Freeing up more IPv4 space wouldn't have helped. IANA was assigning /8 per month at the end. The extra space would have gone in less than a year.

IPv6 would have worked better if they had made minimal changes to the support protocols. But it was have had slow adoption because there was no incentive to switch until addresses ran out.

> Freeing up more IPv4 space wouldn't have helped. IANA was assigning /8 per month at the end.

You are confusing hoarding demand for legitimate need. The Amazon's and Cloudflare's of the world were playing games to get large allocations, speculators were spinning up hundreds of legal entities to get allocations, tons of backroom deals to look the other way.

Pretty much every use case today for IPv6 is environments where CGN would have worked just as well.

We should probably have auctions for IPv4 space to encourage more efficient use. Not that we have some kind of authority to require this, but we've often suggested this in connection with our proposal to prepare to allocate 240/4.

While one can say that there's no way that IPv4 demand can ever be "satisfied" (which seems right to me), one can also imagine a different quantity demanded at $0.50/address than at $0.00/address, and also different levels of effort to make sure that almost all addresses that are allocated get put into use on the Internet. (I know $0.00/address isn't exactly the right way to describe what RIR allocations cost, but economically they've been more similar to the "beauty contest" than the "auction" allocation method.)

In the final direct initial allocation phase, people learned that something (with substantial economic value that can likely be sold in the future, no less!) was very scarce, and was being given out nearly at no cost for almost the last time. It's not surprising that they would have jumped at the opportunity to get as much of it as they could qualify for, somewhat independent of what use they expected to make of it in the short term. Maybe especially when they were hearing how other people were jumping at that opportunity.

Or we could just remove the purely artificial scarcity and call it a day. The cost here is backbone table size, not endpoint addresses

There are auctions for IPv4 space, though they did not really become a thing until after the RIRs ran out of IPv4 blocks. The price per address is about $50.

Yes, and hopefully we can use that kind of mechanism to allocate 240/4 in a way that achieves very high utilization.

I sat in on the ipv6 ietf meetings. That was certainly the intent (minimal changes). I still remain confused about why people think this is such a big deal.

- changed aro. Ok, news design is better but that didn’t need to happen. Shouldn’t be a problem for anyone?

- prefixes are an addition but there are really good arguments for them and not much downside. This can be argued I think

- fusing the end system identifier in the public address was a mistake, and I thought so at the time, and I guess it’s been mostly rectified.

So what is so tragic here? ISPs just didn’t care for 20 years because the crunch was delayed. Now they do. So where did Steve screw up?

Neighbor Discovery is basically ARP wearing a trenchcoat. The only people "hurt" by the change are the ones who were parsing the output of the arp command for whatever reason.

IMHO the biggest problem is that IPv6 address autoconfiguration was half-baked. There is no mechanism to inform anybody about which address you have configured for yourself, unlike IPv4's DHCP where a central server knows everyone's address and can do things like update DNS entries and configure security devices. Autoconfiguration also didn't include critical details like "Who provides DNS for the local network?" and "What's the NTP server?". There isn't even any way to authenticate that the Router Advertisement your machine receives is valid, although this problem is shared with DHCP. The committee seems to have put a lot of faith in anycast routing, which has never been a good idea outside of toy networks.

> that IPv6 address autoconfiguration was half-baked.

Indeed. I thought I was being an idiot and just not understanding how this was supposed to work, until I learned that it just doesn't do a lot of important things. So when the day comes that I have to move my network to IPv6, I plan on continuing to use DHCP because I want the omitted functionality.

Of course, I still might be being an idiot and not understanding. Getting a solid picture of how IPv6 is supposed to work is genuinely hard to do with any confidence.

Be aware that DHCP6 doesn't work the same as DHCP. It's really intended for configuring routers, not hosts.

I wasn't aware. That's a real bummer, and a good example of the numerous kinds of gotchas that make this transition much more painful than it would otherwise have to be.

The more I learn about IPv6, the more I dread it.

IPv6 did not fail. It's used by a sizeable chunk of hosts, network owners made investitions in hardware, software and skills. It's not going anywhere, like it or not. Just like IPv4 will not go anywhere. They will coexist.

I still don't understand why IPv6 is a thing. End users can use NAT just fine. Servers can use CDNs and reverse proxies, sharing single IPv4 address among any number of hostnames. But it is a thing, so it's hard to imagine any other protocol to take over.

