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Comment by varshithr | Hacker News Reader

How is India so far ahead in IPv6 adoption?

Because with IPV4 addresses getting ever more expensive[1] going straight to IPV6 for as much as possible, and placing everything else behind a provider-wide NAT saves you a lot of money. And in India they're trying to modernise as cheaply as possible.

[1]https://www.ipv4auctions.com/

Is it usually cellular ISP that first adopt IPv6? Because there's been a new disruptive player in telecom space called Jio and I am guessing they are behind this rise in IPv6 popularity.

Yes, buying IPv4 address is expensive today. If you have been an ISP for years there is no problem because you bought your IPv4 addresses at yesterday's low prices. If you are a new ISP you pay today's high prices - but ipv6 is nearly free so you roll that out to save money.

Yes, but not always. In my country (Estonia) the biggest ISP (Telia) provides IPv6 for home connections, but not on the mobile network.

As for Reliance Jio, they have over 300 million IPv6 users, with a total IPv6 adoption of 88% [0][1].

[0] http://www.worldipv6launch.org/now-we-are-six/

[1] http://www.worldipv6launch.org/apps/ipv6week/measurement/ima...

Even in the US, I believe the first large-scale IPv6 rollouts were by Verizon and Sprint.

Mobile networks (3g/4g) in India operate on ipv6. Thanks to Jio everyone and their dog has a 4g connection nowadays.

That also makes sense considering the sheer amount of people. With that many devices and people, it just makes more sense than trying to NAT everything at the carrier level.

I wonder if China's ISPs are doing the same thing?

A year back the party decreed a plan to have all Internet users on IPv6 by 2025, with a quarter of them already by the end of this year [0]. There was a test rollout back at the beginning of the summer [1]. I guess we might see a huge rollout before the end of the year to meet the deadline. There's been a slight rebound already [2][3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_deployment#China

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/ipv6-in-china/

[2] https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/AS9808

[3] http://www.worldipv6launch.org/apps/ipv6week/measurement/ima...

I speculate this is not true for China. ISPs in China have to deal with country-wide censorship system which has to be upgraded to support IPv6 traffic. This might be the reason why China has a low IPv6 traffic.

Yes. That's what I thought too.

A quick google search gave me this blog. https://blog.apnic.net/2017/02/07/reliance-jio-boosts-india-...

disclaimer: I know nothing about specifically Indian internet infrastructure.

Probably because they ran into the IPv4 shortage relatively early (address allocations were based on the distribution of nodes in the 1980s or so), and because they didn't get massive internet adoption early enough to need to fall back on carrier-grade NAT like Russia or China.

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