India: 47M
China: 358M
Both countries have roughly the same population. The IPv4 problem has been swept under the rug with CGNAT and a normal person doesn't even notice it. But it sucks. Forget having a dedicated IP, even on a broadband connection, you don't get a public IP that's truly yours. According to IPInfo[1], there are around 1,000 users sharing my IP. I get flagged for malicious activity, and online gaming is impossible without a Tailscale relay.
Of course, much of this comes down to the bad luck (+ policies) of developing late, when most IPv4 blocks had already been allocated. But it's pretty unfair how US DoD, Apple, Ford, and others [1] are sitting on enormous IPv4 blocks they'll probably never fully use, and may never sell. Meanwhile I am sharing a single public IP with a thousand strangers.
[1]: https://ipinfo.io/223.233.77.184
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...
PSA that if you have a ham radio licence, anywhere in the world, there are IPv4 addresses available for you for the taking at ARDC (AMPR)[1].
You can either get a block of /24 to announce yourself (you've got to cover all the technical setup and costs of this) or use their free 44net.connect service and just organise a wireguard tunnel.
You cannot use it for anything commercial.
[1] https://wiki.ampr.org/wiki/Main_Page
I have looked into acquiring an ipv4 block many times but never came across this. Thanks for the lead!
The Chinese are having a big push for IPv6 adoption, and, being China, this is likely to actually happen as ISPs follow government orders. But also being China, they are also pushing for 'enhancements' for IPv6 for the usual reasons, which the rest of the world is unlikely to be willing to adopt.[1]
[1] https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/07/22/china-advanc...
Interesting, never heard of IPv6+. Can't find much in the net about it either. This looks like the offical page, but do you know of any articles where experts anayze it? https://www.ipv6plus.net/IPv6Plus/ipv6plus
> But it's pretty unfair how US DoD, Apple, Ford, and others [1] are sitting on enormous IPv4 blocks
Maybe Apple and Ford, but it's more than fair that DoD has large blocks since they created ipv4 to connect themselves to other networks. It was only 10 years ago that the US government decided to give up control of IANA.
Sure there's historic reason that the DoD has such a large block, but it is definitely unfair in the modern world. There is no way they need or will ever use their massive block of addresses. They have 13 different /8 blocks, ~218 million unique addresses, that's over 5% of the entire IPv4 address space.
The modern paradigm you're using as a comparison only exists because this network designed for the US military industrial complex was so freely open and fair that it is now used by everyone.
There were and still are are other global networks -- none of them come close to being anywhere near as open or interoperable. What's the next closest, PSTN maybe?
Seen differently, it’s fair for a founder who has relinquished most of their control over the system to retain 5% equity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You can always just use IPv6 where there is plenty of address space available. You can even get a /44 as a hobbyist easily
I have no deep ip knowlede, but if the companys do not use those addresses , cant we just use them an snatch away those unused addresses?
Nobody will peer with you if you start announcing addresses you don’t own, so there’s no way to make those addresses reachable on the public internet.
My take is that the solution here isn't "give India more IPv4 addresses", it's "force more Americans onto CGNAT", so that it becomes untenable for service providers to treat IPv4 addresses as if they're tied to a single user, and to encourage people to use IPv6.
The US is already 55% IPv6, and this figure is only going to go up in future as ISPs decide to migrate their network cores to IPv6 for financial reasons, making IPv4 a lower-performance edge protocol riding on CGNAT on top of IPv6. Similar selfishness elsewhere will start to drive other parts of the ecosystem to IPv6, and the problem will solve itself.
s/IP/IPv4/g
Configuring my OS to prefer IPv6 addresses of DNS responses significantly reduced the number of web captchas I see (on NAT444 with native IPv6).
IPv4 is old and broken, use IPv6.
I'd love to do that, if my ISP would provide me an IPv6 address. Windstream doesn't provide IPv6s. They did a trial a few years ago rolling it out and then undid it.
