
So Long Last /8 and Thanks For All the Allocations - minusf
https://labs.ripe.net/Members/wilhelm/so-long-last-8-and-thanks-for-all-the-allocations
======
EE84M3i
IPv4 address utilization is incredibly low. For example, consider 44.0.0.0/8 -
it's sitting around almost entirely unallocated. UCSD Caida uses it for their
network telescope (pretending to use it for amateur radio) and won't give it
back.

Just look at how dark it is:
[https://benjojo.co.uk/internet-2018.png](https://benjojo.co.uk/internet-2018.png)
(from [https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/scan-ping-the-internet-
hilbe...](https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/scan-ping-the-internet-hilbert-
curve))

Discussion on r/amateurradio -
[https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/ohi7j/did_you...](https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/ohi7j/did_you_know_that_there_is_a_classa_16777216/)

~~~
Beltiras
Apple has an /8 but Microsoft does not? How did that happen?

~~~
toopsss
Microsoft pretty much had an anti internet strategic policy until 1995, that’s
why. Back in the day a tcpip stack was a third party add on.

~~~
outworlder
Trumpet Winsock?

~~~
astrodust
Consider that when Trumpet Winsock was a third-party IP add-on for Windows
3.1, classic MacOS already had IP support built-in.

Ironically around that time Microsoft was selling Xenix
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix))
which did support it.

~~~
kalleboo
Originally Apple's MacTCP was actually a product they sold separately, it
wasn't bundled into the OS until 1994. Although it was usually easy to get a
hold of a copy since universities and such had site licenses, and ISPs often
had redistribution licenses

~~~
astrodust
Ah, it was introduced in System 7.5 which, perhaps coincidentally, was the
first version of MacOS I had when I needed to connect it over TCP/IP.

------
cm2187
Even in developed countries IPv6 is barely deployed (my UK ISP - BT - pretends
that they rolled it out but half of the time my modem tells me IPv6 is not
availabled until I force it to reconnect, and no sign of IPv6 on mobile
networks).

Was looking at whether it was more economical to buy a small address block vs
rent it from a datacentre. A /24 address block seems to cost around $4,000
upfront but then you need to pay €2,000 signup + €1,400 per yr RIPE membership
fee. On the other side IPv4 is not going away and the price is only going to
go up given the failure of IPv6 to deploy. Is there any way around the RIPE
membership? Like owning an IPv4 address block through a proxy / broker?

[edit: RIPE fee]

~~~
cptskippy
Support for IPv6 is weird.

Comcast's IPv6 implementation is rock solid and faster than IPv4 most of the
time. I've been running publicly accessible IPv6 HTTP hosts over it for
several years now.

The last two Motorola Modems I've had came with IPv6 support and were
provisioned by Comcast out of the box.

Access Points from D-Link will autoconfigure via SLAAC but DNS has to be
hardcoded.

It's 2018 and yet Ubiquiti's UniFi enterprise networking gear only has alpha
support.

IPv6 on Tomato just works and has for years, IPv6 on Raspbian not so much.

Windows just works seems to fuck with nonWindows clients so Enterprises
disable it via Group Policy.

Android devices seem to forget IPv4 if they catch a wiff of IPv6 on the
network.

~~~
merb
> Windows just works seems to fuck with nonWindows clients so Enterprises
> disable it via Group Policy.

well I've seen most enterprise networks with no IPv6 support. (mostly admins
thing that this beast is hard to work with) Also Kubernetes has limited IPv6
support (mostly on the documentation site) (of course it's easier to support a
IPv6 only cluster, because heck you wouldn't really need BGP or some wierd
overlay networks (sadly it still is not there yet)).

In Germany IPv6 within "Deutsche Telekom" is just good. But sadly on the
consumer side you still won't get any fixed IPv6 (due to privacy concerns!)

~~~
gsich
privacy is not the issue. Selling business plans is the real reason.

~~~
gmueckl
You won't believe the number of crazy people in Germany who believe that
static IP addresses are the root of all evil because of all the magucal
tracking and surveillance possibilities they famtasize about.

~~~
gsich
IPv6 would allow for both.

------
isostatic
"It's important to keep in mind that while 185/8 is finished, we still have
around nine million recovered IPv4 addresses in our available pool. Under
current policy and growth rates, we expect these to last a further two years."

They've really cracked down on IP allocation since the days of giving
companies entire /8s, or even since 2012

"185/8 was allocated in just five and a half years...in comparison, the
preceding /8 - allocated under the old needs-based policy - lasted only five
months"

~~~
jlg23
> They've really cracked down on IP allocation since the days of giving
> companies entire /8s [...]

