
An IPv6 Update [pdf] - okket
https://conference.apnic.net/46/assets/files/APNC402/An-IPv6-Update.pdf
======
johnjac
As a network engineer for over 2 decades, I've been skeptical of IPv6 for the
majority of them.

I still am.

As IPv4 becomes more scarce, two economic forces trigger

1) They become more valuable (read more desired). IPv4 has all the network
effects going for it. It's where 99.9% of the Internet already is. .1% being
IPv6 only devices.

2) To counter the rising value/cost: Workaround/Kludges/Alternatives to every
devices needing a globally unique address are tried. Everyone is going to
reply with how awful NAT is, and I concede it has its flaws. However, it is
hard to deny its success so far. Business then do the cost benefit of the
shortcomings of things like NAT vs selling their now valuable IPv4 address
space, think where they are going to come down?

~~~
rstuart4133
Having rolled out IPv6 only networks experimentally at conferences I was
struck by how well it worked. By the end of the conference 1/2 the delegates
used the IPv6 network (ie was a separate SSID). There was not one complaint.
(I had the pleasure of a few network engineers tell me their phones, tablets
and PC or whatever would never work on IPv6 network, only to later discover
later they were already on it.)

In particular NAT works both ways, meaning IPv6 only devices have zero issues
accessing the IPv4 world via NAT. When used in that way you get the best of
both worlds - a world route-able IPv6 address and perfectly backward
compatibility.

In the mean time I've rolled our a dual IPv4, IPv6 network that spans the
country for my company. Almost zero issues (I had routing bugs). I was blown
away to discover that any device that was smart enough to get itself a IPv6
address was smart enough to just work in the mixed environment. And this is in
an environment running from XP machines to the latest Android and iPhones.

So we appear to be reached the stage where there are no reasons not to use
IPv6. Of course they is also very little reason to move to IPv6 if you have an
existing stable IPv4 network. Our networks aren't stable of course, and we are
continually adding new connections. We (or rather I) demand a routeable IP
address for each of them - life is just too hard otherwise. We are in the
APNIC allocation pool that run out of IPv4 addresses ages ago. Right now the
ISP's aren't handing out IPv6 addresses. If that ever changes to "you have to
pay for an IPv4 address, or you can have a IPv6 address for free", I know
which way I will be jumping. It's a no-brainer.

------
IvyMike
> 19 ISPs have more than 100 customers per advertised IPv4 address

I guess this means carrier-grade NAT works well enough; given this, I can
imagine ISPs just don't see enough upside to IPv6 to spend on it.

~~~
WorldMaker
Not necessarily? It could also just mean that there are a lot of people not
complaining enough, or simply without any alternatives and consigned to their
fate.

It would also be interesting to know how much of their traffic winds up on
IPv6 tunnels like Teredo anyway to NAT break. Windows by default tries to
avoid the worst NATs by using Teredo IPv6 tunneling, and has since Vista.

It's certainly possible that IPv6 traffic already accounts for why users
aren't complaining about how much CGNAT breaks IPv4.

~~~
IvyMike
> It could also just mean that there are a lot of people not complaining
> enough, or simply without any alternatives and consigned to their fate.

Sad but true, but in the ISP's mind, this is exactly "good enough".

Google's IPv6 traffic stats show Teredo traffic is negligible in 2018.
[https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html)

------
esaym
I recently moved into an area that is served by Spectrum and a local
ISP/electric company that is providing fiber internet (100-1000mbs). They
haven't run the fiber lines by my house yet (they state they will by the end
of the year), but during my communication with them they stated that "IPV6"
was in the works. Promising to offer that by the end of the year as well. I
just checked some online arin records, and it still shows them as having no
ipv6 allocations...

My main complaint with that I spent a large amount of time a year ago
deploying ipv6 dual stack on my home network. My router is a debian box with
shorewall, so I had to learn what was needed all manually. And now, a year
later, I'm not even sure how it works as I've forgotten everything. It took a
bit of work to figure out how to get my router/shorewall box to request an
ipv6 prefix for each internal interface, and then how all that is handled. And
now I don't even know lol

So if this local ISP doesn't offer IPV6, I get to tear all that down and then
I guess start over again re-learning in a future date.

