Hacker News Reader

Comment by m348e912 | Hacker News Reader

At this point I was wondering if it would be reasonable to use ipv6 exclusively. I figured ipv6 addressing is reachable by most by now. That's until I tried to reach ipv6.google.com and it failed. So I answered my own question.

View on HN

Even in the countries with the highest adoption, it's only around 50% https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

At the current rate (approximately linear over the last 10 years), in just 30 more years we'll have 100% adoption.

Realistically adoption will slow down if nothing changes, everyone willing to put the effort in for zero immediate reward has already done so, and some will allow their support to degrade due to low usage.

At some point I guess ipv4 availability will really start to collapse and adoption will speed up again.

Not sure which will come first to be honest, but better if adoption is relatively high when the shit evebtually hits the fan, to avoid the temptation of insane NAT solutions.

Adoption is already slowing down, by half in 2020 vs 2019.

https://blog.apnic.net/2021/02/08/ipv6-in-2020/

I bet that at some point we'll have another inflection point, as the IPv4 prices soar and the IPv6 becomes commonplace enough for some (free/hobbyist-run?) services to say: "sorry, IPv6 only".

An inflexion point can go either way, the question is have we already passed that point with v6 or is this the start of a decline that ends with it failing to replace v4? (Stealing this from Geoff Huston, see page 41 of his presentation [0])

[0] https://www.potaroo.net/presentations/2021-03-02-ipv6-deploy...

You're quite the optimist.

Or someone less tech savvy but legally savvy figures out that IPv4s are scarce resources, just like, for example, housing, and finds a way to impose their use through regulation in some contexts and to ban their use in other contexts.

Why even pay for IPv4 addresses? Who says who gets to "use" them?

Markets generally are good for determining allocation of scarce resources. They push people with the ability to substitute to do that, in this case, use ipv6. Pay for ipv4 so nobody takes more than he needs. Imperfect but probably the least bad option, just waiting to get ipv6 over time hasnt worked so maybe scarcity and high prices do it.

How do you even pay for IPv4? You should just be able to advertise BGP routes to whatever you want.

> At some point I guess ipv4 availability will really start to collapse and adoption will speed up again.

I think this will be more like a linear function. As the IPv4 prices increase, the IPv6 adoption increases until it reaches 100%. I don't think that there will be a collapse.

IPv6 adoption figures are artificially inflated by LTE and 5G smartphone connections (which are invariably IPv6) whereas landline/DSL/DOCSIS connections are still IPv4 on so many ISPs.

I'll say one thing about Comcast in the US: they have atrocious customer service, scummy upselling, and that horrid wi-fi network sharing... but they do 2 things that mean I'll forever give them a free-pass:

1. They have CBC channels in the US so I can watch the Olympics without watching NBC's horribly dumbed-down, artificially time-shifted, and condescending feed.

2. They have a rock solid IPv6 network for everyone.

And many countries have zero adoption.

My ISP had some sort of v4 outage where only v6 worked fine. That was really nice except that even services or games that supposedly work over v6 rely on v4 and are borderline unusable without it.

Yeah I had some issue where my home router's NAT died so IPv4 broke, but IPv6 kept working. My wife said that Google, YouTube, Facebook etc work but nothing else does. It didn't take me long to realize what was happening.

Making hobby projects ipv6-only would be a start.

Since I'm using Hetzner Cloud for my hobby cluster, this is as good a kick as any to start moving that stuff to ipv6.

(Although there's no mention whether HCloud ipv4 pricing is actually affected by those changes)

Hetzner Cloud is adjusting the price for new CX11 and CPX11 instances starting on 1st September.

CX11 goes from 2,49€ to 3,49€ excl. VAT, CPX11 from 3,49€ to 3,99€.

New Floating IPs will also cost more from 1st August - 3€ instead of 1€.

This does not affect existing instances and existing floating IPs.

Source: Received an email from Hetzner as a customer with the affected instances.

You should still get an IPv4 address with the VM for free. But you can make sure you support IPv6 anyway for the day, when even the very first IPv4 will cost extra.

Yes I'm currently using floating IPs as ingress addresses, and I'll switch to IPv6 ones.

I announced an OpenGrok-based search engine project on 2013-04-01, launching BXR.SU exclusively on IPv6 for the first few weeks of availability.

https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2013-Apr...

IPv4 was added a few weeks afterwards.

Google used to do DNS-based filtering of IPv6.

ipv6.google.com works on my side, as does www.google.com over IPv6 just fine, too.

I just checked all the FAANG websites, and it appears that www.amazon.com is the only one that doesn't have an IPv6 record.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com