In America I've never had a non-mobile ISP offer IPv6. At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration. IPv6 will never reach the 100% needed to turn off IPv4.
> IPv6 will never reach the 100% needed to turn off IPv4.
As was predicted in 1994:
Furthermore, we note that, in all probability, there will be IPv4
hosts on the Internet effectively forever. IPng must provide
mechanisms to allow these hosts to communicate, even after IPng
has become the dominant network layer protocol in the Internet.
> It was also predicted that the address exhaustion problem would be averted, in fact that was the purpose of v6. It failed to deliver.
It was averted: how do you think we got several billion smartphones connected to the Internet? Do you think that would have been practicable without IPv6?
Comcast—not even mobile—had to move to IPv6 on their landline ISP business because they ran out of IPv4 addresses for TR-069: they were using multiple 10/8 networks in different regions NATed to hide them from each other. IPv4 became untenable.
NAT / CGNAT has been doing the heavy lifting extending the life of the Internet; ipv6 has done jack shit. If v6 was useful and actually averted v4 exhaustion we'd all be accessing v6 sites/addresses at this point.
Put another way, we can drop v6 completely and the Internet will still work. Obviously wouldn't work the other way around.
As for telco addressing handsets, they could use any addressing scheme to be honest. When people talk about averting address exhaustion, they're not talking about internal addressing of networks, different problem altogether.
> NAT / CGNAT has been doing the heavy lifting extending the life of the Internet; ipv6 has done jack shit. If v6 was useful and actually averted v4 exhausted we'd all be accessing v6 sites/addresses at this point.
This is factually difficult to support.
(Sent from my iPad which doesn’t have an ipv4 address… to hacker news which has an ipv6 address)
You've put yourself in a position where you can't access a lot of websites, including things like GitHub. That might be fine for you personally but isn't what most people do.
> As for telco addressing handsets, they could use any addressing scheme to be honest. When people talk about averting address exhaustion, they're not talking about internal addressing of networks, different problem altogether.
I'm sure if T-Mobile US thought they could, they would have:
> T-Mobile in the United States was running out of IPv4 addresses and needed an IPv6 transition strategy. Their solution was 464XLAT and IPv6-only.
Similarly Comcast rolled out IPv6 because they ran out of addresses for managing their CPE modems using TR-069: they were using 10/8 multiple times over, and it was too much of a hassle so they went to IPv6 (both internally and to their customers).
You do realise that mobile usage is a subset of the Internet and the Internet is not just about end user connectivity.
But you still haven't addressed my original point, how has IPv6 averted the impending (at the time) IP exhaustion problem? As I remember it, we were running out of IP addresses, then we did run out, and CGNAT helped extend the life of the Internet for people on IP, while v6 still remains an island that is optional and doesn't help alleviate any of the pain.
> You do realise that mobile usage is a subset of the Internet and the Internet is not just about end user connectivity.
I would argue that mobile usage is the primary way that many people access the Internet in their personal lives, as evidenced by fact that IPv6 usage goes up on weekends, when people are probably not browsing stuff on work laptops.
> But you still haven't addressed my original point, how has IPv6 averted the impending (at the time) IP exhaustion problem?
If T-Mobile US could not offload a lot of traffic to 'straight' IPv6 they'd need a lot more publicly accessible IPv4 addresses. As it stands now they can only have their IPv4 addresses assigned to CG-NAT boxes, but without IPv6 they'd have to have way more IPv4 to assign to handsets, or given handsets 10/8 or 100.64/10 and have may more IPv4 on their CG-NAT hardware. (They'd also need way beefier CG-NAT hardware to handle higher loads.)
See also for example Vodafone moving to IPv6 to deal with IPv4 address shortages:
And I've only ever had v6, both on DOCSIS and fiber. Both observations are pretty useless in the grand scheme of things; actual adoption rates are what matter.
> At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration.
That's a pretty wild thing to say in the comment section of an article about v6 reaching 50% eyeballs-side deployment.
How would several billion smartphones be able to connect to the Internet without IPv6?
There isn't enough RFC 1918 (or 100.64.0.0/10) space for IPv4-only to be practical: Comcast—not even mobile—went to IPv6 because running their TR-069 management over multiple 10/8 became untenable.
IPv6 is making all sorts of things possible without most people realizing it.
> Those phones are reaching half the internet via 64 gateways, no difference to reaching via 44 gateways.
And how would they have gotten first-hop connectivity without IPv6?
Comcast added IPv6 many years ago on their wired ISP side because they ran out of IPv4 for TR-069 management, and they had way fewer subscribers (at least at the time) than many mobile telcos.
And that half of the Internet is also some of the most bandwidth intensive stuff: Youtube, Netflix, Instagram. The CG-NAT hardware costs of streaming would be huge.
The network isn't just the open internet. There's also the part inside the network. You can view Comcast as a black box that magically gets packets from one side to the other, but Comcast engineers can't.
If you want to run a single massive scale network sure. One of the costs of scaling that the majority don’t see
No reason you can’t carry IPv4 over any protocol you want. Multi tennant vxlans can carry whatever you want over your base network. Maybe an IPv6 underlay makes sense there, doesn’t really matter
What's the par time for L3 protocol migrations on the Internet at its current size?
Bear in mind we've never done a project of this complexity and scale before. I'm sure we all wish it had been faster, but how can you possibly evaluate whether this is a failure or not without knowing how long it normally takes?
Comcast does IPv6 (in most areas, at least), AT&T does IPv6 (was 6rd when I was a customer), CenturyLink (or whatever they're called today) had 6rd on DSL when I was a customer... and it made their CPE do terrible things so it needed to be disabled, but it was offered. My muni fiber ISP offers IPv6.
> At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration. IPv6 will never reach the 100% needed to turn off IPv4.
That was probably a reasonable take 15 years ago. But we're at 50% v6 globally, and the ISPs that are doing v6 + cgnat would not want to move all that v6 traffic to cgnat. v6 traffic is managed with stateless routing; cgnat is stateful and costly.
There are many lessons that can be learned, but v4 only is not the future. v6 only might never happen... people are going to keep running old software in emulation that will never support v6... But global routability of v4 will likely end one day. And I'd suspect the tail of the migration will be much shorter than the head was.
Thugs are slowly moving. Another 5 years and most windows machines will support clat. Another 20 and most machines will hopefully support it. I wish it was embedded in the Linux kernel though as that increases the chance of your device working transparently on an IPv6 only subnet using slaac and the application creator doesn’t need to know anything other than their internal dhcp gets a 10.x address and everything works using 464.
I think the future is bright and most problems will be solved by 2040, and almost all by 2050.