> End users can use NAT just fine. Servers can use […] reverse proxies, sharing single IPv4 address

So you want all computers to be behind at least a single layer of NAT. And you also want people to not only have to purchase a domain but also have to pay their NAT operator to add their domain to the reverse proxy

Eyeball networks are vastly different from content networks. Even among the tinkerer "homelab" and HN crowds, it is rare to host content from the same connection/address you browse from.

You're confusing cause and effect.

They're very different precisely because of hacky nonsense like NAT.

How is (home) NAT making the problem more complex than a stateful firewall? You never want to have a policy where incoming connections/UDP streams are permitted by default to reach any random device on the network, regardless of whether that device has a routable IP or not.

Now, CGNAT is a different beast and more worrisome from that point of view.

How do you have two different devices running a webserver on two different IPs at home with NAT?

In a decade or two, everyone is going to be behind CGNAT. There are not enough IPv4 addresses.

> How is (home) NAT making the problem more complex than a stateful firewall?

ICE/TURN/STUN: the address that your software sees on your laptop, desktop, home NAS is not the address that clients can connect to.

In both NAT and non-NAT you have to use UPnP/PCP to do hole punching, but with NAT you have to do a bunch of address-y stuff as well.

IPv4 addresses are getting increasingly expensive. And being behind an ISP’s NAT is terrible. I don’t want to share an IP with my street. It should be easy to run little network servers at home without worrying about reverse proxies or upnp or whatever nonsense we need today to make the network work.

There’s plenty of numbers out there. Ipv6 lets my house have a whole subnet of them. It’s good.

I was (by default) part of a ISP based NAT. I play counterstrike online, and my ping was 80ms... calling them up and getting it disabled, dropped it to 30ms.

being behind their NAT caused all sorts of issues that i didnt realise they were causing... stuff like UPnP didnt work right, opening ports wasnt working right... everything was all over the place.

I don't believe that they're expensive when I can rent VPS for few dollars per month. They might be more expensive than 10 years ago, but this cost is shared among all people behind NAT, so in the end it must be a rounding error.

Running servers at home is a good thing to have, but I doubt that ISP cares much about users running servers at home. Users watch youtube and netflix. That's what they optimize for.

The version 4 address is now a substantial cost when renting a server. It starts getting billed separately, so you can drop it if you don't need it.

The days of getting a free IPv4 address when you rent a VPS are numbered. AWS is already rolling out a plan to charge by the hours for an IPv4 address and other VPN providers are paying attention.

'NAT' and 'fine' do not belong in one sentence.

NAT requires stateful tracking of stateless protocols. It's a hack much larger than anything related to ipv6.

I run a large multi-campus network. At least 75% of our outgoing Internet traffic is IPv6. Looking at home ISPs accessing our services, it’s at least the majority of them coming in on IPv6. My guess is it’s a similar ratio as outgoing.

IPv6 has issues but it hasn’t failed.

Sadly, some ISPs have yet to adopt it. Bell Canada is notoriously slow on it, and shows no signs of starting.

> At least 75% of our outgoing Internet traffic is IPv6

One question I have about this statistic (and also about Google's IPv6 statistic) is, does traffic mean raw bytes? And in that case, is this just a reflection that like 75% of all internet traffic is just YouTube and Netflix due to video being a bandwidth hog?

(I'm a huge proponent of IPv6 - I just wish we had more useful statistics!)

The GP's statistic is probably raw bytes, and yes, a significant chunk of that will be the big video streaming sites, which mostly have v6. That's still a useful statistic, because part of the cost of v4 is NAT and NAT capacity is measured in terms of number of packets.

I guess you're thinking that the number of v4-only websites is much higher than the traffic numbers represent -- which is true but that's actually fine because v6-only clients can still reach those sites easily via NAT64, so having a lot of v4-only websites isn't blocking deployment of v6 or undeployment of v4. The only real problem it causes is that people use it as an excuse to not do v6...

As for Google's stats, they're probably percentage of either connections or users as measured by their frontend load balancers.

Unfortunately in my country (Italy) our major provider (TIM) is not handing out IPv6 addresses to users. Other providers do, for the fact that nowadays IPv4 addresises are expensive and thus they no longer provide a public address. One of them (Iliad) is IPv6 only, and the IPv4 traffic is tunneled into IPv6 at the router level.

