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Comment by optimog | Hacker News Reader

As a Belgian, can anyone explain why the adoption of IPv6 in Belgium is that high (51,51%) compared to all the other countries?

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Because the dominant ISP (Telenet) has enabled IPv6 by default on all their residential gateways. And because they (possibly somewhat surprisingly) have some smart people working for them.

That's remarkable, since Telenet is part of Liberty Global, who owns so many ISP's. Eg. neighbouring country The Netherlands has Ziggo (also owned by Liberty Global). Adaptation in The Netherlands is only 9 pct. Makes me wonder if Belgium is used as a technical testing playground for Liberty Global or if it's just a smart move by Telenet.

When I got a new connection from Ziggo last year I got an ipv6 adres, so they seem to have started to roll this out in the Netherlands as well.

Depending on where you are in the Netherlands Ziggo will give proper Dual Stack or DS-lite to new customers. It reflects the networks that Ziggo was cobbled together from. If you are in a former UPC area you probably want to call them and ask them to downgrade you back to IPv4 (they do this for free). Their DS-lite solution employs carrier grade NAT which blows dog chunks.

Would that DS-lite solution explain why VPN connections to my AWS vps seem really spotty on ipv6 connections?

DS-Lite[0] means you have proper native IPv6 but only a tunnel on top of that for v4, so it's unlikely that IPv6 connections are negatively affected by this setup.

[0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6333

Edit: On the other hand, if connections via IPv4 were spotty I would not hesitate to suggest problems with NAT or path MTU.

Usually it takes just one enthusiastic guy on the tech team to make things like IPv6 happen.

For most ISP's today, enabling IPv6 is just a matter of a lot of reconfiguration and then a bunch of testing.

Makes me wonder if Belgium is used as a technical testing playground for Liberty Global

Not really, UnityMedia Germany is also owned by Liberty Global and we have had IPv6 for years (since I moved here in 2013).

Liberty Global is more of / just an investment company, Telenet probably had their network up before LG took over.

The IPv6 plan started long before LibertyGlobal took an interest in Telenet.

It's the same for Proximus residential gateways, they all have an ipv6.

Mostly Telenet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_deployment#Belgium

My understanding is that for historical reasons the newer ISPs (mostly cable providers) were running out of IPv4 addresses. They then switched their own networks over to IPv6, meaning that if you live in Belgium, there's a very high chance your router has an external IPv6 address and not an IPv4 one.

Because they were running out of IPv4 addresses and they are legally required to not have more than IIRC 16 customers behind one address at any time for law enforcement reasons, so they figured that CGN wasn't worth it and decided to adopt IPv6 instead.

ISP's could argue that websites should be logging source port numbers of tcp connections. That would allow them to have thousands of customers behind the same IP, and still able to identify a single one.

No, they couldn't, because that would be illegal. An ISP cannot just record the communication of their customers because it makes thing cheaper for them.

Also, that easily generates petabytes of logs, so it's not really cheap either.

I find the amount of effort people still put into not learning IPv6 quite staggering.

This kinda stuff is clearly madness.

BTW, I just noticed: No, you cannot realistically have thousands of customers behind the same IP. There are only 65535 TCP ports per IP address, just loading your typical website that loads resources from tons of domains can easily need a hundred ports at once.

You only need 1 port for a connection per domain. You can reuse the same source port for different domains.

So only 65,535 customers can establish a connection to facebook.com from the same ip.

Not the case. All Telenet customers still get at least 1 public IPv4 address without NAT.

Not all customers do. Professional contracts and people asking special stuff or modifying their (Telenet-managed) firewall settings automatically get one. Other consumers - which is the large part of their customer base - get IPv6 with CGN/NAT64 with maximum 16 clients NAT'ed behind a public IPv4 address for legal wiretap+privacy reasons.

Really? I've never seen anyone with a shared IPv4. Maybe because every time I look into it the first thing I do is modify their firewall settings slightly. Heh.

As an end-customer in Germany, 30.76% is a lie. Most big ISP don't even have any (public) plans to support at least a double-stack. However, as rumours say, internally it's all v6 now. The best you can hope for (providing you have a custom and not supplied router) is 6to4.

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