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The IPv6 Transition

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215 points todsacerdoti | 4 comments | 20 Oct 24 05:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.003s | source
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hairyplanter ◴[20 Oct 24 07:13 UTC] No.41893537[source]▶
I have fully implemented IPv6 in my home network.

I have even implemented an IPv6-Only network. It fully works, including accessing IPv4 only websites like github.com via DNS64 and NAT64 at my router.

The only practically useful thing about my IPv6 enabled network is that I can run globally routable services on my lan, without NAT port mapping. Of course, only if the client is also IPv6.

Other than this one use case, IPv6 does nothing for me.

It doesn't work from most hotels, nor from my work lan, nor many other places because most "managed" networks are IPv4 only. It works better at Cafes because they are "unmanaged" and IPv6 is enabled by the most common ISPs, like ATT and Comcast and their provided routers.

Based on this experience, I think IPv6 is less valuable than us HN audience thinks it is. Private networks, NAT, Carrier Grade NAT are good enough, and internet really doesn't care about being completely peer-to-peer.

I think the adoption rate reflects this--it's a linear growth curve over the last 25 years. It should have been exponential.

I think cost of IPv4 reflects this--it is now below the peak, and has leveled off.

As surprising as it seems, IPv4 exhaustion has not been a serious problem. Internet marches on. IPv6 is still a solution looking for a problem, and IPv4 exhaustion wasn't one of them.

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Dylan16807 ◴[20 Oct 24 07:15 UTC] No.41893541[source]▶
NAT is mostly okay, but carrier grade NAT where you can't forward a port causes real problems.

IPv4 exhaustion is a real problem, it's just not enough to motivate people much.

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kijin ◴[20 Oct 24 07:21 UTC] No.41893584[source]▶
If it was a real problem, market pricing would reflect the increasing severity of that problem.

The truth is that people who care about port forwarding are such a small minority -- especially now that P2P file sharing has lost its hype -- that they don't make a visible dent in the rate of IPv4 exhaustion.

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1. efitz ◴[21 Oct 24 09:33 UTC] No.41902262{3}[source]▶
Why was this downvoted? It’s exactly right.

The reason that IPv6 is so lightly used is that it’s cheaper to use IPv4 + workarounds.

I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, or making any value judgment about IPv4 vs IPv6.

People and businesses don’t spend money on technology upgrades where the benefit is not measurably better than what they already have.

This is just common sense; no one wants to throw away money.

If you want people to use IPv6, then IPv4 has to fail first. As long as people keep making it work then the benefits of changing will never outweigh the costs.

BTW this is exactly the same situation as clean energy vs fossil fuel, etc. In that situation governments are actively putting their thumb on the economic scales in all sorts of ways. Again, I’m not offering a value judgment, just an observation.

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2. pmarreck ◴[21 Oct 24 12:18 UTC] No.41903346[source]▶
> The reason that IPv6 is so lightly used is that it’s cheaper to use IPv4 + workarounds

Cheaper? Hetzner and other hosts give IPv6 addresses out for free and charge extra for IPv4 addresses.

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3. immibis ◴[21 Oct 24 13:04 UTC] No.41903736[source]▶
And if you want PI addresses, they exist for IPv6 only.
4. efitz ◴[21 Oct 24 20:57 UTC] No.41908461[source]▶
Most people don’t need a public IPv4 address and can live with CGNAT.

For the relatively small number of people who do need public addresses, renting them from a cloud provider or buying blocks at auction are still economically viable, in comparison to the capital costs of upgrading everything that needs upgrading to support IPv6-only.