
How IPv6 deployment is growing in U.S. and other countries - el_duderino
https://code.facebook.com/posts/635039943508824/how-ipv6-deployment-is-growing-in-u-s-and-other-countries/
======
okket
Just for kickers: If you have native IPv6 (certainly dual stack), try
disabling IPv4 (easy in macOS, just go to Network Settings and disable it).

It is amazingly sad how little works with IPv6 only. Today, in 2018. (Hello,
Microsoft/GitHub, here is a low hanging fruit to appeal to developers)

~~~
kojon99
IPv4 works just fine for websites.

Also why would ipv6 appeal to developers? What do I care if GitHub supports
ipv6 or not?

~~~
Faaak
Same old, same old.

You care because you may need various IPs when doing complex applications;
which you can't have right now because of IPv4 exhaustion

~~~
augustz
I really wish IPv6 had a better argument than you can't get IPv4 addresses
needed to build a complex application.

The majority of complex applications being built today are being built to be
IPv4 accessible and may even be using IPv4.

You can use 17 million private addresses + buy plenty of public IPv4
addresses.

AWS and Google are both building major clouds that are both complex and STILL
heavily IPv4 oriented (I and others pinging them to add IPv6 for a long time).

They throw in an IPv4 for every running instance and even their elastic IPv4's
are cheap if attached to an instance.

~~~
iknowstuff
It reenables all of the devices on the internet to be able to directly connect
to each other. No NAT, no STUN etc.

~~~
p49k
Do we even want that anymore and is it still a smart idea?

~~~
Rjevski
We actually do want that especially for the internet of things, so that your
lights and garage door keep functioning during an AWS outage that takes out
the relay servers (used to work around NAT) or if the manufacturer goes out of
business.

------
augustz
"the world is out of IPv4 addresses" should really be written "the world if
out of FREE IPv4 addresses".

I wish the IPv6 promotion pieces would include that because when I read news
articles about this (or someone tells me there are no more IPv4 addresses)
they always include this statement that you can't get IPv4 addresses anymore
and so things like new services can only use IPv6.

~~~
Rotdhizon
Most every article ever written about the IPv4 vs IPv6 debacle outside of the
knowledgeable tech sector is usually false in some big way.

~~~
bovermyer
> Most every article ever written about technology outside of the
> knowledgeable tech sector is usually false in some big way.

Fixed that for you.

------
jedberg
Every six months, I enable dualstack on my laptop and router. The last time
was maybe a month ago.

It's still not there. The experience of my daily use of the internet is vastly
better with ipv6 off. There are just too many sites that answer with an ipv6
address and then fail to work, and I have to wait for the system to fall back
to ipv4. At the same time, I've yet to find a single site I want to get to
that isn't available on ipv4, nor any site that offers a noticeably better
experience over ipv6.

Edit: Amusingly I was down voted for stating my opinion on my own ipv6
experience. No one likes the truth I guess?

~~~
darren_
Possibly because 'too many sites that answer with an ipv6 address and then
fail to work, and I have to wait for the system to fall back to ipv4' is a
complaint from 2012 or so? rfc 6555 is hardly new.

and i've seen an ipv6-supporting webapp work substantially better for video
chatting (no STUN/TURN/relaying), although to be fair i was working on it.

~~~
aidenn0
My home network runs all of the /64 from my ISP behind a stateful firewall,
and I expect this is true of others; just because you have a publicly
routeable address doesn't mean you will receive packets.

------
hobbescotch
Annoyingly the support for IPv6 isn’t everywhere yet. One of my remote
colleagues got assigned one and GCP doesn’t support whitelisting of IPv6
addresses in their VPC network firewall so we had to resort to using our flaky
VPN connection in the meantime.

------
jstewartmobile
I messed around with IPv6 on Comcast for a while. They claim very high levels
of residential deployment, yet when you head to their forums to troubleshoot
it, their top IPv6 agent--who seems to know his stuff--generally comes back
with things like " _yes, that is broken_ ," or " _we 're still working on a
fix for that_."

Years later, still no fix.

~~~
markovbot
I've had Comcasst IPv6 for the last few years, none of the issues I've
encountered with IPv6 were Comcast's fault. What sort of problems did you
encounter?

~~~
deathanatos
I have a Comcast business account. I've had an IPv6 address for a few years,
and generally, it has worked exactly as expected. I've had two outages that
are notable:

1\. an outage where v6 traffic was just dropped, period. It took a service
call, but was fixed within a day, IIRC. It was no more or less painful than
any other service call.

2\. an outage where v4 TCP SYNs were dropped, _mostly_ ; once a connection was
established, the connection was fine. AFAICT, this was some issue, perhaps HW
failure, with their modem/router combo. Once the router was replaced, the
issue was fixed. This took several days to correct, mostly because it was
difficult to convince Comcast's techs that the physical copper cable is
probably _not_ discriminating against IPv4 traffic.

My experience w/ their business division is that the support agents have some
_light_ experience. My experience w/ their residential side is that the
support agents have never seen a computer.

