ISPs won't bother with IPv6 until they've either run out of IPv4 space or the internet starts to use IPv6's advantages.
Discussions about IPv6 quickly end with "we have enough v4 space and there are no services that require v6 anyway". As long as the extra cruft for v4 support remains free or even supported, large ISPs won't care. We're at the point where people need to deal with things like peer to peer connectivity with two sides behind CGNAT which require dedicated effort to even work.
I know it sucks if none of the ISPs in your area support IPv6 and you're left with suboptimal solutions like tunnels from HE, but I think it's only reasonable all this extra cost or effort becomes visible at some point. Half the world is on v6, legacy v4-only connections are becoming the minority now.
I have has native IPv6 since 2010, from two different ISPs.
It is also available for one of my phone contracts but not tried enabling it yet.
Well, you're very lucky (genuinely).
In 2025, I tried to access my services using IPv6 with 4G phones and different subscriptions (different ISPs), fact is, many (most?) of them did not support IPv6 at all :(
I had to revert to IPv4. And really I have nothing against IPv6, but yeah, as a simple user, self hosting a bunch of services for friends and family: it was simply just not possible to use only IPv6 :(
(for context, the 4G providers are French, in metropolitan France)
My phone contract that does offer IPv6 is with Free, I could not work out whether it would disable IPv4 if I enabled IPv6 so have not tried changing it.
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Super interesting, but the person you're responding to lives in France.
There is not a single ISP in my area that provides any IPv6 support whatsoever. This is also the case for many, many millions of others around the world.
Conversely, I had IPv6 for about 5 years from an ISP and when I switched providers, the new ISP was IPv4 only. A few years later and they now support IPv6, but my firewall setup is now IPv4 only, so I've not bothered to update it.
(exe.dev co-founder here)
We are not running out of IPv4 space because NAT works. The price of IPv4 addresses has been dropping for the last year.
I know this because I just bought another /22 for exe.dev for the exact thing described in this blog post: to get our business customers another 1012 VMs.
Yep. As sad as it is for p2p, NAT handles most uses cases for users, and SNI routing (or creative hacks like OP) handles most use cases for providers.
I was surprised how low IPv4 prices have gotten. Lowest since at least 2019.
Amazingly even most p2p works with NAT, see (and I am biased here) Tailscale.
I certainly wish we simply had more addresses. But v4 works.
Your NAT traversal article is amazing, but sadly the long tail (ha) means any production quality solution has to have relays, which is a huge complexity jump for people who just want to run some p2p app on their laptop.
And it's not clear it will ever be better than it is now with CGNAT on the rise.
Would love to hear I'm wrong about this.