It's crazy I can get fiber to my house in the US, but not IPv6.
Your greedy ISP won't provide you with IPv6 for financial reasons - it's cheaper not to change or upgrade systems. This won't change until they start to provide you with IPv6 for financial reasons, as they reach the point where going to IPv6 starts to be a cost saving for them rather than having to run two different networks at once, with a whole bunch of CGNAT to keep the IPv4 part of it going.
iirc, hurricane electric was offering IPv6 via tunnelling somehow.
https://tunnelbroker.net
I was doing this back when I had BT in London, my internet speed back then was pretty abysmal and it would randomly drop routes- ironically this tunnel actually improved my internet (because of the routes not being dropped, not the speed).
They do this for free because they're a tier 1, meaning everyone pays to connect to them and they benefit from having more things hosted on their network. It's free because your ISP pays for it.
And they can always tell your ISP if they don't like paying to connect to the tunnelling server they should just implement v6.
Unfortunately, he.net tunnels have terrible reputation, so if you use this for your regular browsing, you're likely to get hit with more captchas than if you're on a cgnat with well behaved neighbors. Some sites will just not work, with no errors, because why waste errors on networks with bad reputation.
It wasn't always like this, but it was for me the last time I tried.
I think I had HE and Surfnet tunnels in the very late '90s already. IPv6 sure is taking some time...
Annoyingly, this will not work over CGNAT as far as I know - the tunnel needs 'both ends' to be accessible directly from each other I think.
There are cgnat provides who don’t also give you a real ipv6? Evil.
Try getting a /24 these days without paying a fortune. We NAT everything and still wait for IPv6 because the ISP CPE barely supports it. Land analogy is apt, landlords everywhere.
My ISP is only a few years old, but they don't support IPv6 at all. And when I complain about it to support, their response is basically "we don't see the point".
Practically everything on IPv6 also has a IPv4 address you can use instead. Adding IPv6 just adds more that can go wrong.
Sure, but if they're a new ISP, chances are they have a hard time getting IPv4 and they likely run CGNAT. If they run CGNAT, the benefit of IPv6 is there's a lot of high volume traffic that will move to v6 and the CGNAT use will be smaller. Routing v6 packets is much easier than tracking connection states and munging packets...
If they have enough v4 for all their customers, sure fine.
It's not just that the ISP will lower their costs for CGNAT, the users will also get a much better experience.
On IPv4 with CGNAT you get blocked and sent millions of captchas because you are sharing an IP with 5 IoT devices actively running a botnet.
On v6 you don’t have that problem.
This is an interesting take, however from what I seen its other way around. Most security conscious operators would only allow IPv4 instead of IPv6. Your ACL rules and tools are still better at handling/managing IPv4 compared to IPv6
> Most security conscious operators would only allow IPv4 instead of IPv6.
I strongly disagree. That's obsolete knowledge, thrown around by people who want to be considered security conscious but haven't actually updated their knowledge in many years. A statement with similar implications might be "security conscious operators require their users to rotate their passwords monthly", which is what a lot of people use to think a decade ago, and now what it really communicates is that you're talking to a dinosaur.
But IPv6 is complex and inherently globally accessible. Yes, NAT IS not supposed to be a firewall but it works like one nonetheless in many cases.
IPv6 will never replace IPv4 because it is a different protocol rather than merely a new version. The name is a lie.
> IPv6 is... inherently globally accessible.
No, it's not. If you really want a NAT there is no reason you can't use a NAT with ipv6. In fact, it can work even better because instead of using a random port for the translation, you can use a random ip address for each connection.
A random ip address that is globally reachable?
Why would it be reachable? It might be name-able but that doesn't imply reachable.
You're conflating the two parts of NAT: address translation and inbound filtering. A router can block any inbound traffic coming from WAN, even if the IPv6s on the LAN side are public.
In fact, hole punching for IPv4 shows this distinction. By default inbound traffic is blocked, but as soon as private host has opened up a connection, it is (indirectly) reachable and nameable (via the routers public IP + port).
