If only ISPs actually bothered giving out IPv6 addresses to their customers. It's 2021, I have a 1 Gbps FTTH connection and still no trace of IPv6. This is a complete disgrace.
Claiming that they don't see a return on investment is equally silly. Most ISPs have rolled out fibre, or new equipment in the last 10 years. They could just have rolled out IPv6 when new equipment came online over the last decade.
Maybe the ISP deliberately bought equipment without IPv6 support, like we did, but by accident. Two years ago we bought new Cisco equipment, for a remote office, only to discover that there where no IPv6 support. So back to Cisco it went. Why did Cisco even bother to make network equipment that doesn't support IPv6?
Still, it's better than IBM who claims IPv6 support in their software, but haven't bothered to test it the last 7 years, so it doesn't actually work in the current versions.
The same reason credit-card payment terminal people sold almost-EMV terminals to retailers in the US around 2010-2015: so their customers will come back 5 years later needing another upgrade to something they should have bought originally.
It's not circular logic, it's no loose ends.
Reminds me of a story in The Dragon Book. (compiler design book from the 1970s) FORTRAN IV doesn't (didn't) allow arrays with more than three dimensions. Because programmers didn't write programs using arrays with more than three dimensions. Programmers didn't write programs using arrays with more than three dimensions because the compiler didn't allow arrays with more than three dimensions.
I just googled Terraria IPv6 and this is the first result I got:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Terraria/comments/cytn2w/terraria_p...
Yeah, people ask you why you are using IPv6 as if ISP customers get to make that decision...
I just switched to full dual stack (by leasing a static IPv4 address from my provider) to be able to handle incoming connections for my VPN. As long as you don't want to host anything on IPv4, dual stack lite is fine.
In other words: the demand is for connectivity--or rather the services being connect gives you, like the ability to view YouTube videos and see tweets--not for addresses.
This is utterly bonkers. While the ethernet cables they give out can likely do 10Gbit (but definitely not 25Gbit) very few people have 10Gbit-capable ethernet or wifi chipsets and there is no way they will actually be able to routinely transmit data at this speed.
Swisscom do 6rd and don't offer static IPv6 either presumably because of how 6rd works. So it is a pain to configure anything except using their own box.
Bit of future proofing, the fibre cables will be in the ground for 10 years and who knows whether consumer devices can routinely do 10G by then. The cost is dominated by the price of digging up the roads, not by sticking a few extra strands in the ducts.
It just feels a bit dishonest to sell a 10G connection and tell the user to speed test on the router's web portal when their PC won't get remotely near that.
You know what's not great? I live in a new building. It was built in ~2015. It's not even on Google Street View.
They decided to go with a commercial solution ("digitalStrom") for Ethernet that caps out at 100Mbit.
I now have to use Wifi to get anywhere close to the 1Gbit I pay for. The lack of forethought (or the grift for the company that bought that tech) is astounding.
Thank god I only rent.
But I wouldn't be surprised if my 50mbps connection is as expensive as your connection, presumably while offering worse service.
- You often only get it in city areas, I say city areas because metro areas include small settlements around the city still connected with the metro. And in many experience it's quite likely the best you can get in that settlements is either way less or unreliable high latency LTE.
- There are faster contracts like 250Mb/40Mb for 45€/Month but availability is spotty, and companies will sell it to you even if not technical available. E.g. most 100Mb contracts say serving 60Mb would still be "valid" for your 100Mb contract.
- It's not uncommon that many DSL of different people will go through choke points in areas with high population density but not that much money, so speeds dropping sometime randomly noticeable are not uncommon.
- It's common that if there are technical problems (which are not uncommon when switching providers) it can take days to fix them, my previous (small) company went a month without proper internet connection due to this, they fell back to using a LTE router temporary but they had to buy it themself it wasn't provided by the internet provider.
A good point is that all the internet contracts tend include a land line phone number and tend to have "unlimited" data volume (which isn't always truly unlimited, but close enough to unlimited).
Frequent stories include internet being so bad that it frequently is short term temporary(<15min) unavailable, randomly temporary super slow internet, or a supposedly 100Mb internet connection frequently slowing down to close to 1Mb causing video conferences to fail. And that is in the city.
