The thing is, no sound company has to. No consumers have IPv6 only. Everyone is dual stack. By not deploying on IPv6, you don't lose a potential customer, you just make them use their existing IPv4 connection.
You'd better be on dual stack if you don't want your users to think the competitors feels faster/smoother. Otherwise you'll be the Yahoo of your market.
I work with VOIP and we had to disable v6 for our customers because we were getting complaints about latency issues repeatedly from customers on v6. Disabled IPv6, no more complaints.
IPv6 is more likely to make you "the Yahoo of your market" than the inverse, especially if you work in latency sensitive applications.
http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2015/04/facebo... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfjdOc41g0s
Facebook and many other companies are finding that IPv6 is faster, personally at home I have found that disabling IPv4 allows me to more quickly buffer and stream Netflix, and about 30 - 40% of my traffic is IPv6. My Apple TV is the last hold-out that still seems to use IPv4 over IPv6 for Netflix.
In large part, this just boils down to the fact that less people use it, so less people notice problems and they're addressed less quickly. However, it makes it very unusable for applications like VOIP to customers when there are issues occurring. So while the bandwidth may be better on IPv6, I have no experience with that side of things personally, we're far more concerned with link stability - packet loss, latency spikes, that kind of thing. Again, just anecdotal, but not necessarily contrarian either.
more like convincing ISPs to do more than the bare minimum is hard.
Greenfield IPv6-only ISP's are new now, but will be much more common in the future. Comcast kicked this idea around (at either NANOG or the @Scale conference) of not giving end users v4 addresses at all and doing 4to6 NAT in the cloud within 2-3 years.
Despite its overwhelming usage, IPv4 is already a second class citizen.
There are a whole lot of "sound" companies using AWS, which has extremely limited (and in many cases nonexistent) IPv6 support.
https://www.quora.com/Does-Amazon-Web-Services-support-IPv6 https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-AWS-EC2-support-IPv6
Fundamentally, why do they have to support ipv6? Especially when they have monopoly power over their customers? Its not like the customers can see the difference, and if a website doesn't work for a network of millions because the site v6 only the only loser is the website.
I'd be surprised if we hit 15% this year. Web services are doing a good job supporting v6, but now you have to get all ISPs to do it as well, and those ISPs are always ranked as some of the most consumer unfriendly companies in a lot of countries because they have no market pressure to improve or serve their customers well.
From: http://meetings.ripe.net/ripe-54/presentations/IPv6_manageme...
In the control plane, all devices need to be remotely managed, so NAT isn’t going to help us, nor is federated Net 10 islands…
IPv6 is the clear solution for us.
It's only separated in that your cable modem gets a non-routable IPv6 address. It's non-routable within the internet but is a stock standard globally unique IP address. This is used for management purposes.
Posit: the rest of the world continues growing and adopts IPv6.
Europe is left behind by stick-in-the-mud ISP's. We're already starting to see this [0]. The exception in Europe is Germany, mainly due to DT.
Discuss.
[0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
It's not obvious. A twenty-year deployment plan is a joke: Maybe this is the best they could come up with, but that doesn't convince me this was a good plan, or IPv8 should be modelled on this deployment.
> No sound company today will launch its services in IPv4 only and eschew 10%-25% of potential traffic
You have that backwards: No sound company would launch its services in IPv6 only because the Internet is IPv4.
It weren't broke, so nobody would ever fix it. A twenty year deployment period has no intrinsic problem, only philosophical ones. IPv6 was not needed, if not for the IPv4 exhaustion. When it became necessary, deployment started.
> You have that backwards: No sound company would launch its services in IPv6 only because the Internet is IPv4.
You read me wrong. I did not mean single stack IPv6. I meant dual stack IPv6/v4. The Internet is no longer IPv4 only. If it isn't clear to you yet, it will become so along the next 12-24 months.
I think there's a fallacy here. IPv6 does not solve this problem. Even if all devices were IPv6, typical homes will still have a router that blocks incoming connections by default, even if it is now a deliberate stateful firewalling decision rather than a consequence of NAT.
Firewalling P2P traffic effectively remains just as hard with IPv6 as with NAT.
The only way to fix this currently is to either stop using firewalls (very dangerous in this era of never-security-updated IoT devices) or to use IPv6 equivalents of the same solutions the IPv4 NAT world has developed (NAT-PMP, uPnP, etc). The latter case won't improve anything in P2P connectivity using IPv6 over anything we have already with IPv4 NAT.
For example, ISPs hand out entire /64 per customer (at a minimum, almost all will give you larger subnets if you ask). This allows you to have a separate IP address per application, which can be allocated from an unfirewalled pool.