BTW, static IPv4 NAT with public addresses on both sides exists as well.
Addressable means routable. Otherwise the distinction between a Public and Private address becomes one of firewall rules rather than a meaningful property of the IP Address.
And as you say, hole punching is still “PUBLIC IP” + port. Not an IP and any port you fancy unless the firewall was configured correctly.
Maybe I am wrong, maybe you’re confused, maybe IPv6 is just rubbish. Maybe all 3.
What do you mean globally accessible? All the devices on my network have global IPv6 addresses for the last 5 years - since my ISP enabled IPv6 but none of them are accessible unless I configure it.
Very weird take, and not supported by facts or evidence, but OK.
Do you ever wonder if most people don’t “see the facts” and after almost 3 decades and so much the adoption at 50% might mean to consider if the technology is just rubbish?
Most IPv4 "security" is a side-effect of NAT. NAT was not intended as a security feature, but it does provide a level of security in the common consumer implementation (PAT, single external IP, unroutable internal network.)
Otherwise, what are the practical differences?
There's more that's been written about configuring/protecting IPv4 networks and if you learn about network security from a mentor or from coworkers at a job, rather than reading books/the internet/LLMs, you're more likely to learn about IPv4 security.
But if you've ever had to deal with endpoint security, if you're just doing static rule based blocking/throttling, /32 or /24 blocking is often your best option. Thanks to CGNAT this often means having a pretty large impact since an ISP's residential customer might end up getting randomly assigned a "bad" address and the cooldown for these rules is often months long or more.
In IPv6 land, you can just block a /128 or even a /64 and rarely hit anyone else in the crossfire.
Blocking /128 is unlikely to block anyone for very long around here. Both the major ISPs give out /56 blocks with prefix delegation. In almost 4 years, mine hasn't changed.
There is no need for that, every modern OS prefer IPv6 over IPv4
Depends on the application, a web-browser that implements Happy Eyeballs protocol may prefer IPv4 if the IPv6 latency is higher.
I know little of this. How/why could one be higher latency over the other?
Different paths. If you’ve got a “dual stack” on your computer, give it a try.
tracert -4 google.com
tracert -6 google.com
I do get very different hops and latency.
However for “happy eyeballs” algo to fallback to IPv4, latency needs to be very bad on IPv6.
(I work on performance tuning a browsers happy eyeballs implementation)
Especially for DNS, browsers don’t wait “very long” for the AAAA (v6) record to be resolved when they already have the A record (v4) and will start the v4 connection after at max 50ms (iirc thats the spec value, but imo it is too long and most browsers wait less I think).
The good news is that if the AAAA still arrives later it will be cached, thus this only affects the first connection to a site.
As for the actual v6 connection being slower (lets say both A and AAAA come from cache) the browser will start a v6 connection and only fall back to v4 if the connection isn’t established within some time (I think the spec says 250ms).
And to make this all more complicated HTTP1/2/3 enter the decision matrix. I.e. should the browser rather try v4/http3 than v6/http2? Opinions probably differ.
All of this is also on the critical path to a website loading for the user, thats why all of those waits cannot be too long. At some point the benefit of the better protocol will be outweighed by waiting. Even worse if the website doesn’t support v6 and the wait was for nothing.
Happy eyeballs is more to fix totally broke ipv6 than speed differential.
For many years and even how there are networks that advertise they can do ipv6 and hand out real addresses but nothing works.
> IPv4 is old and broken
IPv4 is old, very old. But how is it broken? It's literally been working just fine since it came out.
That there are limited addresses is something else: it doesn't mean it's broken.
I don't care that spying/surveillance devices have more trouble spying on me with IPv4 than with IPv6 and I don't care that some apps have a harder time establishing connection.
IPv4 works. SSH over IPv4 works. Browsing the Web over IPv4 works.
