but when this far in the rollout such basic things still lead to difficult troubleshooting sessions then perhaps time has come to say something has gone terribly wrong. It saddens me to say that I totally understand that businesses do not want to pay the price for implementing IPv6 unless absolutely necessary, because until the majority of traffic is IPv6 or even IPv6-only it does not make a lot of sense. The flipping point is nearer than ever, though I fear it will in the short term lead to even worse stability for both protocols until IPv6 truly becomes the norm, whenever that may be.
- lxgr 4mo ago
  > This becomes noticeable when pipelines on IPv6 connected servers suddenly have random request/post failures to public services. Then either the whole service is temporarily having issues or there are a few bad IPv6 endpoints while all the IPv4 endpoints are fine. Do you have examples for this? I've never experienced this, and I've been using IPv6 for years. Also, how can you be sure that the same request to IPv4 would have been fine? Did you actually see consistent failures on v6 and consistent success on v4? Otherwise, if a service has a reasonably low error rate, success on retry is the expected outcome, regardless of the path the retry takes.
VorpalWay 4mo ago
I have yet to see any ISP use CGNAT here in Sweden. It seems to be a highly regional problem for some reason. Both on mobile and on broadband I get publicly routable IPv4.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  That's because Sweden joined the internet relatively early when enough addresses were available. It's like that in most 1st-world countries. Places like Argentina, on the other hand, may have to share 8 IPv4 addresses per city.
  - VorpalWay 4mo ago
    That makes sense. However, I also don't get IPv6 on either my broadband or my mobile. So we seem to be far behind there.
- fundatus 4mo ago
  Wow a publicly routable IPv4 address on a mobile phone? Wouldn't that drain the battery a lot? Or is there some kind of carrier-level firewall still?
- Hikikomori 4mo ago
  Telia does it for mobile, I think Tele2 and 3 as well? Bahnhof, Bredband2 and other small ones also use it for wired customers, but you can usually get a public if you ask for it.
hdgvhicv 4mo ago
That depends on your isp. Mine certainly doesn’t, and I’ve never had an isp on the U.K. which didn’t give me at least a dynamic ipv4 address to my router. Infact the only isp I have seen do it is starlink and I have contacts with ISPs in 60 different counties.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  Note that most ISPs are cellphone networks and most end devices are cellphones.
commandersaki 4mo ago
Sparing a few hundred microseconds of latency is tangibly a better experience?
CrLf 4mo ago
When CGNAT is present, my guess is that's the case. It would be nice to see a study on that; don't know if there is one already. Users doing speed tests in CGNAT may be seeing numbers that aren't exactly real for a (still) mostly IPv4 Internet.

AndyMcConachie 4mo ago

I would expect online video games to be a more important driver.

inigyou 4mo ago
and anything P2P. Maybe that would have been a driver 20 years ago, but now everything is expected to be centralised. Our culture has shifted. Remember when people used to host their game servers? If you're under 16, you don't because it was never in your lifetime.
- hdgvhicv 4mo ago
  I have to open a hole in my firewall to host any service. Nat doesn’t change that. Unless you want to host multiple minecraft servers on the same port on different servers at home? Indeed hosting anything at home is such a rare workflow that someone wanting it can choose an isp which gives them the facilities they need. Unless you don’t live in a competitive market based economy and just have the single government mandated isp aimed at the lowest common denominator, in which case you’ve got far worse problems.
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    The average person finds port forwarding much more confusing than "allow Minecraft y/n"
  - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
    Or unless you do live in a competitive market based economy, and have a choice of several ISPs with practically equivalent offering aimed at the lowest common denominator, none of whom supports something niche like "giving you facilities for hosting stuff at home". If there's one thing market competition does well, is remove any kind of meaningful variety - because supporting a niche offering costs money, and is not worth it unless it nets positive, otherwise it's just a drag that makes you fall behind your competition.
- sznio 4mo ago
  it's more like that the IPv6 switchover was so fumbled that we went from fast P2P like with Skype, to shitty, centralized and data-mined Discord. The internet would be much less centralized if IPv6 happened when it was supposed to.

telesilla 4mo ago

Faster webrtc establishments and other negotiated connections. CGNAT means more relayed than P2P connections so it should be possible to have more direct traffic for services that want to save that bandwidth.

vbernat 4mo ago

It already does. With IPv6, you don't go through some CGNAT box, that could misbehave or just break (and since the biggest chunk of content is available through IPv6, this may not be a priority). Also, a shared IPv4 can be banned by various sites if one of the owner misbehaves. This issue is not present with IPv6. More on this: https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2024-why-ipv6 https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2024-why-ipv6