Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]
ripe76.ripe.net
ripe76.ripe.net
I was client at "Kabel Deutschland, Germany" and they offer native IPv6 for their customers, with "Dual stack lite" as the routing option to reach the IPv4 world. It performed poorly for me, perhaps due to bad load balancing of the IPv4-gateways. I switched to a buisness plan (+10EUR/month) of the same ISP and now have an own static IPv4 adress and not even native access to IPv6 any more. This is a clear statement how they think about their IPv6 support.
I really wish RIPE could force ISPs to release the addresses they don't need :(
An ISP who cannot offer a proper IPv6+IPv4 internet access should not be refered to as an ISP. He supports IPv6<->IPv4 segregation, instead.
That's a very relevant stat when it comes to provisioning CGNAT capacity for your customer base.
Are you on DSL by any chance?
I assume that as usual, it will be streamed live and the video recording should appear here: https://ripe76.ripe.net/programme/meeting-plan/ipv6-wg/
This upcoming RIPE meeting has so many interesting talks... I invite you to "invest" some time going through the program (not all slides are available yet, as it starts tomorrow)!
You can't measure the wealth of an ISP by the wealth of its customer base. ISP businesses are very different in each country. In one country there could be no ISP-hostile regulations, low barriers of entry, a lot of competition, cheap labor, resulting in like $5 ARPU in urban areas and low margins. In another country ISPs could manage to monopolize the market with regulations creating a lot of burden for smaller players, resulting in like $20 ARPU and very high margins. In some countries it is also possible for rent seekers that provide infrastructure for ISPs to suck all the revenue, still allowing competition and leaving them with big ARPUs but low margins.
I suspect the hunch in the title is right though. ISPs from the least competitive markets and therefore rich can afford and do deploy IPv6. While ISPs from the most competitive markets cannot afford bothering with IPv6 and since there is no demand for it yet at all, they don't deploy it. But if demand for IPv6 starts growing for some reason, ISPs from competitive markets will of course deploy it.
I switched ISPs for my fibre connection because my previous one had an absolutely terrible IPv6 implementation. I made sure to let them know why they lost me as a customer, but it's very likely that never happened to them before or since.
I think IPSs can get away with horrible service and abominations like CGNAT for quite some time before it gets so bad that IPv6 gets properly deployed.
My best theory is it has to do with adoption of mobile ISPs.
A few years ago, there was a mad push to have public IPv6 addresses because “soon” customers would be unable to reach your servers since they were only going to be given IPv6 addresses. Clearly, that hasn’t been the case.
It's 2018, nobody would be insane enough to try that
It's still very popular because it's cheaper; no expensive servers to run for customers and they can still play if you eventually shut down your services.
The issue is that most businesses are now so well-acquainted with NAT-ting, they don't really care for IP addresses. In fact, the more opaque your network topology is to the outside, the better from a security point of view. Every app works through http these days (because proxies are mandatory, again for security), so there is little need for real addresses.
When it comes to consumer ISPs, who are the people paying for the high-end packages?
> The issue is that most businesses are now so well-acquainted with NAT-ting, they don't really care for IP addresses. In fact, the more opaque your network topology is to the outside, the better from a security point of view. Every app works through http these days (because proxies are mandatory, again for security), so there is little need for real addresses.
Existing large businesses are happy with their current ways of doing things, sure. But those have never been the early adopters. IPv6 suits the startups (anyone who's working with containers hits problems from reusing the same subnets sooner or later) and it suits businesses that have to merge existing networks. No-one wants to be first, but there will come a point where the IPv4 costs are high enough to be worth doing something about.
Docker doesn't support IPv6, I think.
Gamers don't need high speed or thousands of services and telly channels, just good ping
A conslutant friend told a story about a customer who had been through a few mergers and demergers. One nightly database dump there involved parts of one database being copied to another, both internal to the same company, through five layers of NAT. One of the routers had a 1500-line NAT configuration.
That matches what the presentation says: IPv6 is growing roughly as the internet grows, i.e. new ISPs go with it, because if you are starting from scratch, might as well do things in the modern way. (If you mean vanilla web startup, I think they have enough problems without risking to bork things up by misconfiguring a feature nobody really asks for...)
> When it comes to consumer ISPs, who are the people paying for the high-end packages?
Movie watchers and other media addicts; and they don't really care about IP addresses.
IMHO a lot of bigger ISPs have looked at the struggles of early adopters and decided the effort is not worth it. Most of their budgets these days go towards traffic shaping and caching, where IPv6 doesn't really help much. Established businesses are not clamouring for the feature, so why bother?
I agree that at some point things will change. I think the point of the article was that we thought we had reached that threshold a few years ago, but it looks like it wasn't really the case.
A family of 5 where you need the bandwidth if everyone starts streaming videos at the same time. For gaming you'd advertise ping times, I haven't really seen that recently.
We can call it "IPv6walling."
They aren't quite killer applications though, so it won't push many to IPv6. Possibly as the internet gets larger, some hosting providers simply won't have any free IPv4 addresses left? I guess that could be solved by putting CloudFlare in front of the server to provide an IPv4 address. It's strange, I used to do that to provide IPv6 years ago.
So there'd be no: "I want this IPv6" calls to the ISP.
I suppose that you could add a long artificial delay to the IPv4 service.
EDIT: The only reason I know this is because at some point last year I asked google what my IP address was and was surprised to find it was an IPv6 address, but then later on apt broke, because one of the packages (node?) was only checking an IPv6 address and so now whenever I update I have to force apt to use IPv4.
That's not a guarantee though. Verizon are rich, yet their fiber residential network has been "in the process"[1] of deploying IPv6 for years, and nothing is anywhere in sight still.
1. https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/internet/getting...