IPv4 stopped working fine some 30 years ago. The invention of NAT was caused by IPv4 not working fine (RFC 1631 was written under assumption it's a temporary solution). Hole punching is a thing solely because IPv4 stopped working fine. Much like Y2K, the reason IPv4 appears to work fine is because absolutely massive engineering effort was put to work around the parts that don't work fine.
> IPv4 is old, very old. But how is it broken?
It is broken for you by upstream NAT and CGNAT.
You mean it's fixed by NAT and CGNAT. Because it's works just fine for me.
NAT and CGNAT break the basic idea of how the Internet was designed, forcing everyone into servers and consumers. We've just become used to it, and most people have never experienced it any other way.
The Internet was supposed to be a purely peer-to-peer network, where the addresses on each side of a connection pointed to an end node. That's why protocols like FTP or SIP break when NAT is used, and why you have to play games with port forwarding if you want to run services from your house (assuming you have a public IP address at all).
It's slightly unrealic idea though, as most of internet users are consumers, and that's the role they really prefer. That's why Dropbox gained popularity in spite of, you know, the fact that we all can do it with FTP.
> It's slightly unrealic idea though, as most of internet users are consumers, and that's the role they really prefer.
Because just about all applications are currently architected in such a manner.
When Skype first came out many moons ago it allowed peer-to-peer connections with clients, but a lot of clients were behind NAT (especially ones that could not do PCP or UPnP), so Skype had to come up with the notion of "super nodes" that could do relaying.
Protocols like STUN/TURN/ICE/etc had to be developed to deal with all of this blocking of traffic.
If clients could know their 'real' addresses and allow things like PCP (which is often needed for (e.g.) video games), then perhaps there could me less strictly consuming and more collaborating.
We couldn't do it with FTP. That's kinda the point. We didn't have static IP addresses for every machine or the entries in DNS to go with them.
The whole idea of "consumer" and "server" nodes is so baked into how people think about networking they don't even realize it. But that's not how the Internet was intended to be in the first place.
You absolutely can do it within the existing paradigm, in a number of ways, actually. Search for iroh, or DynDNS for example.
And if you seriously believe that Dropbox appeared because of NAT, and not because people prefer out-of-the-box solutions, I can only suggest you to go out of your bubble, and discuss technical issues with random people.
"Intended" btw is not even an argument. Internet wasn't intended for many things which we happily do here.
I'm well familiar with DynDNS. I used to run it before I got a real domain. It can't tell the difference between my laptop and my workstation, since they're both behind the same IP. I wasn't aware of iroh, but having looked it up, it's just a hack to get around problems that NAT has caused.
And yes, Dropbox does exist because of NAT, or more generally the fact that "consumers" are second-class citizens on the Internet. If everyone had a publicly routed address and an entry in DNS - which is how the Internet was originally envisioned - we'd have solutions that don't require a third party server.
Both of your examples just show how deep the Stockholm syndrome is. IPv4's limitations have shifted the way people think about networking so much that they rarely even realize they're doing it. But this isn't the way it was supposed to be. "Intended" is completely valid when we're talking about how something has strayed from its original design and the ramifications of it.
I'm not naive enough to think that we can ever get rid of the "consumer" and "producer" ideas that have crept into everyone's head. But it's important to remember that these ideas came about only because of limitations in the protocol, not because they're some kind of natural law of how global networks function.
> Search for iroh, or DynDNS for example
CG-NAT breaks all this. iroh relies on relays from people with non-broken internet (no CG-NAT).
>iroh relies on relays
Yes, and DynDNS too. Which is fine, cause it works, and that is what I said. The claim to which it replies is that people have to pay to Dropbox cause poor souls were stopped from sharing files using existing technologies like FTP by the damned IPv4, and not because they simply prefer an out-of-the-box GUI thing.
There were out-of-the-box GUI experiences, like Apple's "Back to my Mac", that never worked right because of all the issues with poking through NAT caused by IPv4.
