
The IPv6 Adoption Curve - Sami_Lehtinen
https://community.infoblox.com/t5/IPv6-CoE-Blog/Where-Are-You-On-The-IPv6-Adoption-Curve/ba-p/11116
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chrissnell
I decided to commit to using IPv6 a couple of years ago and got my personal
servers serving my sites in a dual-stack. I also got my home router set up for
it, getting my subnet from my ISP and making sure that all of my home devices
were getting addresses.

It was only after doing this that I realized the problem with IPv6 adoption in
the US: the network sucks! Most ISPs (including mine) are using 6rd gateways
to get their customers onto the IPv6 backbone. The gateway servers are poorly
placed (rarely local) and totally overloaded. The performance was so bad that
it was making my everyday web browsing experience feel broken. I killed v6 at
home and haven't looked back.

Maybe some day ISPs will do a proper deployment with real routing and I will
try it again.

~~~
samplonius
That is generally the opposite of reality. IPv6 is generally faster than IPv4.

I don't know what "a couple of years ago" is, but all tier-1 ISPs have IPv6
backbones. There should be no reason for your access ISP to have to tunnel
anything to get to a tier-1.

Your statement "Most ISPs (including mine) are using 6rd gateways to get their
customers onto the IPv6 backbone" is kind of a red flag. If ISPs aren't
connected to a backbone, can you even call them an ISP?

~~~
stevencorona
AT&T has deployed 6RD instead of native dual-stack. I can get close to gigabit
on IPv4, but max out at 80mbps if I use their 6RD gateway.

~~~
Dylan16807
It also crashes some of their modems! Every few hours through normal traffic,
in under a minute if I quickly visit many IPv6 addresses.

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jzl
Seems like one of the largest sources of IPv6 adoption is mobile phone
networks. I'm on AT&T in the US and if I check "what is my ip" when on LTE it
shows me an IPv6 address. Mobile now accounts for well over half of all web
traffic, so if/when mobile networks are universally IPv6 then we'll basically
be over the hump.

~~~
pfranz
What's weird is what you're seeing doesn't just apply to IPv6 adoption

[https://xkcd.com/1865/](https://xkcd.com/1865/)

~~~
jzl
Hadn't seen that one. Brilliant, and absolutely true.

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sebazzz
I like to change to IPv6 and my current ISP can make it happen (Ziggo, The
Netherlands). However, I have currently my own externally accessible IPv4
address and I will lose that when I opt-in to IPv6 because Ziggo only offers
IPv6 with DS-lite. DS-lite means I cannot access my network anymore over IPv4,
so I will not change to IPv6.

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AceJohnny2
(Hopefully obsolete) anecdote: in France, the ISP 'Free' offered IPv6 ahead of
the competition (2009? I forget). I was glad to hop onto the bandwagon and
enable that.

A while later (2014?), I was annoyed by my poor bandwidth. A bit of sleuthing
revealed that IPv6 was the culprit: turning that off in the ISP's control
panel doubled my bandwidth!

I know that a lot of internet routers didn't have IPv6 acceleration. IPv6
packets jumped out of the (fast) data plane to be processed by the (slower)
control plane. At the time this made sense considering the rarity of IPv6. I
suppose Free, being a cheap ISP, were still using these older routers.

In 2013, the telephony-focused router company I worked for still hadn't
implemented data-plane processing of IPv6, because there was no requirement
from it.

Hopefully in 2017, driven by Comcast or other IPv6-dependant phone operators,
most routers do IPv6 acceleration.

~~~
samplonius
I'm not aware of any routers that can forward IPv4 in hardware, but pass IPv6
to the control plane.

Even the discontinued Catalyst 6500, which was used (and still is) by a lot of
ISPs with the SUP720 supervisor, can do native IPv6.

I think you are completely wrong about this. Routers with native IPv6 were
available 15 years ago, and are already getting pulled out to be replaced by
the new stuff.

The reality is that, that ISP tier 1s use either Juniper MX or Cisco ASR9000
routers. These routers have good IPv6 performance.

~~~
jauer
Off the top of my head, Cisco routers with the PXF chipset (7304/NSE-100) had
this problem for much of their service life

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noinsight
Microsoft is also experimenting with IPv6-only networks internally:

[https://blog.apnic.net/2017/01/19/ipv6-only-at-
microsoft/](https://blog.apnic.net/2017/01/19/ipv6-only-at-microsoft/)

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liberte82
A few years ago I remember hearing all about the IPv4 crisis and how we were
going to run out of addresses very soon. How did we misjudge this so badly? It
seems like it should be some pretty simple mathematics to figure out when
exhaustion would occur?

~~~
jzl
There was no misjudgement. IPv4 addresses are still running out. Adoption of
IPv6 _has_ helped the issue. Some parts of the world are aggressively going
IPv6 only. IPv6 adoption has seen a massive uptick in the last year. Check the
google graphs.

Also some under-utilized IPv4 address blocks have been recently re-claimed.
MIT recently sold off half of its class A to Amazon:

[https://www.networkworld.com/article/3191503/internet/mit-
se...](https://www.networkworld.com/article/3191503/internet/mit-
selling-8-million-coveted-ipv4-addresses-amazon-a-buyer.html)

~~~
snuxoll
> MIT recently sold off half of its class A to Amazon:

And garbage like this is why I cannot wait for the IPv6-only future, CIDR let
us stall IPv4 address exhaustion but it has caused severe bloating in routing
tables. Considering an IPv6 route at the internet level is capped at 64-bits
(the max length of a proper network prefix, you can technically do smaller
ones but WHY, and nobody will take your BGP advertisement for it either) I
expect even with a 2X increase in size occupied by each individual route the
size of a full BGP table is going to be dramatically smaller.