Outside of cities it's common to have insanely slow internet all the time to a point that people fall back to use LTE->WLAN routers, but then it's common to hear that the LTE is frequently overloaded around "rush hours" making people at the "outer ranges" of the closest LTE tower lose connection.
The state of the German internet infrastructure is kinda a sad joke.
Through I should note that things differ depending on the area of Germany you are in.
Anyway the best thing I can buy (and get) in my area (in a relatively wealthy area of Berlin) is ~60Mb/10Mb connection which is somewhat reliable (fails 0-4 times every day for ~1-5min each, but it only happens between 2am and 6am, so ok, not a problem and at least one failure is probably the router).
EDIT: Just to be clear the biggest joke are not the ISP's but the politicians which let themself be bribed not only to tolerate but actively support this situation. Through it's also incompetence not to long ago some politician responsible for making regulations in this area stated (and believed) that ???Kb (forgot the actual value but it was less then 1Mb) is high speed internet. It's sad if politician are stuck years in the past and are so arrogant and incompetent that educating them about their mistake is destined to fail.
I monitor my internet with Grafana and can provide stats for these problems for the past few years...
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/600-000-anschluesse-bis-2...
(giggle)
IPv6 is also common. In case of DS-Lite you don't even get your own IPv4 anymore.
But yes it doesn't make sense for local wiring at all. 1Gbit-capable LAN cabling is cheap and ubiquitous. On the other hand it sounds like you have wired ethernet in your building... that's also quite unusual. Mine (70s) does not :)
(Through to be fair you get 50/10 for 30€/Month without limit.)
Offering connections in the Mbit range anno 2021 _is_ bleak, compared to some countries.
This paints a pretty good picture: https://tweakers.net/ext/i/2003127256.jpeg, which comes from this article in 2019: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/158414/aanleg-van-glasvezel-naar...
Plenty of places here are stuck on some form of broadband.
Personally I'm using as a provider "solnet.ch" (I'm their customer since a very long time and so far I'm very happy with them - it's a small provider headquartered in the canton Solothurn, but my connection originates from the canton Zurich), and so far it doesn't seem that they'll offer IPv6, so this matches your statement.
On the other hand, if I remember correctly, I think (not sure and I cannot check this now) that I did have to modify my DNS configuration of my email server related to IPv6 when my parents changed from Swisscom to Sunrise (in 2020 or 2019 - my mother uses my email-server and the IPv6-entries weren't configured correctly) => can it be that Sunrise is using IPv6 as well, at least partially?
I might be wrong, especially regarding what you mean with "natively" (maybe you mean that customers get "only" an IPv6-address, the access to the IPv4-network being fully relayed at the ISP-level?).
Customers actively have to opt in to 6rd on Swisscom and actively have to set up hurricane electric and other IPv6 tunnels. Which means connectivity is limited to people who are going to do that, so service providers on the internet must offer IPv4.
That is suprising, why? Can most people even use that much speed? Netflix only need so much bandwith. Good for homelabs, just most people don't have them.
I've wanted to switch to init7 for a longtime, but Green's service and price is hard to argue with.
IPv6 doesn't make anything go faster, or let customers access anything they can't already access and quite likely it will make difficult to diagnose networking problems which break stuff (speaking from personal experience with IPv6 here!).
I don't think ISPs will be motivated to give out IPv6 addresses routinely until there are important areas of the internet which are IPv6 only. Until that point they would just be making more support burden for themselves.
And I can't see important stuff going IPv6 only any time soon since you don't make a new and exciting service which the majority of people can't access.
And I don't mean only the cost of running it, in my country for example by law the ISP has to maintain a log for 5 or 10 years of all the IP addresses assigned to the user, and in case of a NAT even of all connection and source ports associated with each client. That is a cost that you will save with IPv6, just assigning an entire /64 subnet to every customer.
Of course you will start to save money at the point where we can switch off IPv4, that is not something we will see tomorrow, but if we don't start, the problem will not become better with time, but worse.