Relying on peer-to-peer relays also doesn't scale, which is why Skype dropped its supernode architecture.
> That's why Dropbox gained popularity in spite of, you know, the fact that we all can do it with FTP.
Dropbox gained popularity *BECAUSE IT MADE IT EASY TO DO THIS WHEN YOU'RE STUCK BEHIND NAT TRASH*. By the time it was even a thought in anyone's brain the internet had already been ruined by that garbage.
It would never have existed in a world without NAT because it wouldn't have been needed, syncing data between computers you owned that all had publicly routable addresses is a much simpler problem.
Every ISP that has CGNAT v4 without providing full v6 needs to be shut down. They are either incompetent or actively choosing to make their users' service less useful to restrict them and/or encourage "upgrades". Internet service has a public routable IP address, period.
Only today we would have put everything behind something like NAT anyway because your devices would be getting hacked constantly.
>it would never have existed in a world without NAT because it wouldn't have been needed,
I'm sorry, but this claim is one of the brightest examples of false consenses effect I've seen in ages. People generally just prefer an icon on desktop to click/tap. And that's the reason Dropbox found its audience.
Now imagine if you didn't need that icon and Windows Explorer (or whatever file manager you use) could just connect to wherever your file is. Maybe through a "Favorite."
Then imagine the security implications of trusting windows to serve just some selected files over FTP and never have any security hole that exposed other files or allowed RCE
> It's slightly unrealic idea though, as most of internet users are consumers, and that's the role they really prefer. That's why Dropbox gained popularity in spite of, you know, the fact that we all can do it with FTP.
Dropbox gained popularity because none of us can or want to bother to do it with FTP, with the exception of a very small and determined minority.
Why do you think that even FANG engineers use cloud storage systems such as Dropbox/iCloud/OneDrive/Google Drive/etc. Can't an elite software engineer put together a FTP server?
Why do you think Dropbox et al are still a thing in spite of projects such as Syncthing?
This is not the only instance where user experience and convenience show their value. Look at Docker, for example. The "aktually" crowd will be fast to say that anyone can do the same with chroot et al, but they will again be missing the whole point. It's the same thing why Microsoft tried to invest in Aspire even though Docker is here.
It's like complaining that people can buy bread when all they need to make their own is flour, water, salt, and yeast. That's completely besides the point, ain't it?
> You mean it's fixed by NAT and CGNAT. Because it's works just fine for me.
CGNAT works for you? Do you play video games at all? Because there are all sorts of people for which it doesn't.
The fact that you may be fortunate enough to get a publicly-accessible IPv4 address on your WAN interface does not mean everyone else is. This type of attitude seems to be akin to "I gots mine."
I don't play this kind of games at all, but I still can sympathize with you if it's your preferred pastime, and it doesn't work as good as you'd like. I just don't think it warrants a conclusion that those nets in which we are arguing are broken. They are tangibly, observably doing pretty well. And I find that the idea that in a shiny world of pure IPv6 central servers/nodes would decentralize themselves comes from deep misunderstanding about what "normal" humans want.
Until a service's WAF catches your /32 because your ISP had previously handed it out to a spammer.
There are working procedures to follow in such situations, and minimally competent ISPs deal with them well enough so that most users don't even know the problem exists.
What I really don't understand is IPv6 has been around... decades now... why the heck havent we started forcing it more and more?
A large chunk of IT people don't understand it. So they don't demand it from their vendors. The vendors see the lack of demand so they spend fewer resources on it. When someone wants to implement IPv6, they see the limited vendor support and decide against it.
The last three companies I've worked at have all been IPv4 only. I set up IPv6 in our lab, but neither the SCADA software nor the PLCs we use support it at all, and none of my coworkers can troubleshoot it if problems pop up.
I've got a buddy that's a technical manager at an ISP and he'll straight up tell you they don't do IPv6 because he and his people don't know it.