I think the only way that we will move to IPv6 is a law (probably from the EU) that imposes to every provider to give its consumers an IPv6 address.

It's looking more like a slow victory than a failure: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

People like to complain a lot about the new features in v6, but they don't make it any worse as a v4 replacement.

IPv6 adoption is just the traffic shift from desktop to mobile. IPv6 kinda makes sense in mobile because it solves a problem of needing multiple addresses per person (phone, tablet, gaming device, etc) and the whole stack is maintained by two entities (the phone OS manufacturer and the carrier). It probably would have worked even better if it was far less complex and only solved the problem that was needed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210122043401/https://blogs.aka...

Residential broadband has been getting v6 too. It saves money and provides added functionalityfor the same reasons as on mobile. And academic/research networks got there first long time ago. Corporate envirments seem the biggest holdout.

Residential broadband often has it too. The laggards are corporate networks and cloud where IT is ultra conservative and “if it’s not broke don’t fix it.”

The only thing that will make corporate environments change is if something they need starts requiring it, and not a second before.

Cloud is slowly getting it. Slowly. GitHub still doesn’t have it though, which makes pure v6 nodes annoying for a lot of use cases.

I work for a federal space where IPv6 native is a mandate. As someone who's working on k8s, we often have to build and patch everything ourselves to support that mandate. Want to pull a helm chart from a github repo? Gotta either dual stack the node or run a reverse proxy to make that happen.

I'd love to be at a point where everyone just dual stacked everything so that one day we can flip off the IPv4 switch.

Try NAT64. It'll let v6-only clients reach v4-only websites.

Interesting. I'll take a look! Thanks!

I think major failure of Kubernetes was not being IPv6-only from the beginning. Its model of every pod having own address works much better with IPv6 where addresses are cheap. With IPv4, it needs complicated overlay networks. The cluster boundary would also make a good place for NAT64 proxy.

Kubernetes didn't get IPv6 support until later, and it sounds like it isn't reliable yet.

> I think major failure of Kubernetes was

Heh. Kubernetes as a whole was a failed project at Google that got open sourced.

I was under the impression that Google simply latched onto the project? Doesn't Google still use borg to this day?

Corporate networks are not lagging for being ultra conservative; they lag, because the moment they start thinking about any change, their vendors start pushing all manners of products and licenses on them, that they insist are absolutely necessary for that change and it won't work without it. Sharks feel the blood in the water, and they want to make whatever is possible on it.

So in the end you are looking both at capex, increased opex and for what? You have ipv6? Congratulation, now you go to your C-level bosses and explain to them why it was worth it. Good luck.

> IPv6 adoption is just the traffic shift from desktop to mobile.

There are entire ISPs (in the US) that are IPv6-only for CPE because IPv4 is unavailable and they have to use expensive CG-NAT boxes to deal with IPv4:

* https://community.roku.com/t5/Features-settings-updates/It-s...

*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35047624

Meanwhile India was 80% IPv6 as of a few months ago:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32798003

The fact that the US and EU just happened to get a bunch of addresses first doesn't mean the rest of the world has the same options available.

More addresses are needed if everyone on the planet is to be able to connect.

IPv6 only solves a problem if you don't understand the problem itself! Just because people have five devices doesn't mean they need 65,000 * 5 internet addresses ... there is an endpoint for every port and each device needs only a handful of ports if not only one! Each user can certainly get by with five ports on five shared ipv4 addresses.

As I said before IPv6 will never happen fully because it solves a non-problem very expensively - by assuming the whole world is 64-bit workstations!

That works fine for outbound connections but doesn't work for inbound connections. You can't have two devices listening for inbound connections on the same IP address.

I'm worried about the long tail. IPv6 won't actually be useful until more or less everything supports v6; as long as there are enough clients which don't support v6 servers need v4, and as long as there are enough servers which don't support v6 clients need v4. And until we can start disabling v4, v6 gives no advantage and only causes significant added complexity.

I'm worried that the time when we can start removing v4 and therefore see the actual advantage of v6 won't be here for at least a hundred years, optimistically.