You did not have to be a company, your estimates of how many of the IPs you
request you'll plan to use right away, after one and after two years just had
to be within some boundaries (ripe form #160, if memory serves me correctly).

~~~
jlg23
Well, looks my memory got corrupted over the last 2 decades: apparently not
the correct number. Anyway: You had to specify purpose once and provide an
allocation plan for the periods I mentioned above.

------
HillaryBriss
Another interesting complication is Android's longstanding lack of full
support for DHCPv6:

[https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/3718/does-
androi...](https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/3718/does-android-have-
support-for-ipv6)

[https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36949085](https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36949085)

~~~
zlynx
Many people, myself included, feel DHCPv6 is a silly idea and should go away.
IPv6 was designed to not need it, and continuing to use DHCP is just inertia
and a desire to keep doing things in the same old way.

As I recall originally everyone was supposed to use well-known addresses like
::1, 2, 3 on the current network or multicast DNS.

But nooo. Was that too hard? DHCP or nothing! And then DNS was added to SLAAC.

The rest of DHCP was always useless. Once you have DNS, it can be used for all
other service discovery.

------
alex_hitchins
Does anyone know the amount of IP space that's allocated but never used or
even allocations that have no routes to? I know there is a market to lease IP4
blocks and there is a resale market. I just wondered how much is just being
sat on.

~~~
grenoire
What are the main issues with IPv6?

Edit: I did not mean this as a derogatory question. It's legitimate. I simply
posted it under the wrong OP. Calm down people.

~~~
alex_hitchins
Sorry, I'm not sure I follow your question.

------
tormeh
It's hard for an ISP to justify switching. It costs money now, so your
competition who do not switch can use the money saved to outcompete you.
Switching costs are also likely to fall the longer you wait. Customers don't
demand it.

If I was CEO of an ISP, I would have ordered a plan, but not put it into
action just yet.

~~~
apeace
I work at a small ISP and I consider this a misconception.

Any network equipment your ISP bought or gave you in the last 10-15 years
supports IPv6. Equipment only has a certain lifespan anyways, so there really
has been no "cost" to upgrade. Maybe a bit of software needed updating.

In my experience, the problem is customers don't care that much about IPv6.

When your customer is an IT professional who has been configuring networks the
same old way for years, they expect to be sent the IPv4 subnet information. It
would be a negative customer experience if we gave them an IPv6 subnet by
default. Since they don't see the need and aren't used to it, it's bound to
cause frustration for them.

We do support IPv6 for any customer that wants it.

I think IPv6 will happen when web sites can no longer get IPv4 addresses. Then
people will start saying, "my favorite site is v6 only!", so the IT people
hear about it and start to care.

I think it'll be several more years.

~~~
kalleboo
> I think IPv6 will happen when web sites can no longer get IPv4 addresses

With vhosts and the proliferation of CDNs, will this ever happen? If my site
is behind CloudFront, I don't need any IPv4 addresses of my own

The only thing that IPv6 really _solves_ for end-users is peer-to-peer. If
video games, VoIP, etc have lower lag on IPv6 (due to not having to go though
a mediating server) customers might demand it.

------
djrogers
Is it just me, or does the excessive use of undefined acronyms make this a
difficult read for everyone else too? At the very least, please annotate your
first use of acronyms like LIR and RIR so us outsiders have some context.

~~~
jwr
I'd say that if you don't understand the acronyms, you won't find the rest of
the article useful or informative, either, so I don't think it's much of a
problem.

~~~
comex
Speak for yourself. I know what an /8 is, know what it means to be running out
of IPv4 addresses and having to ration the last ones available, and am
interested in news about how that process is going, especially insofar as it
affects the transition to IPv6. That was enough for me to grasp the majority
of the current article, which I found informative. But I’ve never interacted
with the IP address allocation process myself, nor is it all that central to
my interests, so my knowledge is relatively skin deep. I could tell you what
ICANN was and probably remembered that RIPE was one of its regional
affiliates, but not much more than that. In particular, I had no idea what an
RIR or LIR was. So, while I didn’t _mind_ the use of jargon, neither would it
have hurt to spell out the acronyms the first time.