I do think this is a valid indicator in "not fully developped yet" countries, but I don't think its very representative for others.
As for the slow down some ISP in france started to regroup several clients under the same IPV4 addr, essentially assigning them the said ipv4 and a range of ports, some sort of PAT at the ISP level, I don't know if it is an isolated solution but it might explain part of the slow down. Doesn't explain why they do it tho.
My office is on Meraki hardware, which is not yet IPv6-ready. Can't quite wrap my mind around the latter. I didn't pay for the hardware or initial 3 years, and I certainly won't be extending the license if support isn't ready.
As a side note, I'd look closely at router implementations as you deploy in home and other small networks. Too many consumer-grade hardware companies rely on NAT versus proper firewall rules to restrict inbound traffic. I don't expect the majority of them to get the basic protections right as we move to publicly addressed IPv6 networks.
How much would you pay to access the ipv6 internet?
What are support costs for ipv6 endpoints / compatibility needs / help desk / securing / understanding / training all techs etc vs ipv4?
= ISP motivation?
ipv4 is relatively well understood, existing infrastructure to serve it, and people are willing to pay MORE to access the ipv4 internet, and basically won't pay anything to access ipv6 only internet.
If you've used ipv6 actively, plenty of stuff doesn't play well, lots of weird hangs on connections etc in deployed contexts, and even with ipv6 you can't seem to actually go endpoint to endpoint (ie, printer at work from computer at home easily). My ipv4 based vpn works great though (and doesn't support ipv6 properly). I started down path of hassling vendors, but it's not worth it. You've got your work ISP to hassle, then fix work internet gateway, then get firewall sorted, then get internal network sorted (yes, the copier runs some ancient crap), then get each employees home internet sorted, then all their machines, then all the related software. They couldn't have made the migration path harder if they had tried.
IPv6 deployment is a matter of politics. It depends on the opinions of the network personnel, on the hardware they have in their core network, on the hardware their customers have (CPEs), on the support contracts they have, etc. That's what decides whether they put a CGNAT in place, whether they buy more IPv4 addresses, or whether they deploy IPv6.
Are you saying there are network engineers/management at ISPs who don't believe IPv6 is an imperative? As someone who in a former life worked inside large ISPs on the networking side I can tell you that that view would be quite rare. What would be the politics exactly?
Most ISPs run Juniper and Cisco gear in their core, both of these have have been capable of routing v6 for well over a decade now. Additionally if you are running older gear you would have hit the 512K route TCAM limit years ago.[1]
None of this would have anything to do with existing support contracts either. You would be pretty hard-pressed to find a rev of JunOS or IOS/NXOS that didn't support v6.
It's actually much more efficient to route v6 than v4. The global IPv4 table 719K prefixes now while IPv6 has 52K See:
http://www.cidr-report.org/as2.0/
and
http://www.cidr-report.org/v6/as2.0/
Lastly the fee schedule for IPv6 allocations from RIRs are not cost prohibitive for an ISP. Using ARIN as an example here:
https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html
[1] https://blogs.cisco.com/sp/global-internet-routing-table-rea...
If the rest of your message is true, why are the ipv6 numbers so low, if it's not because of politics?
I personally expected IPv6 growth to slow down gradually. I find it very odd that the growth hit a wall like that. Oversimplifying somewhat: The number of new v6-capable users increased every month, then boom, zero.
I also find it odd that politics would have no effect at 13% or 14% deployment and then block growth entirely at 15%.
In this context it has to mean something that didn't impede IPv6 growth at all for a while, then suddenly blocked IPv6 growth completely. Can't imagine what it would be.
(Sorry, didn't notice the comment until much too long had passed. I realise noone's going to read this. Oh well.)
Where is this? What do you have to back up this claim?
>how does that work when a customer's IPv4 address changes?
As far as I can tell, it wouldn't. But I don't see what your point is.
I'm not in Australia, but I've had the same IP for decades, even having gone through multiple routers, so it's probably tied to the DSLAM port I'm connected to, which makes sense for such a billing scheme. Also might be why I don't have IPv6 yet either.
You'd end up needing a much smaller array for v6 -- small enough that you could fit it into the presumably-unused parts of those 2^32 arrays that correspond to the v4 class E space.
Unfortunately, this is true for at least one major ISP in the USA. IPv6 support is seen as a low priority internally, as they work to merely keep their devices online.
One huge secret about Juniper devices is that the hardware is remarkably unreliable. At one company, a partial Juniper SSG failure prevented a failover to good hardware. At another, we so many Juniper SRX RMAs that we had a full time network engineer handling the RMA paperwork. (Admittedly, they said we were their biggest client, and had a bigger implementation than Juniper's own network lab.) They have a bad habit of failing on reboot - one was operating fine, we reboot it and it reports errors. This happened repeatedly in several data centers - at one point we had 1/6 of our data centers non-redundant while we waited for RMA shipping.
This is patently untrue. The MTTF is the same as Cisco gear. The only reason this would be a "huge secret" is because it is not widely held opinion.
There are bad revision of chipsets on certain boards from time to time yes. And if you place a large order you will likely feel that pain if you're shipped boards with those revs. I know this first hand and with SRXs. Firewalls are but one segment of their product line and the one that was never their core strength(in fact this was the Netscreen acquisition.)
The T4000 and MX 960s are both "big iron" and in both the core and edge of Tier 1 ISPs. The reputation of these are exceptional and for good reason. Their EX/QFX ToR switches also have a well-deserved reputation.
To use your anecdotal experience with on particular segment of their product line and make a sweeping generalization of the quality of their entire offering is absurd.
I say this as someone who doesn't have a horse in the race and has very little love for network hardware vendors in general.
Juniper even instructed us to reboot the passive node before any failover, just to catch these issues.