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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

>I have been getting native IPv6 from my ISP for nearly six years now.

Meanwhile Danish ISPs refuse to implement IPv6 because: There's no demand.

That completely missing the point and their responsibility in my opinion. There's never going to be any significant IPv6 demand from private users. At work however we have customers that have started to request IPv6 only devices and networks, because there's no need for IPv4 specifically, and in some ways IPv6 is just easier (for example there's no need to do NAT).

For IPv6 to be successful the ISPs need to role it out, regardless of demand. The issue isn't necessarily at the consumer end, but the ISPs are part of the Internet and they need to help develop it, regardless of profitability in the next fiscal year.

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Elsewhere, the ISPs are doing the IPv6 rollout in the worst possible way imaginable: DS-Lite with no PCP for AFTR (i.e. no way to have incoming IPv4), and allocating only /64 subnet, where their CPE is mandatory in router mode, no way to switch it to bridge mode (thus losing control of your own gateway. I'm talking about you, UPC/Liberty Global).

For just consuming the web, it is fine. For switching from public IPv4, is is insufficient.

NAT traversal (hole punching) works for CGN well, doesn't it? sure you need a coordinator/RP between to CGNed users, but that is not really an issue as far as I know.

Hole punching works for applications that are designed for it, and can invoke the coordinator. Sometimes, you just want plain old incoming connection (in my case, VPN).

BTH, I've never tested whether it works with CGNAT or not. It would be additional hop to jump if I would give up my IPv4 address, which obviously I'm not going to.

End user residential connections usually need a DynDNS as there's no guarantee you'll get the same IP for any foreseeable time period. So dynDNS could be bundled with hole punching. (It just allocates a port on the CGNAT, due to cost concerns I'm guessing these are rather dumb TCP/UDP devices, so almost anything will work through them.)

Of course it's a lot messier than getting a static private address allocated.

This will not help you if you have something like an IP camera that you want to access from outside your home, since the address will change frequently.

The only good thing about UPC/Liberty global's implementation of DS lite (now "Ziggo" where I live) is that they will switch it back to IPv4 with a single phone call to the help desk. I can live without IPv6, I cannot live without being able to reach my home server and IoT things.

For SoHo stuff people already need a DynDNS, and they could bundle that with NAT hole punching pretty easily.

Though of course it'd be nice to get a private static address.

I don't think the success of IPv6 as a whole hinges on these residential ISPs. I think there is enough momentum for IPv6 already (mobile users especially) that we get a healthy coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6, where new stuff gets designed for an IPv6 fastpath and limited support for IPv4 legacy shims for the "long tail" of adoption.

I guess the ISP space isn't competitive enough that they will ever go "looks like our ipv4 users get shitty latency and more congestion on facebook than the competitor's ipv6 users, so we're gonna upgrade next year!", but their IPv4 setups will probably eventually succumb to attrition too and be replaced by IPv6 gear.

>> Meanwhile Danish ISPs refuse to implement IPv6 because: There's no demand. That completely missing the point and their responsibility in my opinion.

Responsibility to whom?

If there's no significant demand from end-users for something, then we're relying on there being a benefit for access providers.

>> For IPv6 to be successful the ISPs need to role it out, regardless of demand.

>> regardless of profitability

Can anyone give examples of a successful technology roll-out where there was no demand, and no profit to be made?

If industries can't self regulate and play nicely, the big bad government will come with their regulations and I'm sure they won't like those.

> Can anyone give examples of a successful technology roll-out where there was no demand, and no profit to be made?

Seat belts, airbags and other safety systems in cars (like ABS, VSC, etc). Emission control systems in cars.

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