Comment by alt227
5 days ago
IPv6 was superceded by NAT a long time ago. It will die a slw and quiet death which is why it is now being ignored by training facilities and experts worldwide.
5 days ago
IPv6 was superceded by NAT a long time ago. It will die a slw and quiet death which is why it is now being ignored by training facilities and experts worldwide.
Oh no, somebody should warn all the ISPs deploying IPv6-native connections with v4 reachable over some fallback technology (464XLAT, DS-Lite, NAT64 etc.) to their hundreds of millions if not billions of customers!
--Sent from my IPv6
The only ISPs issuing IPv6 only connections are mobile device operators and Telcos. THey are a small subset of ISPs in the world and IPv6 only connections will never gain any traction outside of that world.
I agree it will not die so I retract that statement, but it will never fully replace IPv4 in standard wired internet connections.
Digital Ocean didn’t even have an ipv6 address on by default in the droplet I created last week. It’s just a switch to flip, but I’ll bet the support costs of hobbyists/enthusiasts not realizing they needed to also write firewall rules, make sure ports weren’t open for databases and things like that for ipv6.
My memory of IPv6 is getting waves of support tickets from people who took their (already questionable) practice of blocking ICMP on IPv4, blocked ICMPv6, and then got confused when IPv6 stopped working.
The legacy of the Ping of Death and redirect abuse still looms over people that may not have been born yet :)
It's a "just doesn't work" experience every time that I try it and I don't experience any value from it, it's not like there isn't anything I can connect to on IPv6 that I can't connect to on IPv4.
My ISP has finally mastered providing me with reliable albeit slow DSL. Fiber would change my life, there just isn't any point in asking for IPv6.
Also note those bloated packets are death for many modern applications like VoIP.
Exactly. Spectrum delivers good IPv6 service in my area. I tried it when I upgraded my gateway. All of my devices are assigned 4 IPv6 IPs, hostnames are replaced by auto assigned stuff from the ISP, and lots of random things don’t work.
I went from being pumped to learn more to realizing I’m going to invest a lot of time and I could not identify and tangible benefit.
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You can maybe connect to everyone over IPv4, but chances are that that path is strictly worse (in terms of latency, P2P reachability, congestion et.c) than a v6 one would be.
For example, two IPv6 peers can often trivially reach each other even behind firewalls (using UDP hole punching). For NAT, having too restrictive a NAT gateway on either side can easily prevent reachability.
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> those bloated packets are death for many modern applications like VoIP.
Huh? The packet sizes aren’t that much different and VOIP is hardly a taxing application at this point anyway. VOIP needs barely over dial-up level bandwidth.
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Last time I looked at Digital Ocean they had completely missed the purpose of IPv6 and would only assign a droplet a /124 and even then only as a fixed address like they were worried we are going to run out of addresses.
But really what's the point of giving half an internet worth of addresses to every machine? I never understood that part of IPv6.
I think it would have been better having shorter addresses and not waste so many on every endpoint.
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"Simple" VPS providers like DigitalOcean, etc. really need to get the hell onboard with network virtualization. It's 2026, I don't want to be dealing with individual hosts just being allocated a damned /64 either. Give me a /48, attach it to a virtual network, let me split it into /64's and attach VM's to it - if I want something other than SLACC addresses (or multiple per VM) then I can deal with manually assigning them.
To be fair, the "big" cloud providers can't seem to figure this shit out, either. It's mind boggling, I'm not saying I've gone through the headache of banging out all the configuration to get FRRouting and my RouterOS gear happily doing the EVPN-VXLAN dance; but I'm also not Amazon, Google, or Microsoft...
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I use IPv6 on my authoritative DNS servers and that's basically it. To your point keeping it disabled on all my hobby crap keeps everything simple for me. If someone can not reach IPv4 then something is broken on their end.
IMO ipv6 is a perfect example of why interface designers can be valuable on technical projects. One of the genius things about ipv4 is it’s a pre-chunked number you can shout across the room or keep in your head as you run down the hall to your keyboard. IPv6 addresses simply don’t have that feature. If they had kept the 4-chunk format and made it alphanumeric, or added a chunk and made it hexadecimal, or something along those lines, I think they could have reasonably alleviated the problem of running out of addresses while not making the addresses SO unfriendly to remember.
But when designers bring things like that up, you get “it’s really not that complicated,” or “I explained this to my 200 year old grandmother over tea/my 16 month old child over the course of a diaper change/my non-technical wife that I intellectually respect less than I should/etc. and they wrote a book on it the next day,” kind of crap. Human factors engineering. Ergonomics matter in technical products.
NAT doesn't solve everything, and creates a whole new class of problems that you can just avoid by adopting IPv6 natively. And it's definitely not being ignored at larger companies.
In particular, just off the top of my head...
- T-Mobile US doesn't even assign clients an IPv4 address anymore. Their entire network is IPv6 native.
