IPv4 is almost gone (in Europe anyway)(ripe.net) |
IPv4 is almost gone (in Europe anyway)(ripe.net) |
My OS supports IPv6, my home router supports IPv6, but at no point have any of the home ISPs I've used (three in the past five years - BT Internet, Be and Origin Broadband) made any mention of any sort of IPv6 support.
I'm not au fait with the workings of such huge operations, so is there any reason for ISP adoption of IPv6 to be so sluggish? It's not like it's been an overnight thing. I'm aware it's unlikely to be a simple case of flipping a switch, or installing a new software package - but we do appear to be approaching an IP crunch.
Are there any consumer ISPs that do offer customers a block of IPv6 addresses for use, rather than (or as well as) a single IPv4 address?
Comcast, at least in some parts of the country (e.g. SF's East Bay). You don't even have to ask them. One day I noticed my router was being advertised an IPv6 route. I switched on DHCPv6 and got an IPv6 address, as well as a /64 prefix for the rest of my network.
Unfortunately /64 is all you can get for now, which isn't really sufficient, but they've promised to delegate shorter prefixes in the future.
Not sufficient for what? (Honest question.)
To say the least! This particular rumble ("we're out!") may be new-ish in the last few years, but the general rumble ("we'll run out!") has been going on a lot longer, and the transition is pretty much the opposite of an overnight thing. I learned about how IPv6 was imminently needed and right around the corner when I took a networks class in college. In 1996. Tanenbaum's book (from four editions ago!) includes ten pages on IPv6 that could appear in a book published today nearly unchanged.
But I'm likely to be moving out of their coverage area at some point, so I'll add this to my list to consider when I do. Thanks!
Other than that, our co-location provider Blacknight offer IPv6 to their customers.. but that's not exactly residential!
My ISP and wifi router support IPv6; but my modem does not. And without this modem failing, I probably won't shell out $150 for a new one.
[1] http://www.sixxs.net/faq/connectivity/?faq=native&countr... [2] http://bens.me.uk/2011/adventures-in-ipv6
So my iPad, iPhone, and MacBook Pro being logged into the same Google account over IMAP would sometimes cause issues because of too many connections for that specific account, now with IPv6 that isn't an issue because all of my devices now have their own unique IPv6 address. Perfect.
And - more importantly - soon no longer applies even to that. IPv4 is essentially gone, and when it is, not having IPv6 will mean your web is smaller.
IPv6 gives you much more freedom in configuring your network as both a service provider and consumer. This isn't boring :)
1) you need to enable IPv6 everywhere 2) when that is working, you can sunset IPv4
So, every transition strategy involves both the life support for IPv4 and the delivery of IPv6.
Sometimes the ISP has no choice but to use it. And iff the ISP also rolls out IPv6 in parallel, this is fine, the users can access the dualstack websites over IPv6, while still using IPv4 for the rest of the content. And this is the key.
A lot of folks here are building products that have their front door on the Web.
And this is where all of you, as a "content provider", can make a difference for those users who already have IPv6 by providing the service both on IPv4 and IPv6.
EDIT: Also - Everything I have a hand in is accessible via both IPv4 and IPv6..
The first and mose obvious examples I can think of:
* Internet services (eg websites, netfix etc) can no longer blacklist IP addresses without blocking entire ISPs.
* Businesses can no longer offer "direct to the office" VPNs for remote workers.. Actually - even site-2-site VPN's will break if both sides are behind an ISP wide NAT.
They both offer free IPv6 "tunnels" which can be used to provide IPv6 to your home/office.
We use SixXS in the office, and the tunnel has been alive without issue for 83 weeks and counting..
(P.S. SixXS is probably the easier choice if you have a dynamic IP, or are not setting the tunnel up from your router directly..)
[1]: http://www.sixxs.net/ [2]: http://ipv6.he.net/
It's also hard to get the entire `net to switch their behaviour, and adopt something that is incompatible with IPv4, without telling them what benefit they will gain by doing so. Can you blame them? But the "experts" and their zombie followers sure are trying.
IPv4 works. NAT works. NAT can be traversed. So what is the problem exactly?
As a home user, I can set up my own NAT'ing scheme with private IPv4 space far easier than I can learn to deal with the added complexity of IPv6.
OK, now I will get skewered by IPv6 fanatics. How many of them are getting paid to do IPv6 consulting work?
IPv4: It Just Works. "Experts": They make mistakes, just like everyone else.
Now, let's hear from the "experts".
I'm still stuck on an IPv4 connection at home, in Britain. My phone still can't get IPv6 on mobile internet. My VPS host still doesn't support IPv6 on my server. And PHP still fails to properly parse some types of IPv6 address.
Things have got better, sure, but don't say it's almost gone. Far from it.
It still fails to reject February 31, I'm completely not surprised to hear that it fails on IPv6.
When you consider the ability for inter-RIR transfer of networks, not to mention the market being developed (already released?) by ARIN (do other RIRs have markets?), and you've got a great recipe for a run on IP addresses.
Comcast, Verizon, and T-Mobile are a few of the big eyeball networks who are making large infrastructure investments in IPv6. ISPs are far ahead of most content and hosting providers in this area, as they bear the pain of IPv4 scarcity when providing addresses to their subscribers.
Transit providers are on the whole prepared for v6 as well.
As an ISP, you don't want to wake up one day and see analysis that your network numbering is at odds with your growth plans.
Works over NATs and proxies. And obviously the techniques from there are already used by those who want to sell your info for profit. So, please, let's put this meme to rest :-)
Blacklisting can and will happen based on other things, just that it is more costly and less performant. So the consumers will pay for that in hidden costs - less of the "useful" services delivered, etc.
The VPN part is sort-of correct - it will depend on the type of the NAT. With most of the NATs, establishing the direct connection over a pair of them is technically possible - take a look at STUN, TURN and ICE (IETF standards).
At my $employer, a couple of bright interns this summer made this: http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/ - which aggregates the stats from various places and allows to get a more rounded view. Besides for the access part (EDIT: which, as I said, just takes some time), the situation is not bad at all!
EDIT: And, kudos to dualstacking your gear! :-)
Why is having one subnet insufficient? I use multiple subnets (I have a guest network), and I don't want to have to use NAT with IPv6 when my ISP has effectively infinite address space. Of course, I'm not an average user, but remember that 10 years ago only power users had home routers, and for everyone else 1 IP address was enough. Now everyone has a router. There are already some consumer access points that tout a "guest network" as a selling point, and there may be other consumer uses for multiple subnets in the future.
In short, one /64 is sufficient for duplicating an IPv4 like situation. A /60 or /56 gives us more room to innovate in new types of home networks.
Another way of looking at this is that IPv6 could have been just IPv4 with 64 bit addresses, and we would have been fine. However, the designers decided to add stateless auto configuration, and added another 64 bits to make it work.
[1] In privacy mode, the Interface ID is generated randomly instead of from the MAC address (to prevent tracking by MAC address). In this case, you still need lots of bits to make the probability of a collision insignificant.