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 News:
* https://havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk/
A major ISP in the U.K., that said in a public statement on World IPv6 Day in 2011 that
> As well as our core and access networks being capable of supporting IPv6, we're rigorously testing our entire network to ensure that all customers have a smooth and simple transition when the time comes to flick the switch and turn IPv6 on. We're really pleased with how our tests are advancing and are happy to say that by the end of 2012, we'll be able to fully support customers looking to switch to IPv6.
has not managed to actually flick that switch in 15 years.
* https://ispreview.co.uk/story/2011/06/08/uk-isp-fluidata-hai...
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.
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.)
Starlink shattered this monopoly in my area.
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.
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).
I think this is a classic chicken and egg problem and the only way to solve this issue is government regulation. Anyone aware of the mandatory IPv6 in Europe? I heard that the Chech Republic is doing something about it. I Poland, only Orange and probably TMobile supports it, the smaller ones - almost none.
This will work on nerds (aka the HN crowd) but the average person will read that and wonder why they should care when the page loaded. Also, if you keep displaying the banner people will grow accustomed to it and ultimately ignore it.
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.
And yet Amazon's site seems to be half baked and buggy every time I visit.
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)
Sure they didn't just mean they'd change your static IPv4 address to a different one?
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.
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
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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.
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.)
Right. Which is why this is not a choice businesses should be allowed to make.
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.
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.
>IPv6 not being supported in many places means the internet is more centralised, less likely to use proper p2p tech-
Realistically nobody outside some devoted HN readers are going to self host their own content. At best you'd see something like netflix trying to offload their video hosting costs onto their customers.
Well yeah, because they can't. Maybe if they could, they would do it more. You probably wouldn't want to host a permanent website from home, although some people do, but you could share a file. It would be popular with game servers, too.
>You probably wouldn't want to host a permanent website from home, although some people do, but you could share a file.
bittorent has been around for decades and nobody used it. They emailed files to themselves instead, or used dropbox. This all happened before the ipv4 shortage and people getting moved to CGNAT.
internet is used by billions of people, not just you.
You sure you don't have this reversed? The average person uses the internet to watch tiktok videos and join zoom meetings, all of which is centralized. The people self hosting their NAS or minecraft server is a tiny minority.
> join zoom meetings
no reason this has to be centralised.
in fact, Jitsi uses p2p with WebRTC until a third person joins the call: then migrates the call to be relayed.
A really nice latency win.
Nobody used BitTorrent? LoL
ISPs had/have whole groups trying to stomp it out.
And it was a nightmare due to NAT even then.
It just got worse with CGNAT.
I think the commenter you’re replying to is pointing out that nobody used BitTorrent for legitimate cases. And that take is sadly correct. Despite having huge upsides, everyone just hosts on centralized CDNs, file syncing services (gdrive, Dropbox, etc).
Even Linux distros push you so direct downloads now rather than pointing to trackers.
BitTorrent only has healthy usage for content that’s untenable to host legitimately.
That is because BitTorrent has been targeted so much.
Also, hey now - I have a lot of (actual) Linux disk images, and it works well for that!
The sheer amount of times Airdrop has been the "best" way to share files takes away from your point a bit.
It's almost always faster than anything else available, and ipv6 would make that method of sending files closer to the default for most people.
Having VOIP in games or 1v1 lobbies is, in the strictest sense, "hosting" something in the same way.
FD: I work in video games so I speak from this bias.
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Obviously I can't see the future, and I live in my own bubble....
Isn't self hosting, and small, private/semi-private communities the only way forwards for much of the internet? AI has made content extremely valuable, which in turn has started to destroy the openness of the web. Things are getting more and more siloed, with entry fees.
There's a world where self hosting comes back in a big way. AI ironically makes it much easier.
> Realistically nobody outside some devoted HN readers are going to self host their own content.
How about Xbox/PS multiplayer/P2P gaming? Hosting a Minecraft server?
When Skype first came out it was P2P, but had to come up with the "supernode" concept (basically STUN/TURN/ICE) because of NAT: now all of our communication methods basically have to phone into the mothership.
Do we want the Internet to be more centralized (possibly given more power to the tech bros) or more decentralized?
Maybe the solution is to make IPv4 prohibitively expensive.
Or even just expensive.
The p2p tech argument doesn’t work anymore. Most routers ship a stateful IPv6 firewall enabled by default now because IPv6 was resulting in people’s vulnerable shit getting popped.
So p2p stuff still doesn’t work without explicit configuration that rules out 99% of your users. It’s super annoying.
Yeah, it's impossible to do anything about a stateful firewall to get p2p connections.
It's a shame because if we could only get over stateful firewalling we'd be one step closer to the impossible task of using voice chat in console video games.
Right now they don't have that of course and the only hurdle is "NAT Types" which, as we all know, is a much easier problem to solve for the average person...
(this was sarcasm, if it wasn't clear).
> 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.
If I'm with a small-time ISP that has to use CG-NAT because they don't have the cash to buy/lease enough IPv4 addresses to give one to each CPE WAN interface, then using things like Xbox/PS multiplayer/P2P gaming is no longer possible. Want to host a Minecraft server? Too bad.
Are those two use-cases "useful to the consumer"?
You are right, but ISPs will tell you that you're not allowed to host servers anyway. Most have it in the AUP.
I did port forwarding in 2010 for a Minecraft server. Basically every router supports it.
It wasn't meaningfully more difficult than setting up the server.
You can't do that with CGNAT.
Most isps, you can’t do that anymore as you no longer have a publically reachable IPv4 address. It moved the ‘just configure your router’ part to their equipment, as they now use CGNAT.
It’s gotten much worse.
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.
Actually not as much point now.
The reason to regulate in maybe 2000 or so was that staying with IPv4 led to NAT. NAT led to it being impossible for users to receive incoming connections. Inability to receive incoming connections led to (a) horrendous protocol complexity, (b) probably some applications never even being invented, and, (c) everybody using ultra-centralized services. Ultra-centralized services led to advertising-driven distortions of service utility, concentration of political and economic power, and choke points. Choke points led to surveillance state bullshit that's just fully ripening today.
And, yes, this was (in broad outline) foreseeable in 2000. I wasn't the only one.
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago...
We are locked into apple and google backup services because of CGNAT. If ipv6, and symmetric fiber internet, was ubiquitous when smartphones came out, there could have been a competing option that backs up your own data to an appliance in your own home.
In NL we have this one: https://heeftodidoipv6.nl
Their core network has IPv6, but not their customers, 17% market share in telecom in the Netherlands.
Are there more?
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%!
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.
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
After several decades, IPv6 has proven itself as a supplement to IPv4.
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).
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.