There's also the fact that almost all major OSs now come with sane firewall defaults, also allowing applications to punch holes via APIs. (You could also have done this with IPv4 if it had a larger address space.)
If you spend some time thinking about how to solve these problems with IPv6, you will find that there are lots of ways to do it that are simpler and far more secure.
For example, a single IP address per application would be fine, but there is no protocol that allows me to allocate addresses per application on a central home router such that I can then identify them to permit them individually.
And applications punching holes via APIs does exist in uPnP and NAT-PMP, but isn't that the same thing as what you dismissed above as a hack?
The most reliable way is to rely on your system firewall to prompt you to open up a port when an application binds to it (which can be accomplished with the default firewall software on a modern system.) Again, this is technically possible with IPv4 too, it's just impractical due to address space limitations.
> there is no protocol that allows me to allocate addresses per application on a central home router
Correct. But the whole point it to take the router out of the loop for this, and only use it as a coarse firewall. With IPv6 very device gets a separate /64, so it can simply allocate from its own pool of 10^19 addresses.
> And applications punching holes via APIs does exist in uPnP and NAT-PMP, but isn't that the same thing as what you dismissed above as a hack?
Not the same. With IPv6, you do not need to coordinate across multiple NAT devices (or even worse if you're double/triple NATted as in some countries.) You're also not limited by the maximum NAT table sizes (again amplified in the double/triple NATted situations.) Since each system has 10^19 addresses (preallocated out of a global pool of 10^38 addresses), these can now be treated as system resources and managed intelligently by the kernel.
I don't trust, and doubt I'll ever trust, the firewall on my Smart TV, even if it had one. That's because I don't trust that it'll ever receive timely security updates. So I must use [the firewall on] a central router.
I think applications communicating with firewalling is not a hack, but applications communicating with routing is a hack. E.g. I have two friends who share a house (and therefore an internet connection) and I can play a game with one or other of them (via uPnP) but not both at the same time. With IPv6 + uPnP (assuming that's supported), they'd still have the same firewalling they have now, but I'd be able to play a game with both of them. No?
Another way to fix this problem is a personal VPN that only establishes outgoing connections automatically by default but can proxy incoming connections when explicitly requested. This is the same type of thing as used with NAT, except without the expectation that your ISP is the one providing it. Considering how obnoxious ISPs are these days in terms of filtering and such, this would be a major improvement. Since I am currently doing this (minus the proxying so far which I haven't needed but could easily add) for $15/year with a IPv4 address and virtual host that is way overprovisioned for what it needs, it seems likely that this could be done on a large scale for IPv6 at a quite low cost.
Yes, and that would be the sensible thing to do.
This "public/private" distinction doesn't even work: What if you have two LANs that aren't bridged? Possibly because they are connected through a VPN? Or maybe one Ethernet and one WiFi? Can you communicate between them? Or only on "public addresses"? What if the VPN is between two companies, say, who don't trust each other? And why would you make it depend on the "address type" anyhow, why not just have the application drop connections that come from outside the LAN?
Blocking all inbound connections by default is no real problem as long as you have a protocol for telling the firewall which addresses/ports to open to the public - the problem with the "port forwarding" that you need with NAT is that ports collide and that you create asymmetric address translations or bottlenecks and all that crap, a simple protocol that tells the firewall to open a specific port or address would be trivial to implement and to use.
Also, IPv6 has link-local addresses, which are essentially "private addresses for a LAN", so you can actually set up services that are reachable only on a given LAN (and nowhere else) - but that really only makes sense for local LAN management (neighbour discovery and such), not for application protocols, those really should just be reachable from everywhere, as far as the local API is concerned, and access control should then happen based on source addresses, possibly implemented as a stateful packetfilter at the network boundary, as you otherwise severely limit which network architectures can be used.
I think the main additional assumption I have to (part of) what you describe is that applications (on a general purpose system) cannot be trusted to behave reasonably on the network, however users need insecure local networking to work. The public/private disctinction would work the way I imagined it, but only because I was assuming a limited form of source address filtering: essentially one bit on every interface (including VPNs) for "is this local" (I also assume separate addresses per interface). The second address is so that so wildcard listening only listens on local addresses, and explicit public addresses need to be specified (or otherwise enabled) by the user before a server will listen on it. I didn't realize that just doing source address filtering as you suggest could accomplish the same thing with one address in a much simpler way.
This would allow two users to have the same port opened. This makes it easier to communicate with others on the internet.