~~~
jrockway
I started learning IPv6 before it was widely deployed and just used Hurricane
Electric's tunnel broker:
[https://tunnelbroker.net/](https://tunnelbroker.net/)

I think you can just set one of those up and keep using IPv6 regardless of
whether or not your ISP gives you an IPv6 prefix; when they do, just switch
over to that.

------
rinka_singh
I think I can give a pointer as to why the IPv6 deployment speeded up and then
slowed down. Reliance Jio started public deployments in mid to late 17 and
they grew very very quickly through till early this year as they were giving
free access to their 4G networks. They have started charging only from this
year.

During the later part of last year I think they managed to get over 100M
customers...

~~~
skbly7
I believe in this explanation a bit. u/okket (@OP) will it be possible to get
IPv6 in India graph somewhere? (like you have for China)

~~~
tambre
Here's a graph from Google's IPv6 statistics: [0]

[0]
[https://www.vyncke.org/ipv6status/project.php?metric=p&timef...](https://www.vyncke.org/ipv6status/project.php?metric=p&timeforward=365&timebackward=365&country=in)
(data from [1])

[1]
[https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html)

------
PugCPC
The following is a surprise coming up the horizon. It makes use of the basic
IPv4 standard RFC791 to resolve the issue of IPv4 public address shortage.
Since it may sound like out-of-the-blue, allow me to state that it has been in
private reviews at the highest levels of responsible organizations without
getting a shot at yet. So, please enjoy the information.

We came upon a scheme that can expand each public IPv4 address by 256M
(Million) fold without affecting the current Internet. A proposal called EzIP
(phonetic for Easy IPv4) has been submitted to IETF:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-chen-ati-adaptive-
ipv4-add...](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-chen-ati-adaptive-ipv4-address-
space-03)

Essentially, among other benefits, EzIP can establish a sub-Internet capable
of serving an area with up to 256M IoTs, from just one IPv4 address. This is
bigger than the largest city (Tokyo metro) and 75% of the countries. This can
realize the CIR (Country-based Internet Registry) model proposed by ITU a few
years ago stealthily even without setting up a CIR organization. If a
government is not interested in this resources, private enterprises can make
use of it to provide "local" Internet service in parallel to the current
"global" Internet model, very much like the Independent telephone companies in
the PSTN industry.

The current Internet then becomes the backbone / infrastructure / skeleton for
interconnecting these sub-Internets, yet only for carrying inter sub-Internet
traffic, very similar as the electric grid supporting islands of renewable
energy generated by individual homes and businesses. Consequently, there will
be a lot of spare IPv4 addresses for quite sometime to come.

In terms of the IP address length, the basic EzIP header format proposes to
double it by utilizing the Option Word mechanism in the IP Header to make the
overall system 64 bits. It is just as well to make the Option Word to carry
longer bits like up to 96 bits so that the overall address system becomes 128
bit, in the same class as IPv6 while totally staying IPv4 within conformance.

Then, much of the efforts in developing and deploying IPv6 are no longer
needed.

Thoughts and comments will be much appreciated.

Abe (2018-09-15 12:48)

------
bhhaskin
I have IPv6 deployed at home for a few years now and it works great! I wish
more places adopted it.

~~~
vkuruthers
Hi @bhhaskin, what practical advantages do you see to running IPv6 at home? I
think my ISP (Xfinity) provides it, but have not tried enabling it yet.

~~~
toast0
If you tend to have IPv6 at work and on mobile, you can out up multiple
servers at home and reach them -- without having to use alternative ports or a
port multiplexing scheme. (Provided the ISP CPE lets you actually get incoming
SYNs; sometimes that's a lot harder than it should be)

------
sparrish
TLDR; "IPv6 deployment has slowed in the past 12 months. Why? We're not sure"

~~~
colonelxc
Though you have received downvotes, that is a good tl;dr. To expand on it,
they had a couple theories about what is driving ipv6 adoption, but there
measurements don't support them, so they still don't know.

------
seiferteric
So china recently turned off their ipv6 basically?

~~~
tambre
Not really. They turned it on for an increasing number of customers during a
single week and then turned it off for most of them, but still ended up with
more IPv6-enabled customers than before. As explained in the Cloudflare blog
post [0], this is common when testing IPv6 deployement before complete
rollout.

[0] [https://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-in-
china/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-in-china/)