IPv6 is an investment for ISP, more than customers (that it's not true they don't care, they maybe don't understand the technical details, but when they find out that they can't play online with their PlayStation/Xbox because they are behind a NAT, they will complain to the ISP).
I don't see that at all.
Everyone still needs an IPv4 to the outside world for compatibility, and pretty much all the time 24/7, so they wouldn't be saving money at all.
And why do they need a NAT? My NAT only happens on my personal router, not at the ISP level. It's not something that concerns the ISP at all.
So I don't understand any of the motivation you're describing.
(And if there are legal requirements around recording connections and ports and whatnot, you'll still have to record each connection made under IPv6 as well right? And may I ask where you live that every TCP connection you establish gets logged for 5-10 years? Recording your assigned IP address is one thing -- and for most people's home connections it rarely changes -- but I've never heard of recording every connection.)
One small thing, though:
> My NAT only happens on my personal router, not at the ISP level. It's not something that concerns the ISP at all.
"Carrier-grade" (what a laughable term) NAT exists. You are fortunate that your ISP does not implement it. Do you happen to have a business plan, or a gigabit plan?
There is also ds-lite which I've read comcast uses extensively. Here customers get ipv6 addresses only, and share a pool of v4 addresses when they exit the ISP's network.
No I've never had carrier NAT. People often need to connect to their home computers from the internet for various purposes -- remote desktop, media server, SSH, NAS, printing, whatever -- which carrier NAT wouldn't allow, as far as I understand it.
I understand ISP's don't want you running high-traffic web servers on a home contract, but I thought it was still considered essential everywhere to at least be able to connect to your personal IP address from the internet for personal usage. (For home internet -- not mobile, obviously.)
Yes! CGN, asymmetric bandwidth plans, dynamic IP addresses, they're all treating the customer as a consumer. As if it's just a cable hookup. It's a shame, really. CGN shouldn't exist.
UDP "hole-punching" would still work with CGN, but in most cases you would need cooperation of a third party. There are also trickier ways like what samy.pl/pwnat does.
I'm on FIOS in NYC now, but when I was on optimum and spectrum they both gave me IPv6 delegations and, as far as I could tell, they never changed. Honestly I would not have switched to FIOS in hindsight -- it's not much better and I don't think I'll ever have IPv6 :(.
The world moving to IPv6 helps them, since they can then use the internet equally, running servers, remote desktop, etc.
> And may I ask where you live that every TCP connection you establish gets logged for 5-10 years?
The EU started doing this, then removed the obligation, then decided it was a threat to democracy and banned it [1]. But since Brexit happened, the UK can continue with whatever they're planning [2].
[2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/internet-connection-records-...
[1] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/eu-supreme-court-...
Is this really true/correct?
Assuming that an ISP would implement a pure IPv6-network for its customers, wouldn't their customers by typing on their PCs e.g. "ping 1.2.3.4" in their terminals be routed automatically through "[internal IPv4 network between customer and ISP] => [ISP's public IPv6 address in Internet being translated to their SINGLE allocated IPv4-address] => [target's IPv4 address]", and then back (to get the ping-reply)? So, some kind of "magic" IPv4[internal customer]=>IPv4[internal ISP] => IPv6[external ISP]=>IPv4[external ISP] => IPv4[target], using NAT or however it's called?
I'm absolutely not good in relation with networking, especially not IPv6 (in theory simple, that was at least the tone of the articles that I read a few years ago, but at that time it has been quite difficult for me to set it up on my root servers), so what I just wrote might be plain wrong :P
Yes, but a more and more services pass to IPv6 you can start to resize your IPv4 infrastructure, and arrive at a point where you will switch it off entirely, as it was done for the transition from analog television to digital one (of course we talk about at least 20 years, but if we don't start it we would never see it).
> And why do they need a NAT? My NAT only happens on my personal router, not at the ISP level. It's not something that concerns the ISP at all.
They need a NAT because they don't have so many public IP address to give one to each customer. So they introduce a second level of NAT, where a group of customers share the same IPv4 public address. That of course causes a lot of problems, especially for online gaming where it's required to open ports, or in general for applications that use p2p protocols.