Nope, it's much easier because the addresses are easy to predict. When both parties are behind NAT, neither side knows which address and port they will appear to be coming from to the other side, while without NAT, both parties know exactly what address the other side will see (it's the one the local socket is bound to ...), that makes it relatively easy to establish a connection through a stateful firewall with a simultaneous connect if both sides can somehow tell each other where their respective sockets are.
It's outright trivial with UDP, not quite that easy with TCP: Assume both sides are behind a stateful firewall, both sides simply send a packet from their socket to the respective remote address/port, which will cause each local firewall to establish a connection tracking entry that will allow packets in the respective opposite direction to pass through. There is a race condition that might cause one of the packets to be rejected by the remote firewall (if it arrives before the locally originated packet passed through the firewall), but that doesn't matter: Afterwards, both firewalls have an entry for the connection, and all subsequent packets will pass through just fine. This is impossible with NAT because you cannot know the remote address that the NAT will assign for the connection, so you cannot send a packet to establish the entry in your firewall, and you cannot learn the address because you would need to receive the packet to see the address on it, which you can't as long as the firewall doesn't know about it.
Also, a protocol for opening ports on the stateful firewall would be much simpler without NAT, as the firewall doesn't need to allocate ports or handle conflicts between multiple clients wishing to be forwarded the same port: The address/port allocation authority is with the client, the client('s kernel/network stack) can simply allocate ports on its assigned addresses and then only needs to tell the firewall that connections to a specific address plus port should be allowed in. This also means that, for example, the firewall forgetting those open ports doesn't cause much trouble: The clients simply can tell it again whith ports to open, and they will be reachable again, at the same address, no need to tell peers a new address because a uPnP gateway forgot which ports it had allocated to which client.
And maybe most importantly: P2P traffic between devices on the same LAN becomes much, much simpler. Currently, if you have two participants of some P2P system in one LAN segment, where both establish an open port on the NAT gateway via uPnP, when one wants to connect to the other, there are roughly three possible scenarios: It can try to connect to the public address/port as established by uPnP, just like any remote client would. If you are unlucky, the NAT gateway only does DNAT, in which case the connection won't work because any responses will come from the local address of the peer instead of from the public address of the NAT gateway, so won't be recognized as belonging to the connection. If you are lucky, the NAT gateway does hairpin NAT, in which case the connection works, but all traffic has to go through the NAT gateway in order to rewrite addresses, instead of directly from one machine to the other at the ethernet level, which usually will be much slower than a direct transfer (even more so when there might be multiple people doing the same thing on the same LAN, where the switch might well be able to forward multiple gigabit flows at once, but your DSL NAT gateway most likely will not, not even if they are both in the same case). Or, if you want to avoid both of that, you'd have to somehow detect that you are in the same LAN and then figure out what the address of the peer on the LAN is in order to connect to that address instead (and note that you can't use the local addresses to decide that, even if you know them, as you might well have addresses in the same private address range, but still be connected to completely different LANs).
Without NAT? You simply connect to whatever address the peer announces. If you are on the same LAN, your machine's routing table will automatically route the packets to your local LAN, directly to the other machine, at full LAN speed. If not, they will be forwarded to your local gateway, through the internet, through the remote stateful firewall, and to the remote peer. No difference at all, apart from the speed, possibly, it just works.
It seems like this is another doomsday prediction. Evidence would make it persuasive.
I do not see the word "direct" in any part of the rant. Am I missing something? Are you sure that is what he meant? The text reads "do these computers really need to be on the Internet?"
Indeed an internetwork like any other network should be symmetric but I am not sure adpoting IPv6 is the only way to achieve that. Nor that adoption of IPv6 would be used for that purpose.
Instead I see asymmetric, data collection motivated ideas like "Internet of Things" being put forth as "the way of the future". Such ill advised ideas would more likley be the justification for using IPv6.
Do all these "things" (computers) need to be on the Internet?
Not that I know of.
There's an argument, not made by me, that some IoT is foolish to which I alluded. Is that what you mean?
The text starts with a question that undermines the whole text: "does every node need direct Internet connection?". Today, with P2P traffic on the uprise, the answer is a striking Yes. If, even with the hurdles of poor performing NATs, there is market pressure for P2P protocols, it's absurdly obvious the Internet must be symmetrical, not server-client.
The text then goes on about the impossible transition plan for IPv6. It's now obvious that moving servers to dual-stack, then clients progressively onto IPv6 (through provider address-space exhaustion) is a sound plan. It's happening, and it's approaching the critical point. 2016 starts at 10% IPv6 traffic, will end at 25% IPv6 traffic. No sound company today will launch its services in IPv4 only and eschew 10%-25% of potential traffic.