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Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

I decided to commit to using IPv6 a couple of years ago and got my personal servers serving my sites in a dual-stack. I also got my home router set up for it, getting my subnet from my ISP and making sure that all of my home devices were getting addresses.

It was only after doing this that I realized the problem with IPv6 adoption in the US: the network sucks! Most ISPs (including mine) are using 6rd gateways to get their customers onto the IPv6 backbone. The gateway servers are poorly placed (rarely local) and totally overloaded. The performance was so bad that it was making my everyday web browsing experience feel broken. I killed v6 at home and haven't looked back.

Maybe some day ISPs will do a proper deployment with real routing and I will try it again.

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That is generally the opposite of reality. IPv6 is generally faster than IPv4.

I don't know what "a couple of years ago" is, but all tier-1 ISPs have IPv6 backbones. There should be no reason for your access ISP to have to tunnel anything to get to a tier-1.

Your statement "Most ISPs (including mine) are using 6rd gateways to get their customers onto the IPv6 backbone" is kind of a red flag. If ISPs aren't connected to a backbone, can you even call them an ISP?

Some ISPs (I don't know if it's accurate to say most) have last-mile or middle-mile equipment that does not support IPv6 and they can't afford to upgrade it, hence kludges like 6rd. Of course good ISPs don't use kludges, but then you're getting into no true Scotsman territory.

This is the experience I had with CenturyLink, they support IPv6 via 6rd and it sucks. It's annoying I don't have native IPv6 support with CableOne either (and they're too cheap to bother upgrading anything beyond the DOCSIS head-ends to charge you more money), but I'd rather use a Hurricane Electric tunnel if my ISP can't give me native v6 in the first place.

AT&T has deployed 6RD instead of native dual-stack. I can get close to gigabit on IPv4, but max out at 80mbps if I use their 6RD gateway.

It also crashes some of their modems! Every few hours through normal traffic, in under a minute if I quickly visit many IPv6 addresses.

AT&T has some areas on native dual-stack now. I gather they are working on moving away from 6rd.

I think you're conflating "backbone" with metro distribution. I'm pretty sure that all of the big US ISPs have native IPv6 on the backbone, but very few can bring native IPv6 to your home.

Most of the big US ISPs are using 6rd: AT&T, CenturyLink, and Cox. As far as I know, Comcast is the only one with true IPv6 to the curb but I might be wrong about that.

Comcast and Charter both have native IPv6 which is about 50% of the US market.

Comcast is a dual stack network, and their IPv6 network is faster and better than their IPv4 network. Faster RTT between two endpoints, and overall I am happy to have IPv6 turned on.

On the last graph, it identify the current period as the begining of the early majority starting to switch over to ipv6. ISP are not the fastest institutions out there, and it will likely exist a large variance where v6 is either much greater or much worse than v4 traffic.

There exist this project that track performance for v6 vs v4. In some countries v6 has above performance to v4, in others places it is worse. You seems to had the bad luck of getting the worse end of the variance.

Why not set up your own tunnel with Hurricane Electric instead?

That's the same problem: your IPv6 is worse than your IPv4.

The lesson learned from 6bone, HE, 6to4, 6rd, and Teredo is that we need native IPv6 or nothing. Tunneled IPv6 is worse than no IPv6 due to its unreliability.

I'm actually quite impressed with HE.

They are essentially donating IPv6 bandwidth to the tune of 50Mbit per tunnel.

For home users, Netflix blocks Hurricane Electric (sometimes?) because it can serve as a proxy for non-US users. I haven't had it happen in every case, but it blocked users at work from connecting and at home I got US Netflix instead of Canadian.

Tunneled IPv6 through HE is more reliable than the average big ISP 6rd gateway but it doesn't solve the problem of latency. More than likely, you're still crossing a significant amount of network distance just to get to their gateway and then however much farther to your destination. The latency just isn't worth it.

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