5 ms·

Just to add to the 'but the ISPs do not' anecdotes, it has been six months since someone last commented so it is probably time to mention this again on Hacker N

• jonathantf2 4mo ago
  Purely from a business perspective, for VM there is no point. They have more than enough v4 to keep them going, customers (outside of a tiny technical minority who probably wouldn't chose VM anyway) do not see any benefit. That plus other ISPs v6 implementations breaking things randomly, I understand why they don't bother.
  • Hizonner 4mo ago
    Right. Which is why this is not a choice businesses should be allowed to make.
    • post-it 4mo ago
      Of all the things to regulate why bother with this one? It's not like IPv6 is better for the environment or useful to the consumer.
      • inigyou 4mo ago
        It reduces the monopolization power of big cloud providers. This is especially relevant to countries that aren't the US, because it reduces reliance on the US. It also just reduces resource waste (of labor time). Countries like China that have insufficient IPv4 addresses and political power have mandated it. One IP per home is manageable, for now, but CGNAT is really bad.
      • dijit 4mo ago
        depends on how you look at it. Right now it's very much a tragedy of the commons. IPv6 not being supported in many places means the internet is more centralised, less likely to use proper p2p tech- because it's a lot harder to make it work rather than throwing up a TURN box and relaying everything. "The latency? Who cares? IPv6 sometimes breaks right now" - because nobody is testing it, so why should people be the first to support it? There's no easy upside. The only real upside for businesses is not having to pay for increasingly expensive IPv4 allocations. But they don't really care, its not nearly expensive enough yet. Customers will get GCNAT, businesses will continue as normal. All that will happen is that the internet gets slower and less equal. Which is exactly the same thing that's happening with inefficient memory hungry software: people either have to buy a more expensive laptop or they have a shitty experience.. Nobody is advocating for them, they just feel things getting shittier year on year and many are just choosing to avoid technology instead.
        • lwhi 4mo ago
          Maybe the solution is to make IPv4 prohibitively expensive.
          • lazide 4mo ago
            Or even just expensive.
            • topranks 4mo ago
              It definitely costs them a lot. Implementing v6 without doubt saves money for ISPs. Especially in the CGNAT game as those boxes aren’t cheap.
  • lambdaone 4mo ago
    The slow adoption of IPv6 by many older companies is at least in part a paradoxical result of the success of IPv6 elsewhere, particularly in new builds where there is practically no overhead in deploying IPv6 in a green-field environment - see for example the mobile telecoms market in developing countries, where new builds are IPv6-first. This has taken pressure off the IPv4 legacy address pool, reducing the urgency for older providers. End-users are typically completely unaware of whether their traffic is being carried over IPv6 or IPv4, and so simply do not care one way or the other. (This particular post is more than likely being made over IPv6, since news.ycombinator.com has an IPv6 address and my OS, browser, router and ISP all support IPv6 straight out of the box, as is now true for the majority of users in my country.)
• globular-toast 4mo ago
  15 years is plenty of time to switch away from them. IPv6 is just one reason. It's a shit ISP. I ditched them as soon as I could and cited IPv6 as a reason, in case it made a difference (I also questioned my new ISP before I joined). Virgin Media exist for two reasons: first they were given a monopoly by their Tory chums (Thatcher) and, second, all ISPs are allowed to make you sign absurdly long, anti-competitive contracts (18 months is common). If ISPs were treated the same as utility suppliers we'd probably be in a better place.
• gertrunde 4mo ago
  I once asked them if we could enable IPv6 on a 1Gb DIA circuit, and the response I got back was that "we can convert the circuit to IPv6, but you'll need to give up your IPv4." I don't think I bothered asking them again!! (Edit "them" = Virgin Media)
  • inigyou 4mo ago
    Sure they didn't just mean they'd change your static IPv4 address to a different one?
    • gertrunde 4mo ago
      Quite possibly. But the way that they dealt with the whole thing smelt very "we don't know what we're talking about", enough to put us off. And shifting all the IP space about would have had costs with very little return, so little business appetite to go through it.
      • topranks 4mo ago
        Was that real DIA?? I’ve seen this commonly from them with residential service. They mostly give you a private v4 address behind CGNAT in addition to IPv6. If you want a public v4 they put you on their old network which has no v6.