------
appdrag
RIP ipv4 :p And ipv6 is still nearly nowhere...

~~~
sp332
Google says >30% of USA usage is over IPv6.
[https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-
country-ipv6-adoption&tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption) Akamai says 40%.
[https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/about/our-thinking/state-of-
the...](https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/about/our-thinking/state-of-the-internet-
report/state-of-the-internet-ipv6-adoption-visualization.jsp) But it shows a
huge jump in May last year, not sure what that's about.

~~~
adventured
Most countries have a small number of dominant telecom providers. When they
adopt IPv6, you'd normally see a very big jump in a short amount of time.

~~~
sp332
Sure, but that doesn't explain why they show the USA jumping from 27.7% to
38.7% in one day (5/24 to 5/25) when Google's numbers don't show a similar
rise.

~~~
adventured
You see the same jump at the same time in some other countries, such as Norway
and Canada. I would guess that's down to a measurement adjustment on the part
of Akamai, enabling them to see more adoption that they had been missing.

------
fipple
I’d rather these run out even faster so we can just get on with IPv6. Why
waste effort on these dying gasps of v4.

~~~
Spivak
Because the 'dying gasps' has a _really_ long tail. My guess that that
everyone in this forum will be dead before 25% of the internet is IPv6 only.

There's a huge difference between supporting IPv6 and not supporting IPv4; the
latter will take much much longer.

~~~
fipple
I don’t mean killing IPv4 - I mean all infrastructure and ISPs supporting IPv6
and treating IPv4 as legacy. Like V12 gasoline engines. They exist and are
even produced today but the world has pretty much abandoned them.

------
nashashmi
Can anyone offer an explanation why IPv6 still has not blanketed the world
yet?

I mean if client pings an IPv4 address, it should be automatically converted
to an IPv6 version. So why isn't IPv4 instantly outdated?

~~~
tedunangst
What? Converted by who? How does this work?

~~~
betaby
For IPv6 only like that
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6877](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6877)
Sprint mobile uses that method

------
citrin_ru
Anybody know why 240.0.0.0/4 is not used? It currently blocked by many
routers/firewalls but it was possible to start "unreserving" process long time
ago and use this net by now.

~~~
oasisbob
It's hardcoded to be broken in too many devices. NANOG has long and winding
threads about reclaiming the class E space - there was consensus that it
wasn't possible to get enough devices unbroken for the space to actually be
usable.

IIRC, a lot of networking equipment chokes on it.

------
nsbq71
>we still have around nine million recovered IPv4 addresses in our available
pool. Under current policy and growth rates, we expect these to last a further
two years.

And by then they will have recovered even more. The end of IPv4 is a lie, and
how bad IPv6 is and the lack of good transitioning systems doesn't help.

~~~
freeone3000
What's wrong with IPv6? The only complaints I've seen are "the numbers are
bigger", as if that's not the point, and that makes them harder to remember.

~~~
chrisper
My "main issue" with it is that if people are used to being behind NAT, they
now have to be a bit more careful about securing their computers (firewall
etc.) because every computer now is publicly accessible. Most routers do not
even seem to have an IPv6 firewall.

~~~
toast0
The 'residential gateway' for my attached fiber connection doesn't allow
incoming syns for the ipv6 addresses it hands out and I couldn't even find a
way to tell it to let me actually use the internet as intended, other than
bypassing it (which works fine).

Most endpoints these days don't have much if anything listening by default
though. The reality is that even trusted local networks are hostile networks,
and vendors have responded to that.

------
d3ckard
Is it time to just admit IPv6 is a failure and move on to new standard?
Adoption is very slow though economical needs are already here. Instead of
complaining about users maybe we should do something so they actually want to
switch?

~~~
sp332
I think you'd be surprised if you looked up actual adoption numbers.
[http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/](http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/)

~~~
d3ckard
Just did. 7 operators over 90%. On 7th page you get under 50% adoption if
sorted. Well, given how old is IPv6, it's a failure.

~~~
icebraining
_Well, given how old is IPv6, it 's a failure._

Why?

