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Comment by Tharkun | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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