I've had less than 0.5% of customers ask for IPv6 from my fibre ISP. It's not worth supporting as a result. The main reason is that any service that is not widely used will have gremlins that result in poor customer experience, and if it's always the same handful of customers hitting problems or finding quirks, there is a real risk of poor word of mouth incident reporting that can harm the business. At least if something goes wrong with IPv4, it's going to be noticed very quickly.
Some people will say monitoring is all that you need, but I do not agree. There are a million different little issues that can and do occur on physical networks in the real world, and there's no way monitoring will have a 99% chance of detecting all of them. When incidents like the partial Microsoft network outage that hit certain peering points occurred, I had to route around the damage by tweaking route filtering on the core routers to prefer a transit connection that worked over the lower cost peering point. It's that kind of oddball issue that active users catch and report which does not happen for barely used services like IPv6.
> I've had less than 0.5% of customers ask for IPv6 from my fibre ISP
How many ask for IPv4? I understand your situation, it's a lot of work, for something that many won't notice. It's just that saying there's no demand because your average consumer, who also doesn't know what IPv4 is, isn't asking for it, is the mentality that keeps IPv6 from being implemented.
On the funnier side of things, we've also sometimes run into the opposite problem that we can't reproduce an issue, because it's only on IPv4 and 95% of the time everything we do is IPv6. But we're also not serving home users.
Static IPv4 addresses are closer to around 5% of customers. Nobody asks for IPv4, but some customers bring their existing or own wireless routers along and occasionally choose devices that are not IPv6 capable. Maybe in another 10 years those devices will finally be fully removed from service. The worst stragglers right now are the old combo DSL modems that effectively have no modern replacements -- it's just not worth spending money to replace them when customers are going to migrate to fibre soon enough.
I don't think GP meant static addressing but literally, how many ask for IPv4 service? None, because you just provide it; it's an unstated expectation.
Now apply that to IPv6 and you can see the point that (I think) GP is making.
Side note: The claim it is not widely used doesn't track. How many people use Google or Facebook? More than half of that traffic is over IPv6.
https://circleid.com/posts/ipv6-usage-in-the-u.s-surpasses-5...
So when you said `ask for IPv6` you meant `ask for a static IPv6 prefix` or something else similar to a static IPv4 address? Or is this an apples to oranges comparison?
And then you say `Nobody asks for IPv4` - so nobody asks for IPv4 and 0.5% ask for IPv6?
> I've had less than 0.5% of customers ask for IPv6 from my fibre ISP. It's not worth supporting as a result.
Big, evil, hated Comcast has full ipv6, and I doubt any of its customers asked for it either. Instead people complain they’re only getting a /60.
Comcast was forced to go to IPv6 because they ran out of IPv4 addresses in the private address space to use for management of their network (think of how each and every cable modem needs a an address for management in addition to all the routers and CMTSes). I was a fly on the way inside one of the router vendors when this took place more than 15 years ago.
If you already have to do CGNAT, why not IPv6 as your core network with NAT64 at the border and 464XLAT on the CPE? It gives you best of both worlds.
I'm not doing CGNAT. We were able to get enough IPv4 addresses directly from ARIN a few years ago after being on the waiting list for a couple of years. It's a pity that widespread fraud depleted that pool faster than it should have been.
CPE support for IPv6 has generally been garbage with it taking 15-20 years before the bare minimum was supported by mainstream router vendors. Even today there are still vendors that assume only IPv4 support. In my opinion the IETF really screwed up when they made IPv6 more complicated than just IPv4 with more address bits. The incumbent in my area generally uses PPPoE in their access network, but routers that supported PPPoE and prefix delegation basically didn't exist in 2010, and only started being available circa 2015 (in part due to the required bits not existing in OpenWRT and the hardware vendors' software development kits for their chipsets). Sure, we're 10 years further on now, but there remain a number of vendors that only support IPv4 for management of devices (cough Ubiquiti cough) in parts of their product line.
That said, there are features of IPv6 that are absolutely awesome for carriers. The next header feature that pretty much eliminates the need for MPLS in an IPv6 transport network is one such item that makes building transport networks so much cleaner when using IPv6 than IPv4. No more header insertion or rewriting, just update one field and fix up the delta on the checksum and CRC. They just aren't really applicable for smaller networks.
Ah, okay, well if you already have the IPv4 address space available for all your customers that's a different story. I can understand why you want to wait to dual-stack in that case.
I do think NAT64/464XLAT is a pretty good architecture for new ISPs that can't get their hands on IPv4 space, though. Or even MAP-T, but CPE support isn't really there yet.
Android and iOS have pressure on app developers to support IPv6 or at the very least function on 464XLAT. On home broadband people could connect anything including programs that use literal IPv4 addresses and break on 464XLAT. Things like corporate VPNs, Skype, online gaming. Ironically these services would benefit the most from supporting IPv6 but they've evolved to deal with IPv4 NAT to the extent that they've become dependent on IPv4 connectivity.