I think you’ll find the real transition to be a lot quicker than that. All it takes is one of the big companies drawing a line in the sand because they’re unable to buy enough IP addresses, so they finally take a stand. Just like when YouTube nailed the lid into the coffin of ie6.

I doubt a big company would draw the line in the sand. But I could see an upstart (think TikTok) not having up enough IP addresses and just giving a crappy, slow proxied experience over IPv4, but having it be native, zippy and good over IPv6. Suddenly you have teens begging their parents to switch ISPs.

That comes with a major assumption that switching ISPs is an option. Most people get to choose between their cable company, or a fleet of ill-trained pigeons

As an example, the options where I am right now (thankfully temporary) are:

- $55/mo. 3 Mbps DSL

- $80/mo. 300 Mbps cable (or even more expensive, faster cable)

- $120/mo. 100+ Mbps (if you're lucky) Starlink

- A few other heavily restricted, very expensive satellite options (e.g. HughesNet), to which the aforementioned fleet of ill-trained carrier pigeons might be preferable

Only one of those is practical and (mostly) reliable for anything remotely approaching something like remote work.

Back home it's such a luxury to be able to choose DSL, cable, or fiber. I can only dream that all markets will have an actual choice between Internet service providers someday.

Did you look at doing 5g home Internet? There's great coverage in lots of areas.

At least in Canada 5g comes with $50-for-15GB levels of data cap pricing

Actually most people (in the US) get a choice between the cable company, the LEC, and a 5g carrier, and maybe even StarLink.

I have a choice between the cable company and sorta Starlink (Starlink isn't actually available in my area yet, and is a nonstarter anyway). There are no other options available to me.

Many of the "choices" are false choices. My home, in the downtown of a major city, shows as having two choices for wired broadband, but the phone company's wired broadband option is an old ISDN network grandfathered in to "broadband" that probably shouldn't have been, it is the very bare minimum of "broadband" in 1990s standards. (And the phone company charges the same monthly cost for it as actual high speed broadband options they provide, just to add additional cruelty.)

I think you'll be surprised. As soon as most large and medium businesses support IPv6 we'll start to see people dropping v4, likely within the next 5-10 years. When only a tiny % of your potential customer base is dependent on v4 you start to weight the cost of staying dual stack or just going pure v6

> Just like when YouTube nailed the lid into the coffin of ie6.

That was the work of a few people on the YouTube team, not the company itself taking a stand:

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

It has one huge advantage: larger address space.

(Which we could have had with a minor tweak of IPv4 instead.)

The larger address space is only an advantage if we don't need a v4 address. The situation "I need a v4 address" is not worse than the situation "I need a v4 address and a v6 address".

Not exactly. There's some pretty snazzy interoperability tech out their. (I.e. 4-6-4 XLAT) that let's clients get v4 addresses when they need them, which means if there's a big chuck on devices on both ends that support v6 you don't need as many v4 address.

This kinda a problem for motivating people to move to v6 because as implementations of v6 grow there's going to be less and less pressure on the v4 address space.

We could, but it would have broken compatibility with v4 just as thoroughly as v6 did and so would have had the exact same deployment difficulties v6 has.

In fact v6 mostly _is_ a minor tweak to v4; most parts of it are lifted directly from v4 but with a longer address.

> And until we can start disabling v4, v6 gives no advantage and only causes significant added complexity.

v6 advantages:

* If you're an ISP, you need more complex hardware for CGNAT-v4 if your traffic is huge. If you do support v6, netflix, youtube and majority of your traffic is already on v6, you can get by without upgrading your CGNAT Infra.

* I suspect v6 should have faster initial connection - time to first byte, because of no NAT. I assume NAT is implied in v4 because if you're an ISP say in India where you have 1.2B mobile devices, you cannot buy 1/4th of all IPv4 addresses.

* Because of more IP addresses you can run VMs with public v6 addresses. It's not common to have ISPs give multiple IPv4 to a single customer, but with v6 that's always the case.

* Until the transition is complete, I and everyone else is gonna have to use an ISP which provides a v4 address, whether they're end users or a server operators. Fair enough though that ISPs may have some incentive to making more people have v4+v6 (not that they seem to have realized...)

* I really don't think NAT could possibly make a noticeable difference in the time to first byte. My guess about what's "barely noticeable" would be a few hundred added milliseconds, my guess at what NAT would add would be a few milliseconds. Happy to be proven wrong though if there are any studies or experiments on the topic.

