I wonder what they got it for? if just for more IPs for AWS stuff, or if it's for something like IoT stuff?
At $14 per IP: 2^24 * $14 = $235mm
Price per IP estimated from:
https://www.ipv4auctions.com/
Depending on how much it actually cost I feel like it could be a number of things from simple branding to nefarious traffic shaping. If you're an AWS shop maybe they want you to be able to set simple bypass/static route for 3.0.0.0/8.
GCP only supports it on the edge for their load balancers for instance.
[1] Cali., Denver, Zurich, Hong Kong
On the hosting service I use, you can rent an IPv6 only host and you pay less. Why would you pay for an IPv4 address if you don't need it ?
Last I recall (years ago) my buddy was running some type of VPN through Comcast just to be able to use IPv6 properly. That's when I decided it was still too new for me.
Clearly I don't know anything on the subject, and I'm not claiming to. These are one of the areas where I don't know, don't desire to know, and want it to "just work". I am however interested in making my applications compliant asap, but until I can reliably use it, I've not even attempted.
So with that big pile of ignorance, are we "there yet"? Ie, could I build applications and run them on a IPv6 compatible host, with hit it with my home ISP with a reasonable expectation that everything will work? (assuming my code works, of course).
I feel like I need a "caniuseIPv6.com" site, similar to https://caniuse.com. From the outside, IPv6 implementation and support seems bizarrely cryptic.
On the modem side, nothing needed to be done for IPv6. Any firmware updates or configuration needed is done by Comcast.
On the router side, there is a dedicated IPv6 configuration page. Settings are:
• Connection Type: Native
• All other available settings: Set to either 'Enable' or 'Stateless'.
That was it. My Mac has IPv6 configuration set to configure 'Automatically', and I get an IP. If I go to plain Google and ask it "what's my ip" I get a IPv6 IP back.
On my iPhone, on wifi, if I do the same "what's my ip" Google search, I get an IPv6 back. My carrier is Ting GSM; if I turn off wifi and do the same Google search, I get a different IPv6 IP back.
At work, IPv6 is rolling out _very_ slowly, but I was able to get a fixed IPv6 address. That has been programmed into the configuration for my laptop's USB-Ethernet adapter, so I have IPv6 at my desk at work. Although most work services are not IPv6-enabled, DNS is.
And at home, IPv6 is enabled and is in active use, both on desktop and on mobile.
As for testing, I suggest https://test-ipv6.com and https://ipv6test.google.com
(Yes, all IPv4 addresses can be represented as IPv6 addresses in a reserved zero prefix network, some network APIs just offer IPv6 and then treat IPv4 addresses this way for convenience, but we obviously don't route packets this way since those would be IPv6 packets, yet they're for an IPv4 destination which can't read them)
In some very large deployments they do v6-only. Everything internally is IPv6, when you connect to that IPv4 only site you'd actually connect to a company-provided gateway that speaks IPv6 on your side but IPv4 to the outside world.
If you're big enough this makes loads of sense - now you have this vast address space for everything, all your systems are simply configured for IPv6 only (not twice the configuration) and it pretty much just works. You buy some specialist appliances at the edge for that translation, but your users only have IPv6 stuff.
I'd welcome someone showing me how that was basically impossible, but I don't see why the entire IPv4 space isn't in a special prefix / address space of ipv6 since they allegedly have so many atoms of mappings.
Neither of these changes are required if there is a dual stack proxy or CDN that sits infront of your application, as they will most likely talk to your application over IPv4.
The other gotcha is if you try to interrogate clientIP for analytics, authorization, geo-ip etc, which may need a little more care.
(As a comcast customer that "one day" for me was several years ago)
Lots of things fail if you're IPv6 only, but it was a useful experiment and I'll try it again in a year or two.
Right now most of my hosts are dual-stack, and I have a /64 setup for my home network.
Ok, the xkcd is about nanobots with a volume of "a few cubic microns"[1], whereas atoms are much smaller.
[1] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/865:_Nanobots
At home you've been using IPv6 passively for 18 months, it works and you never noticed.
Hence the big up spike on weekends and major holidays.
IPv6 is the future of IP connectivity, that is not going to change.
If you want an IPv6 address over your existing IPv4 connectivity, you can get one in a number of ways - that’s an overlay network that is already supported by a massive amount of hardware and free software.
And it's the general-purpose computing devices that are lagging in IPv6 support, not the networking-centric hardware implementations. It's been quite a while since business-quality networking devices shipped without IPv6 support.
For those home / small-business routers which still lack support, that is probably going to be a software implementation either way, and at the very least the software nature of any IPv6 implementation added through a "firmware" update (really just an OS update) won't be a performance bottleneck for those devices.
In some of those cases a firmware update has even been released by the manufacturer, just not applied. In many more, IPv6 is supported by the networking device and the software/firmware but simply disabled, or not supported by one or both of the ISP and the end-user device.
And how many will they need to install? Will everyone install a generic one that all software just works with? Kinda sounds like IPv6, just with the added network in network overheads, and a competitor (IPv6) that's years ahead in terms of real world deployment.
And then there's the suggestion ISPs could run these popular overlay network nodes, that customers don't even need IP. I'll pass on slicing up the internet into walled gardens that's ISPs get to choose which overlay networks you can access!
And ISPs shouldn't be able to do any harm with those transport nodes, they shouldn't be able to even see what kind of stuff those nodes proxy.
Ignoring that massive issue, which daemons get installed? Who installs them? Who updates them? End users won't. So it's up to the Software+OS vendor and ISP - Just like IPv6.
Don't get me wrong, IPv6 has been, so far, a pretty epic failure in terms of adoption. But your plan seems to put it all in the hands of the exact same people, but at the same time, gives them a massive incentive to partition the internet into a whole bunch of tiny walled gardens.
Why should this turn out any better than IPv6?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IPv6_tunnel_brokers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6to4
The time to bikeshed this stuff is long, long passed, take the time, understand the options, stop writing off ipv6 as impractical, or never going to happen, nobody is writing a (different) overlay network.
No clear prescriptions for legacy v4 <-> v6 translations, religious hate of NAT, unfortunate separator character (the colon) that is used for domain:port separation. Separate stack prescriptions.
I honestly think it would have been easier to do a rolling upgrade of the internet to support bigger numbers in the four coordinates of IP addresses and increase the number of ports.
I'm obviously not a deep networking expert, but as I've been exposed to IPv6 test conversions it's been painful.
It should never have been adopted in the first place but now it's the only practical option for moving forward.
Customer <> us Office <> us Us @aws <> us @azure
With having so many customers there are probably enough with use cases which requires that ipv4 and having them is probably a necessity.