Yep. I run into "enterprise" cloud environments where IPv6 is disabled, all the time. The sad thing is IPv6 is easier to understand than v4, just based on subnetting practices alone. The real problem is the average "IT" person doesn't understand hexadecimal.
Thing is, you can run ipv4 only, dual stack or ipv6 only. Ipv6 only won't work. Dual stack has a larger attack surface and is complex. Ipv4 works but costs a relatively tiny bit of money so far.
Why would you not use ipv4?
It's definitely a slight learning curve (a few days at most for basic understanding and troubleshooting). I can't speak to complexities like routing protocol configurations.
But goodness, the infinite-subnets-of-same-size glitch is so amazing. I see companies all the time that struggle to subnet their sprawling enterprise. Different subnet sizes everywhere, fragmented networks, subnet migrations to try to defragment, so on.
Many orgs are so short-staffed and staffed with mediocre talent that they spend their days fighting fires and keeping their flawed current practices operating just well enough to keep the lights on and not cause outages or security breaches. Things like "optimizations" and "redesigns" of the IP stack, even in 2026, would be a 5-10 year journey without a dollar sign benefit attached to it. So they limp along until the transition is seamless and necessary or monetarily desireable.
It's only really a learning curve if you're an expert at IPv4, and try to apply your IPv4 mental model directly to IPv6.
Second system effect. It's way more complicated
Replicating even a simple ipv4 lan with mostly stable local addresses and some isp uplink is pretty complex, even assuming all the devices involved support ipv6, which they wont
It's much easier to run a dual stack with v4 for ease of use on the lan and v6 as an additional address that can change whenever and is only used to reach the wan
But the main reason you'd care would be if you can't get a public ipv4 address to NAT to. And if you can't get that, some of the internet breaks anyway.
Early bad experiences made a lot of people reluctant to try again.
There's a lot of edge cases to bite people still.
That said, something like 50% of users have working v6 now, which helps to file down the edges. Growth of v6 in the last 10 years has been much more significant than the previous 10 years. I suspect the next 10 years will be pretty significant, too.
I don't think many organizations are in a position to force adoption though.
You have mandates from say US government for government services and vendors and similar in some other countries. Some countries can force it through strong regulations on equipment sales. And then there's Jio (and maybe other ISPs) that have significant market power in some locales and a significant lack of v4 resources and can strongly encourage vendors and partners to support v6 for better service to users on their network.
We're 10 years out from the Epochalypse as well. Past a certain point you need a governing body to intervene to force the issue in advance of problems with systems, and we've got a dearth of functioning governments these days.
IPv6 brings more address space but also a whole bunch of other stuff, it is much more complex and changes basically everything to how you manage a network. The fact that it's not been widely adopted after 30 years indicates that people generally think the tradeoff is not worth it.
From my readings and limited experience, it's two things.
First, IPv6 in the 90s and 00s is different from IPv6 today. Various extensions and standards have been added that make IPv6 administration easier than it was in the early days. I want to say RDNSS is one of them. Background: one of v6's early selling points was SLAAC, where DHCP could be disposed of and endpoints would auto-configure their own IPs in accordance with the network announced by a router. Problem is, without DHCP, there was no way to get DNS, and DHCPv6 wasn't widely deployed/it was discouraged... so how does one get a DNS server automatically? RDNSS came around to announce DNS servers from the router directly.
TLDR: Early IPv6 sucked more than today.
Second, it's simply a chicken-and-egg problem, particularly at the consumer network level. User-friendly IPv6 router configurations are still rare for home routers, and ISPs have simply dragged their feet. At this point, if we're going to have government mandating all manner of things for consumer products, we should be mandating IPv6 support on home routers and that ISPs delegate at least a /60 to each customer.
You mustn't be on HN very often. People constantly complain about IPv6 being less secure because it doesn't have NAT. And that's part of the reason. Fear and misinformation keeps demand low. The same people don't drive IPv6 implementation where they work, so their fear impacts more than 1 person.
Attempts to force it get routed around.