- Many cloud providers charge extra for IPv4 addresses, but give IPv6 addresses out for free.
For trivial cases NAT is easy, for complex situations it's a nightmare. I've been fighting a lonely battle against multiple-NAT VPNs as being the solution to the wrong problem for longer than I care to remember, and I'm tired boss. A few years ago we had a client site go offline because a local network guy just didn't like IPv6 and turned it off, not realizing that a huge amount of stuff was happening automatically and that's why he hadn't been needing to work on it.
This is not even funny to read, given huge networks like T-Mobile USA being IPv6-only.
Yep, mobile device space ISPs again which is what keeps being argued. IPv6 only connections will never gain full traction outside of the mobile marketplace.
They are using IPv6 as a fancy transport protocol for IPv4 NAT.
By being IPv6-only they are effectively making their users to preferentially connect over native IPv6 though.
Personal anecdote, but once you have IPv6 setup properly (meaning your devices prefer IPv6 over IPv4) 70-80% of your internet traffic will be IPv6.
The NAT64 is really just there for the holdouts.
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That's a bit like saying AC electricity was just a fancy way of delivering what customers really wanted, DC energy.
I'm sure that DC customers used their Edison DC equipment for decades after the grid went AC only; but in the long run the newer, flexible, lower overhead system became the default for new equipment and the compatibility cludges were abandoned.
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No; most sites I reach from the phone seem to be reached via IPv6. E.g. hitting whatismyip.org exposes an IPv6 (though mentions an IPv4 because they're trying to discover that, too). Some sites do not support IPv6; for those indeed there's a XLAT464 service.
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It was?
Isn’t it what all the cell phones networks use these days? And most ISP’s?
They may hand the end user device a IPv4 address but don’t they actually use IPv6?
Yes as I said in a sibling post the telcos are the only ones using it, and that is the only reason that graphs like the google client one exist. That is only because it already exists and is cheaper than using NAT when you have hundreds of millions of clients.
IPv6 only ISPs will never leave the mobile space.
Maybe in the US. I've seen IPv6-only connections via DS-Lite in more than one other country on wired home ISPs.
“The largest ISPs are the only ones using it” is another way of describing it as ubiquitous.
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AWS charges for ipv4 addresses but ipv6 addresses are free. ipv4 with NAT doesn't supercede ipv6, it just extends its life.
What are you even basing that on? Here are some facts:
- You have to pay money to get a static IPv4 address for cloud machines on eg AWS. Anything needing a static IPv4 will cost more and more as demand increases. NAT doesn’t exactly fix that.
- Mainstream IoT protocols have a hard dependency on IPv6 (eg Matter/Thread). Not to mention plenty of 5g deployments.
- Many modern networks quietly use IPv6 internally. I mean routing is simpler without NAT.
So it almost definitely won’t die. It’s more likely it’ll slowly and quietly continue growing behind the scenes, even if consumers are still seeing IPv4 on their home networks.
IPv4 addresses have been dropping in price for a few years and are cheaper in real terms than at my point in the last 15
> IPv4 addresses have been dropping in price for a few years and are cheaper in real terms than at my point in the last 15
More IPv6 deployments may (ironically?) help reduce IPv4 prices as you can get IPv6 'for free' and have Internet connectivity (and not have to worry about exhaustion in any practical way). Doing CG-NAT could reduce the number IPv4 addresses you need to acquire.
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Matter/Thread use private IPv6 addresses so it's just an implementation detail. Nobody is exposing light switches to the public Internet.
NAT fixes it in the sense that blocks become available when providers switch to CGNAT.
https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
People love this graph and regularly tout it as if it explains full internet usage. Especially when they dont bother to add any explanation or comment alongside it.
This graph is mainly due to the fact that telcos use IPv6 for mobile devices, nothing more. Over time you will see that graph flatline and peter out as mobile device uage reaches critical mass.
In US even desktops have 45% adoption rate: https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=i...
afaik every single major US fixed line ISP is rolling out ipv6.
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It seems more the other end of the stick: the IPv4 side of the graph is mainly held up due to corporations. The consumer internet continues to switch, but corporate VPNs are going to continue to drag down the numbers until corporations get charged enough for IPv4 address space that bottom lines start to notice.
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Every major ISP in the US, India, and most of the rest of Asia that I’ve seen is handing out and using IPv6 now too.
Hell, chances are if you got a new router (like any new client) for your ISP, you’d be on v6 too.
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It was simply to point out that you are objectively incorrect. No commentary was necessary. My phone and home broadband both use IPv6 primarily.
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> Over time you will see that graph flatline and peter out as mobile device uage reaches critical mass.
...what? The majority of people access the Internet from their phone, and not only since yesterday either. Are you arguing that this is temporary fad somehow?
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What is the source of the seasonality in that graph? Spikes up a little each summer.
Maybe iPhone release time?!
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