> IPv6 users now account for 45 per cent of Google visitors.
It's hard to estimate how increasing percentage of users with IPv6 access is impacting the demand for public IPv4 addresses. My instinct is "not by a lot", but it's interesting to think about.
Currently IPv6 does not allow you to simply do away with public IPv4 adderesses. On the ISP side that would mean providing a product that couldn't access a huge chunk of the web. On the hosting side that would mean providing a service that isn't available to a huge chunk of users. It's not viable.
But increasing IPv6 deployment could possibly reduce IPv4 demand. If you're an ISP and half of your customers' traffic is over IPv6, maybe you could densify your carrier-grade NAT setup, putting more users behind the same number of public IPs. If you're a large content provider and half of your users are over IPv6, maybe only half of your load balancers need public IPv4 addresses.
The question is - is any ISP or provider actually doing those things in response to increased IPv6 traffic?
IPv6 does allow you to have a client on any ISP to not rely on IPv4: NAT64/DNS64 is one example for a home network (my experience). There are major mobile carriers that will also disagree, and they provide an IPv6-only technical solution.
> It's hard to estimate how increasing percentage of users with IPv6 access is impacting the demand for public IPv4 addresses.
I'm more interested in this excellent point you make, about the economics. I don't think this has been thought through as well as the technology.
And can we please find additional sources other than GOOG for IPv6 adoption?
There are 2 sides of the problem. Consumers and services. Adding ipv6 from the side of services, that is something not so diverse, is easier than from the side of consumers (i.e. multiple ISPs, devices and so on).
If most if not all services are available also on IPv6, the demand for IPv4 may go down.
Services are the most forced side for using IPv4. Consumers can be behind some sort of NAT, so you can have a lot of users behind single IP addresses. But the destination, if it must be IPv4, is not so trivial.
That is the low hanging fruit of IPv6 adoption, having for all interesting services IPv6. Then ISPs will be free to do at their own rhythm their migration to v6 only. If interesting services start to be only for v6 (because they decided that public adoption was high enough, at least for their main target markets) ISPs will start to add ipv6 to their users, or provide some of the transition mechanisms like NAT46 if that is too complex/expensive because local infrastructure.
But still a lot of very used services are IPv4 only (https://whynoipv6.com/ have a recent enough list ), or worse, have faulty IPv6 implemented (i.e. AAAA records but nothing listening there or with routing problems)
> Currently IPv6 does not allow you to simply do away with public IPv4 adderesses. On the ISP side that would mean providing a product that couldn't access a huge chunk of the web. On the hosting side that would mean providing a service that isn't available to a huge chunk of users. It's not viable.
The biggest telco (Telstra) in my country (Australia) allocates IPv6 addresses (only) to mobile phones. I'm not sure when the change over happened, because no one noticed / mentioned it. The WiFi hotspot on my WiFi phone hands out both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Each host gets it's own /64 routable IPv6, so there is no NAT on IPv6. By Debian laptop prefers to use IPv6 when it's available, so when hotspotting to my phone I'm entirely IPv6.
I'm not sure when that happened, because I didn't notice. As far as I can tell, no one noticed.
These are implicit. The IPv4 space is hard money. Demand is high. So ISPs make some money having IPv4 space now.
I've definitely seen this. That's how IPv4 connectivity became an enterprise/business line feature on some ISPs.
A neglected detail about CGNAT is that it has lower the quality of IPv4 connectivity. Higher latency + more connectivity issues.
So if you offer a service then you should offer it on ipv6 due to that.
That's a really slow transition though. So I wouldn't expect this to kill off IPv4 any time soon (say 10y), but longterm it's been the trajectory already.
> Currently IPv6 does not allow you to simply do away with public IPv4 adderesses.
You make a great point, but I would stress that the problem is not posed by IPv6 but by major ISPs with a global presence, such as Vodafone, which unexplainably have been dragging their feet on IPv6 support.
My issue with IPv6 is online gaming doesn’t seem to support it at all. Valorant and similar online competitive games are IPv4 only; despite IPv6 having considering upsides for real time games. I think you could get real uptake from gamers if it was supported (due to possible latency benefits, even if they’re only small)
Gaming was late to IP networks too. I remember so many games would only support IPX networking even after the internet had taken off. Kali was a very popular IPX emulator for IP networks for years.
