IPv6 will never happen without someone forcing hands of big corps and ISPs to switch to Ipv6.
Imagine all social media and streaming services, disable ipv4 within a month. These are not critical services but still will force ISPs to make the switch.
I actually think that what will really drive IPv6 adoption is if the price of IPv4 space continues its upward trajectory unabated. The price has about doubled at auction in the last year.
How are those two things related?
1. There are a ton of owners sitting on inefficiently used IP space.
Any company (not doing cloud hosting or network transit) that's holding a /8 is almost certainly using it very inefficiently, but an owner like Apple will never feel financial pressure to optimize or sell their /8. However, an owner like the university I went to (with a /16 network currently worth $3 million) will eventually face internal pressure to sell that network when the value rises to say $50 million.
As another example, Yahoo is currently announcing subnets containing 4.3 million IPv4 addresses, which is worth $193.5mm at auction. If the price of IPv4 addresses increased by say 10x, their IPv4 space would probably comprise the bulk of the company's value.
2. Owners will need to adopt IPv6 in order to realize these financial gains.
In order to sell a significant portion of their IPv4 space, an owner will have to compact their IPv4 usage into a much smaller space and migrate everything else to IPv6. This will be a huge undertaking for a lot of these places, but at some point it's worth it. By doing that, IPv6 adoption increases.
There is the potential for a feedback loop to be created where demand for IPv4 drops and the prices decline and so fewer conversions are done, but I tend to believe that IPv4 pricing will remain inelastic.
So basically the invisible hand of the market may guide us to IPv6, but I highly highly doubt we will have seen the last of IPv4 even decades from now.
> There are a ton of owners sitting on inefficiently used IP space.
This includes AWS, btw. You effectively get a public IPv4 with your instance, regardless of your actual needs. It actually increases your costs to get cloud instances that don't do that.
AWS has that inefficiency baked in to their design, but I'm guessing that they do efficiently deploy their IPv4 space.
That is still a problem for sure, but I thinking of places doing things like giving a printer its own subnet just because they have no incentive to be efficient.
Another one I've heard is that CGNAT shared IPv4 addresses lead to higher hardware requirements to manage that CGNAT. So just by having IPv6 support and having more traffic go through native IPv6 saves ISPs hardware that would've been required to manage the CGNAT.
My company owns a /16 and everybody gets an static address for each device, so I currently "own" two global IPv4 addresses. But everything is firewalled to hell and we need to connect through a proxy, so what's the point?
The /24 itself doesn’t cost me anything. I registered it before ARIN existed and it’s considered a “legacy” block. No fees cause I never signed their registration agreement.
I pay about $180/month for a “business internet” cable line. 300 megabits down, 25 up. I also “know a guy” at the ISP who made sure the routing wasn’t going to be an issue.
Yep, I was wondering more about the ongoing costs of "operating" the block. I was reading a superuser.com question [1] about it and it mentions ongoing costs, like transit, BGP routing etc.
This is super interesting! I didn't know this was even possible before I started looking into it.
When I read that right, all the transit and routing seems to be done by his ISP. The superuser response is about what happens when your provider (or in this case, ISP) does not do this.
There are no direct costs there. I pay for the bandwidth. The ISP announces the /24 using their BGP ASN.
There are also cloud providers, like Vultr, that will allow you to do BGP with them. You could then get a network block routed to a VPS, then tunnel it out or whatever.
90s were a different time for the internet, even till right after dot com bubble being online was relatively safe, many companies would not even have had dedicated InfoSec teams, no audits and compliance processes were covering firewalls etc
I maybe biased, I grew up in the 90's so I dont' really know how it was before, I do hear people reminisce about days before eternal September and bb groups and the good old 80's so perhaps it is always been a downward gradient as more and more people came online.
The funny thing is social media and streaming is already there:
facebook.com has IPv6 address 2a03:2880:f119:8083:face:b00c:0:25de
instagram.com has IPv6 address 2406:da00:ff00::23ae:4dc1
snapchat.com has IPv6 address 2001:4860:4802:36::15
netflix.com has IPv6 address 2600:1f14:62a:de82:822d:a423:9e4c:da8d
youtube.com has IPv6 address 2404:6800:4006:810::200e
The holdouts are somewhere else. Imagine if cloudflare and cloudfront defaulted to enabling ipv6 - I expect the jump in worldwide ipv6 traffic would be massive. On the other hand the missing services are very tech oriented:
github.com has no AAAA record
Once traffic can default to ipv6, we'll see ipv4 slowly dying, but the defaults really matter.