China mandates IPv6. So does the US, but the US drags their feet. Meanwhile in Europe it's near universal even though not mandated and no v4 shortage.
>Meanwhile in Europe it's near universal
False: https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6
On HN, 'In Europe' means in one person's particular locale based on their experience and generalised across a continent of about 30 countries. But it's always better than in the US of course.
Can we stop this europe/us fight? This remark was completely unwarranted
I wrote this as a European (British) who is living in another European country (Finland). People happily write ‘in Europe’ whilst being quite selective in their definition of Europe - usually their very close neighbourhood, and it usually means North and Central Europe. If that.
I’ve seen some truly unhinged takes here, my favourite ever being something along the lines of European cars not having cup holders because we don’t have drive-throughs in Europe… I have driven my Volkswagen across this continent and enjoyed many a hot beverage on the move.
I’ve come to learn that discussions on a lot of things, in English, usually end up as a comparison to the States, especially if it involves the healthcare sacred cow.
I wish, just 37.73% of IPv6-capable users in Europe according to APNIC despite much higher availability in transit AS. Highest subgroup is Western Europe at around 72.09%, which is still far from near universal. Similar per-country numbers from Cisco.
Unless I've missed something, the US only mandates it for government networks. I don't think there is any mandate for private entities to implement it.
A residential network that can't connect you to government websites is called a fraudulent business model. No different from selling a car that only transports up to 20kg.
I guess I should clarify: the government mandate is that government sites are dual-stack. They have to support IPv6 in addition to IPv4.
A lot of the original /8 holders have sold off chunks to AWS and other cloud providers.
Bell in Canada continues to offer only IPv4 on their fibre network. I fully expect for them to somehow crap up the transition to IPv6 by putting up CGNAT because fuck you, customer.
Fascinating. The resellers, particularly TechSavvy have ipv6. For TechSavvy I believe it was dynamic /64 by default but static /56 for free on request.
> For TechSavvy I believe it was dynamic /64 by default but static /56 for free on request.
"On request" meaning you told your CPE equipment to send a DHCP-PD packet, i.e., you didn't have to call them and ask for something special with your account.
Wow I didn’t know CGNAT was a thing for home users.
It's something I've only recently been made aware of as well. Shocked we're not seeing more push for ipv6 everywhere given that it sounds common enough. If I don't have an IP address, I'm not getting the Internet I'm paying for; I'm getting access to a network that happens to itself have a connection to the Internet. Not unlike some of the BBS's in the early 90s which had Internet access -- I might be dialed in, but that didn't mean my computer itself was on the Internet.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm, Poe's law and all.
But if you are living in a Western country, then you are probably blessed with CGNAT-free residential internet.
I now live in a "western" country and I have CGNAT. It is extremely common here. On the other hand, my ISP (largest provider in the country), in a "developing" country, gave me a public IP so I think there are more moving parts.
I don't think it's sarcasm, I didn't know this was a thing either! At first, I thought OP was writing about their mobile connection.
Some carriers in my country have recently started to share the same IP between 4 customers, each having a port range (1-16363, ...), but you can always request a full IP for free.
That explains a lot of the sentiments I've seen on HN then...
I, unfortunately, have been on CGNATed residential internet since 2016, though I used to still get a public IP on request (they stopped doing that though.) I live in South East Asia, for context.
Without IPv6 my only choice would have been relying on a centralized service like Zerotier and Tailscale.
My current setup is CGNAT on 5G WAN (T-Mobile US), which obviously doesn't open public ports besides needed NAT.
Worse is I have IPv6 connectivity for devices, yet still no open ports available, so no serving available. And I only receive a /64 so no delegation available through router.
So now it's Hurricane Electric tunnel to their nearest (in my city) hosted node for IPv6 and a prepaid 50 USD/year node (technically x2 since I wanted a backup to play around with) for IPv4 port forwarding.