* I'm not sure what benefits there are to giving your VMs public v6 IPs when you still need to support incoming v4 connections.

I did a small experiment with 2 websites: federalreserve.gov and one of the Google's server located in Delhi. I'm in India in a city around 250 kms from Delhi on ISP: Reliance Jio Fiber. I see around 8ms benefit when using IPv6 for Google, and 20 ms when using federalreserve.gov Hardly noticable

For whatever reason (it's probably a mix of NAT, the extra routing needed for CGNAT, and other things) there is a measurable difference in time to first byte on v6. Apple measured it as 40%: https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-tells-app-devs-to-use-ip...

(Also, doing things like loading a webpage requires many round trips, so even a small RTT difference multiplies to a bigger delay for total load time.)

You don't need to remove v4 to get benefits from v6. For example, you can handle inbound v4 on your load balancers to avoid needing to mess around with it on your entire VM fleet.

s/w stack penalizes IPv4 by 25 ms to 300 ms. This is not a point to say that v4 is bad, but has been made bad artificially: https://ma.ttias.be/apple-favours-ipv6-gives-ipv4-a-25ms-pen...

I find partial IPv6 support quite useful. For example, at home I have a lot of services where it it convenient if I can access them but it is not essential. I give those services IPv6 addresses. I have IPv6 at home, at work, on mobile. So it is not a big deal if I can't access them from some part of the world. With increasing prices of IPv4 addresses, I expect that more internal services will move to IPv6.

For services at home, where I do need IPv4 support, access over IPv6 is simpler and more robust. We can expect more of that in the future. Increasing prices of IPv4 addresses, certainly if for routing purposes you need a /24, may result in worse traffic engineering for IPv4.

Most networked things are not end user facing. It's plenty useful now.

End user facing apps also use it in gradual way, eg with WebRTC it lowers service ops costs and gives better latency.

Certainly, it is at least a start that all the cloud providers are slowly raising the hourly costs for v4 addresses to better reflect scarcity and other externalities. Those costs rise high enough it will be a pressure on corporate bottom lines (and then in turn IaaS tools and many other SaaS providers).

And yet Azure has comically bad IPv6 support, so you can't even move (partially) away from IPv4 even if you wanted to. Besides, the cost of a v4 address is peanuts compared to the other cloud costs.

All of the big three (AWS, Azure, GCP) have comically bad IPv6 support and comically bad security advice on IPv6 and private networking in their documentation.

Kubernetes is comically bad at IPv6. Docker is comically bad at IPv6.

GitHub is comically bad at IPv6.

Like I said, pricing IPv4 at all, is at least a start, a baby step in the right direction. Even if it is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the cloud invoice, it is still at least a line item that corporate accountants are going to notice. It is now an obvious cost to cut. Maybe that will put pressure on fixing how comically bad the above offenders (and more) are actually supporting IPv6, because corporate accountants may start asking hard questions.

It spikes up 3-5 percentage points every weekend. Presumably mobile use goes up and computer use goes down.

Corporate use goes down and Residential use goes up.

Corporate networks were the last to drop XP, the last to drop IE, and will be the last to adopt IPv6.

That's not quite true. Even after corporate users have switched the government will still be on V4. The US military is drowning in IPv4 addresses and feels little pressure to switch.

Azure AD only got IPv6 support this year. Most corporate networks have not switched, whole most federal agencies have implemented IPv6(due to mandates), mobile carriers are heavily utilizing IPv6 and so are residential ISPs (Comcast and Time Warner have been deploying IPv6 since 2011)

Federal agencies turned on the Cloudflare flag that auto-translates incoming IPv6 packets to the IPv4 that they support for front facing websites. That checked the box and little progress has been made since then.

Wow a ~40% migration over the course of 20 years. What a victory :|

You try and get billions of people to do anything quickly

It really doesn't matter if your part of the ocean didn't make it to the boiling committee.

The one thing that mattered was more address space. 4 billion addresses are not enough for the world. Anything else in ip6 is nice to have but falls off a cliff of importance and naval gazing that, if really of even nearly comparable significance, would be better directed to ipX or whatever's next.

IP6 is already facilitating connectivity for billions. Globally. That's a pretty major thing, more so than renditions of doing it my way.