  • bebe83939 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • mapkkk 4mo ago
    in my case, they did this without input from me. I only found out because I could no longer access a swath of things I used to be able to. not virgin media, but in the EU
• djantje 4mo ago
  In NL we have this one: https://heeftodidoipv6.nl https://heeftodidoipv6.nl Their core network has IPv6, but not their customers, 17% market share in telecom in the Netherlands. Are there more?
  • wolvoleo 4mo ago
    They also got hacked recently and all their customer details were published. PS: From the millions of customers' details leaked it sounds like their market share is a hell of a lot higher than 17%!
    • wolvoleo 4mo ago
      Yeah I looked it up, they're talking about 6.2 million customers' details. That's 30% of the NL population.
      • laughing_man 4mo ago
        A lot of those people might be ex-customers. People who moved, died, or switched to another company. I worked for a mobile company in the US, and once you were in our customer database, you stayed there. We never got hacked, at least, not so far, but if you got access to customer data the total number would be substantially higher than the current customer count.
        • wolvoleo 4mo ago
          Like the other reply says, this is not allowed in the EU. You can't just 'stay there'. They must be violating the GDPR if that was the case. Also their response has been really bad. It was basically them saying "oh well it's not so bad if your details are leaked". And giving some free antivirus crap.
    • crote 4mo ago
      That's because Odido violates the GDPR by retaining data of ex-customers. The hack also included data from people who stopped using their services several years ago.
• heresie-dabord 4mo ago
  After several decades, IPv6 has proven itself as a supplement to IPv4.
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
• FireBeyond 4mo ago
  I finally managed to get Xfinity giving me a /60, and then figuring out a SLAAC setup that works across my layer 3 home network (mostly me realizing that SLAAC was the way to go versus trying to figure out DHCPv6 and Ubiquiti Edge stuff).
• IgorPartola 4mo ago
  The way to pressure ISPs to support IPv6 is stupid but effective: 1. Sites that help shoppers choose can add a big visual red flag to any ISP that doesn’t support IPv6. Consumers don’t know what IPv6 is by and large but they do understand seeing a big red flag. 2. Same thing for websites. Add a banner that says “hey your ISP doesn’t support proper internet connectivity which this site utilizes. Contact them to let them know that you are having internet issues.” Again, consumers do not know what’s IPv6 is, but they do know what annoying banners are.
  • kvdveer 4mo ago
    What would be the incentive for site owners to reduce the appeal of their site? The user has connected to the site, so there's obviously no immediate problem.
    • londons_explore 4mo ago
      Back when Https deployment wasn't widespread, Chrome added a deliberate delay to http sites so Https sites appeared faster. That was the incentive for deployment for many, because until then Https was generally slower (extra round trips to set up the tls connection).
  • kortilla 4mo ago
    Regular person, “This site requires some weird technology, I’ll shop somewhere else.” This is one of those “if everyone just” solutions that doesn’t work because shopping websites would never do that. Amazon has tons of evidence that even the slightest bits of friction result in noticeable drops in sales.
    • londons_explore 4mo ago
      And yet Amazon's site seems to be half baked and buggy every time I visit.
  • xp84 4mo ago
    From a US perspective, for your #1, the idea of people “shopping” for broadband, is astonishing. Most people here have available to them one single DOCSIS provider and that’s it. A few lucky ones have a FTTP option too, but that definitely not available to more than 25% of addresses. (It’s true that you can use cellular for your home internet, but I consider that extremely compromised.)
• mlyle 4mo ago
  We're finally getting there in the US, though. Top ASNs are >75% IPv6 capable. It's Optimum Communications and Frontier (my provider) that are really holding the numbers down at ~15% each. The latter is improving very slowly, but not a lot of evidence of change in the former.
  • JdeBP 4mo ago
    Indeed. The U.S.A. is currently well above the U.K. in the APNIC statistics hyperlinked-to by the headlined article. * https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6 https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6
• vitorgrs 4mo ago
  Here in Brazil most ISPs provide IPv6 by now... But what happens a lot, when field technician are installing your broadband, they just... don't configure IPv6. As if IPv4 (CGNAT!) wasn't enough. With bigger ISPs this is less common. With mobile carriers this is even worse. For some reason, some default config are IPv4 by default, while literally all of them supports IPv6.
• buggeryorkshire 4mo ago
  Having interviewed with them for a SRE role I can definitely see how they are awful. The amount of technical debt is hilarious.
• marysol5 4mo ago
  If you sign up with + in your e-mail address, it breaks their backend too Fun fun