The rollout to business was after the rollout to residential; I also filled
out a form requesting one way back in the day when they were essentially
polling for interest.

~~~
cjcampbell
> This took several days to correct, mostly because it was difficult to
> convince Comcast's techs that the physical copper cable is probably not
> discriminating against IPv4 traffic.

I'm torn between laughter and intense anguish. I'm afraid to even estimate how
many days of my life have been spent honing my rhetorical skills to convince a
support agent of similar points.

------
ransom1538
Policies like this put a fire under us mobile app guys:

[https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/](https://developer.apple.com/support/ipv6/)

~~~
gsich
Not really. It's just from the developers side. This won't force ISPs to
deploy IPv6, merely some v4-v6 NAT bullshit.

~~~
WorldMaker
Cart. Horse.

Apple adopted the policy to force all developers to keep in mind IPv6-only
networks, because Apple was given a mandate by several mobile carriers (ISPs)
that they needed to support IPv6-only networks.

Facebook's article here even mentions that mobile carriers are well on their
way to their planned 100% IPv6-only networks. (T-Mobile is at 90% IPv6
traffic.)

------
betaby
Large cloud vendors can absorb cost of the IPv4 on the secondary market, and
thus aren't i rush to deploy IPv6. In fact that creates kind of vendor lock-
in.

------
ram_rar
The biggest problem with Ipv6 I feel is, its written as a replacement for Ipv4
instead of extending it.

~~~
Dagger2
Perhaps, but it turns out not to be possible to extend v4 without producing
something that looks like v6. You can only fit 32 bits into the dest address
field in the v4 header, and any attempt at working around that problem ends up
looking like v6 plus one of the existing transition methods
(NAT64/6to4/Teredo/etc).

If the biggest problem in v6 is one that fundamentally can't be fixed, then I
think we did pretty good.

------
cjcampbell
I've been working with IPv6 off and on since 2004. It's great to see progress,
but I'm ready for a bigger momentum shift in the US. Even with the major ISPs
onboard and support appearing in the cloud, it's hard to imagine widespread
adoption when consumer and SOHO network device makers are doing so little to
bring the necessary tools to end-users.

Part of my business is focused on providing privacy and security consulting to
small businesses and self-employed professionals. I've spent a good chunk of
time researching suitable network devices for this audience, and it seems that
IPv6 isn't even on the minds of many device makers (can't resist calling out
Cisco, who has been nearly silent on their plans for IPv6 in their Meraki
line).

As a side note, I am a bit concerned about the day that these same device
makers start to enable support. Given the role of NAT as the gatekeeper of so
many small network devices, I expect we'll see more than a couple stories
about inadequate firewall rules exposing home networks via IPv6.

------
lolc
How come Facebook sees 50% where Google sees 35% in the U.S.?

[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)

Maybe the Facebook app is more aggressive in steering towards IPv6 than
browsers.

~~~
gruez
maybe most facebook visits are from mobile and that mobile providers are more
likely to have IP scracity issues (my speculation based on the fact that
mobile providers tend to do CGNAT more than residential providers).

~~~
WorldMaker
The article mentions several factors that seem relevant. Mobile carriers are
moving to 100% IPv6 quite rapidly. Facebook doesn't see as much Enterprise
traffic, which does seem to be where the biggest lag is (and also why every
IPv6 chart has a nights and weekends sawtooth pattern).

~~~
tialaramex
"Enterprise" seems to have really embraced the "it's not broken it's
compliant" mentality, it's much easier to tell employees "Company policy
doesn't allow that" than make any improvements.

We have been here before, it's how the PC got started. Company policy said you
couldn't have $14 of mainframe time to save six of your team working it out on
calculators over several hours, so you bought a PC with 1-2-3 instead.

~~~
WorldMaker
It's a version of Newton's First Law of Motion, as much as anything. "A
corporation at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by some outside
unbalanced force."

------
protomyth
What was the original reason for all the differences between IPv4 and IPv6
instead of doing IPv4 modified with a bigger address space?

~~~
kstrauser
For the most common purposes, IPv6 _is_ IPv4 modified with a bigger address
space. It turns out that deploying _anything_ other than IPv4 is a major PITA,
and a stripped down IPv4++ that changed nothing but the address length would
be pretty much just as hard to start up as IPv6 has been.

~~~
protomyth
That doesn't sound right since there seems to be a lot of differences
[http://www.electronicdesign.com/embedded/whats-difference-
be...](http://www.electronicdesign.com/embedded/whats-difference-between-
ipv4-and-ipv6)

~~~
Dagger2
There are far more similarities than there are differences though, and many of
the differences are simply direct consequences of expanding the address space.

~~~
protomyth
Uhm no. Look at that chart in the article I linked. That is a lot of changes
that are functional and not just the address size changed. NAT comes up a lot
and that is a major change.

My question is pretty simple. Why the heck did someone think all the changes
were a good idea?

~~~
Dagger2
I did. A good chunk of that chart (addresses, DNS, autoconfig, ARP/NDP,
IGMP/MLD) is a result of changing the address size. Some parts of it are
incorrect (IPsec) or aren't a difference (multicast). Many of the parts that
are left don't seem like a big deal (minimum MTU increase from 576 bytes to
1280 bytes should be trivial, especially since 99.9% of people use 1500 bytes
via PMTUD anyway).

NAT isn't even a part of v4 in the first place, it's an additional thing that
you bolt onto the side to try and deal with not having sufficient address
space for your network. Since in v6 you generally do have enough space, you
simply don't need to do that -- which is good, because NAT complicates your
network and makes it harder to reason about the behavior.

------
rocky1138
Is there a list of websites and services which support IPv6?

~~~
p1mrx
[https://ip6.nl/#!list?db=alexa500](https://ip6.nl/#!list?db=alexa500) has a
reasonable list.

My Chrome extension lets you see IPv6 usage in a bit more detail:
[https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo](https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo)