Both options are acceptable because the needed infra is close by in the largest metroplex in Texas, it just sucks to have to do all this extra work to replicate what I could do with a dial-up ISP.
I'll say this - having LLM assistants handle the nasty routing and firewall rules needed to make this hodge podge work without needing to be a network engineer has been very helpful.
If you're willing to jump through hoops, you might want to check if it's still possible to setup an EIN and a new SMB T-Mobile 5G internet and get a static ipv4 for a small charge per month.
Personally, I had major issues with the 5g wan equipment and my network as well as a snafu with ordering... Sales rep put in the order for a static ip with a ssn based SMB account, but that got removed during provisioning and couldn't be added back. (And then billing issues because the account didn't get cancelled properly, either)
I converted from residential-class to business-class cable a few years ago. In both cases, I had routable IPv4 addresses.
I was just looking at flipping back, but now it seems the default for new resi accounts is CGNAT. They say they'll give me a real IP upon request at no additional charge, but it's anyone's guess how long that holds out.
They don't do IPv6 at all.
Michigan USA.
In Sweden CGNAT was not a thing for a long time, the large incumbents still have their huge blocks of IPs so its "just" go to them if you want a pulic IP. Apparently smaller ISPs do use CGNAT, so its fairly common.
Me as somewhat of a nerd, even doubt if I need a public IP, seeing how cyber security is looking today.
I think CGNAT is the default for new connections in .au, since about 5+ years, at least among "younger" ISPs that popped up around the national broadband network crawlout.
You can generally request to get off it though, at ~1-5$/m extra cost.
In my experience they charge for a static IP but not to turn off CGNAT. Obviously depends on the isp but I’ve tried a few.
One of them I had to call phone support and they asked me why I wanted to turn it off. I said I wanted to run a server and they turned CGNAT off on my account.
> "India: 47M
> "China: 358M
> "Both countries have roughly the same population"
To save anyone else curious from looking it up - their populations are about 1.4 billion (1400 million) each.
and one of the countries has an over-reported while the other is underreporting
Most people don't care about a private IP, which is why they cost about $20-$25 each (which would be about $2 a year to finance). I've used Airtel in the past and they certainly offer a dedicated IP. Currently I'm with TATA and Vodafone in India
Indeed a shared IP is arguably a benefit in that it makes fingerprinting harder.
If your ISP had customers who were interested it could spend $150k on a /19 block giving 8000 IPv4 addresses and charge an extra ₹100 a month for them and after two years it would be in profit.
In fact I think Jio and Airtel offer static IPs for residential use for something like ₹300 a month, which given how cheap IPv4 addresses are is a massive money spinner, but I have't spoken to anyone living in India about ISPs for a couple of years.
i purchased a dedicated ipv4 from my isp.
End users do notice CGNAT when their internet voice/video calls keep dropping for no apparent reason.
CGNAT is awesome, you cant IP ban me anymore and I dont need a VPN turned on for silly things, and I can control fingerprinting (mostly), CGNAT is great for anonymity. If I want a static it cost me ~10.00 a month, im fine with that.
On the other hand, sometimes you get randomly banned due to someone else’s action on the CGNAT IP. Wikipedia is an obvious example.
Thats the only site Ive encountered issues. Im okay with that. I dont think they just let anyone edit anymore anyways.
an ipv4 for every man woman and child!
what is the meaning (or units) of your first numbers?
"swept under the rug with CGNAT" is a really funny way to say "solved by IPv6"
Yep. And, insult to injury, the /4's and /8's of little-unused IPv4 special-use addresses - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv4#Special-use_addresses
Diamonds and IPv4 share a common trait.
Lab-grown diamonds found a strong role as industrial components, which expanded overall demand for diamond materials and widened their use cases. IPv6 may follow a similar path, with adoption concentrated in newer and novel applications where IPv4 addresses were scarce.
IPv4 seems likely to remain in place for many existing applications, much like natural diamonds in jewelry, regardless of policy/advocacy views.