Eh, no plans to move to v6 as someone who works on SaaS. 3.60/month is cheap for the few public IPs most need.
In my ISP/cloud provider days sure I spent a lot of time implementing v6. But it's just nowhere near worth the cost to mess with particularly when you still want/need public v4 along side.
Also, I don't understand how v6 could be responsible for these post peak prices. Most everyone still has the v4 addresses as well and no way v6 only cowboys are outpacing general growth.
I've actually got a really great example where IPv6 is a huge win. Connecting networks.
My company has bought other companies in the past and inevitably we've had IP space conflicts. Work arounds involved requiring users to connect to different VPNs to use services running in different networks. The end result was that we had to renumber huge chunks of the company and patch up the routing tables to make this work.
If we'd both been running IPv6 there wouldn't have been any IP space collision. We could just connect them together and be done with it.
Are you me? I had this exact experience, except after dealing with trying to resolve the conflicts with NATs and all the DNS pain that comes with a system having a different IP depending on where you are accessing it from, and the pain of re-iping an entire company, we actually DID go IPv6. All the offices still had their local IPv4 networks, but the mesh was IPv6 only. Turns out it was SIGNIFICANTLY less effort to get a new office IPv6 ready (usually just tweaking a couple toggles, occasionally replacing some ancient networking hardware) than resolving the IPv4 conflict.
We'd have to do private bi-directional NAT44. NAT is expensive to run and is one of those things that always breaks. It could work but it basically just makes permanent tech debt that will frustrate maintenance forever.
It also only really works when it's a 1:1 scale, as you add more networks the configuration grows with N^2.
It was in response to the implication that it would be nice if all the new companies that big businesses acquire have everything (like ipv6) "ready to go" upon acquisition.
I was making a "joke" that it's as likely as us getting to another planet and it being already setup to be habitable by humans.
Maybe I have a significantly different setup, but on the SaaS side this only requires binding to to ipv6 and adding an AAA record on your ingress usually.
I've always disable IPv6 on my router because I heard it wasn't secure since it was worthless to enable, and was another ingress into security. What benefits are there if any of using it?
The only practical reason you'd want to use ipv6 at home is if you want to expose multiple devices on your LAN to incoming TCP/UDP connections from the Internet without doing port mapping, since your ISP likely gives you a whole ipv6 block instead of just one address like with v4.
The real practical reason, everything else aside, is that you’ll need IPv6 connectivity to reach IPv6 services as the world continues to adopt and transition over to IPv6.
Right, some home ISPs that don't give a public v4 might give you a public v6 without a firewall. Cellular ISPs will probably have CGNAT even on ipv6, for example my AT&T is like that.
There was zero speed difference or any changes I noticed last I configured my router, which is why it's still disabled. I haven't seen a single good use for enabling it.
Not having to use all sorts of NAT traversal hacks or use relay servers means P2P communications like video calls will be faster, but only if both sides are on IPv6, so yes, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg. Most mobile phones are dual-stack now, and apps like browsers do “happy eyeballs” where they attempt both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously and pick the best.
Besides both sides being ipv6, the chat app has to intentionally support some p2p mode, and both sides have to be NAT-free and have firewalls allowing incoming connections.
It's hard to estimate how increasing percentage of users with IPv6 access is impacting the demand for public IPv4 addresses. My instinct is "not by a lot", but it's interesting to think about.
Currently IPv6 does not allow you to simply do away with public IPv4 adderesses. On the ISP side that would mean providing a product that couldn't access a huge chunk of the web. On the hosting side that would mean providing a service that isn't available to a huge chunk of users. It's not viable.
But increasing IPv6 deployment could possibly reduce IPv4 demand. If you're an ISP and half of your customers' traffic is over IPv6, maybe you could densify your carrier-grade NAT setup, putting more users behind the same number of public IPs. If you're a large content provider and half of your users are over IPv6, maybe only half of your load balancers need public IPv4 addresses.
The question is - is any ISP or provider actually doing those things in response to increased IPv6 traffic?