My bad, should've been more clear - yes, it's the default in some places. What I meant is actually treating ipv6 as first class everywhere. For example:
In other words, I expect steering people to do ipv6, then maybe ipv4 as well rather than the opposite would give the internet as a whole another big jump in ipv6 usage.
This will show my lack of ipv6 knowledge but I’ll ask anyway. Say I have an endpoint service somewhere listening only on ipv6.
Let’s take any sort of CDN out of the equation for simplicity. Can I use Cloudflare DNS for the service, such that anyone using ipv6 will connect directly to my service, of course— but can CF do some magic ipv4->ipv6 translation/bridge sort of thing, so that someone on ipv4-only will also be able to connect to my ipv6-only service?
I’d imagine the answer is hopefully yes and perhaps this is trivial stuff these days, but anyway I’m thinking of setting up a blog and might go ipv6 only with it..
Cloudflare makes a website dual-stack from the user's perspective, regardless of whether the server is IPv4-only or IPv6-only.
Typically, both the A and AAAA records point to the same Cloudflare proxy, because serving IPv4 and IPv6 via different infrastructure requires a lot of care to avoid subtle brokenness.
You should be able to advertise your ipv6 endpoint in the AAAA record, going direct to the origin, while make the A records pointers to Cloudflare which can then proxy back to your v6-only origin servers.
About 16% to 23% of the Alexa 500 top sites have ipv6 support [0]. There hasn't been much of a change since august 2018 (17% to 21%) [1], or Oct 2016 (19% to 21%) [2]. 5 years is a long time in tech.
Meanwhile on the user side support has tripled from about 11% in 2016 to 33% recently [3].
I guess when you run a scalable web service, you need comparatively few publicly available ip addresses, and everyone has ipv4 anyways, while when you run an ISP, you need way more ip addresses. So the problem is way more pronounced for ISPs than the service providers. I guess the number of deployments with carrier grade NAT without ipv6 support is quite low.
Years ago, when I perhaps more naively believed in the benevolence of Google, and that wisdom of the Elder True Nerds who worked there would lead us to The Future, I might have applauded them throwing their weight around doing something like that. Possibly with a condescending paternalistic attitude like, "dragging the unwashed masses kicking and screaming into the the future they're too stupid to realize just yet that this will be better for them."
I am no longer so young and naive. Now, there is no doubt in my mind that such a move by Google or the other tech giants would not be made out of benevolence, but because by doing so, somehow, would net them yet greater control over the flow of information across the world. Whether out of an authoritarian desire architect society the right way this time, or chasing their profit margin as far down the asymptote as they can measure, the resultant 1st through Nth order effects would probably be the same for the rest of us.
Control is one argument, but I'd go with the money argument:
All the big cloud providers like Google and AWS as well as the small ones like Hetzner do have an incentive to keep IPv4 going as long as possible. They can charge a premium for things IPv4 "because addresses are scarce". Charging a premium means more profit margin.
At the same time, they do not need to invest in more than lip service for IPv6 support in their offerings: No cloud provider has any comprehensive IPv6 offering, most services don't do IPv6. The edge ones maybe do, but there are always sharp edges, missing docs and general pain, pushing everyone back to IPv4 where the profits are.
I think the "switch" mental model is misleading. IPv6 has already happened, and most users don't notice it since they aren't in the habit of looking at network interface diagnostics on their device. See eg sibling comment about instagram, netflix, facebook etc. v4 NAT will remain in use concurrently and services will remain available over v4 for consumer facing things for a long time.
I thought ISPs were actually doing pretty well? Big corps are moving slowly but I think it's mostly limited to internal NATted networks, which frankly nobody has an incentive to upgrade. We're getting there... slowly.
Lucky you, somebody already did that for you. It‘s called DNS. :P
On a more serious node: IPv6 can be short and if used right they are actually short. Unfortunately, people continue not to care about relearning their habits and treat IPv6 as if it‘s a 1:1 replacement of IPv4 (you can even see it in this threat when people ask „why would you need more than a /64“). A major blocker in IPv6 aren‘t just the IPs but that all sys admins out there are trained to treat IPs as they got used to from the v4 world and can‘t stop to think of them as scarce resources instead of applying a hierarchical approach.
This. I honestly think the FCC will have to mandate it's adoption and give a hard date for the termination of IPv4 for it to work. Both will need to occur.
Imagine all social media and streaming services, disable ipv4 within a month. These are not critical services but still will force ISPs to make the switch.