And so if you want a public IP address dedicated to your connection you have to pay more. I don't know the situation in the US, perhaps your IPS have a ton of public IP addresses they purchased in the past so they can afford to assign to each customer one dedicated address, in my country it's no longer the case with most home connection ISP (and all the mobile ones).
> (And if there are legal requirements around recording connections and ports and whatnot, you'll still have to record each connection made under IPv6 as well right? And may I ask where you live that every TCP connection you establish gets logged for 5-10 years? Recording your assigned IP address is one thing -- and for most people's home connections it rarely changes -- but I've never heard of recording every connection.)
No you don't. The law requires you be able in case of a crime to identify the customer that originated a particular connection. It means that the police goes to the ISP with the time, IP address and source port of the connection and the IPS has to tell the identity of the customer. The method how this is achieved depends on the technology used.
With an IPv4 with public dynamic address, they have to maintain the log of the PPPoE connections, to know at one time the customer that had that address. Not that difficult.
With an IPv4 with a NAT, a group of users shares an address, thus the information of only the address is not sufficient to identify the customer that did that connection. So they have to log all the connection opened by the customer, so they an know, from the IP address and the source port of the connection from which customer originated the connection.
With IPv6, you don't have any of these problems. With so many addresses you can just statically allocate a /64 block of IP addresses to each customer, and basically don't keep any dynamic record.
Of course it's also better for the customer since he has a static IP address if he wants to self host something at home, without using unreliable dynamic DNS services. And nowadays with all the new IoT and domotic stuff having a public address is important (for example just think about accessing security cameras remotely).
Flets is most popular FTTH service that available nationwide by telco. Traditionally it only provides IPv4 service via PPPoE, but the architecture is inefficient and getting old so they started IPv6 service directly on Ethernet (called IPoE, a bit funny). VoIP Telephony service is also provided by IPv6 so the network called NGN.
Now the traditional PPPoE service is getting very slow due to they won't invest very well for old architecture equipment. Instead, they advice to use IPv6 IPoE for faster connection. For IPv4 connectivity, ISPs offer v4 over v6 solution like DS-Lite, MAP-E, and 464XLAT for home (shared v4 address) or IPIP for dedicated v4 address.
Many people use both IPv6 IPoE (fast) and IPv4 PPPoE (slow) because their router don't support v4 over v6, or just prefer dedicated IP for lower costs (like me), so it's important for service operator to enable IPv6 connectivity, to provide faster service. Please support IPv6!
"It Just Works."
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/k9aqjy/newszilla6xs...
If your ISP uses CGNAT for IPv4, then Walmart could fix the captcha problem by supporting IPv6, where your address is distinct from the bots.
Walmart uses a litany of external services, presumably including real-time threat/bot analytics. For instance AdobeDTM, which does indeed serve via ipv6. It seems possible that IPv6 could be playing a part regardless of the status of the base site. These bot gates aren't at HTTP responses, but are in client interrogations and javascript triggers while interacting with the page.
Many IPv6 addresses could be mapped to a single IPv4 gateway address, causing the trigger.
And this is well known in the industry. The IPv4 world has had enormous mapping and trust ratings and understanding -- coupled with a scarcity that gives range owners or operators a higher incentive to care about what happens on it -- while a lot of people are still completely in the dark about IPv6 and still treat it like some scary unknown.
Indeed, and residential ranges are wholesale blocked from participating in various services, because of abuse through compromised hosts in residential networks.
Budget cloud providers are wholesale blocked from participating in various services, either at thier local edge, or the remote edge, because of abuse through deliberate malicous customers and/or compromised hosts.
I have Google Fiber, and I can't say I get a ton of captchas (other than sites that have them for everyone, e.g. unauthenticated contact forms). The only downside to v6 was I had to get a new router because my old one couldn't route v6 at gigabit speeds (could easily do gigabit symmetric on v4 only, but topped out at 400/400 Mbps on dual-stack).
Back when I had Spectrum (which was Charter in my area pre-merger), their v6 worked fine as well.
I say miraculously, because most of the rest of the ISPs in my country have "experimental" IPv6 "coming soon". Any decade now. Any decade...
Without passing judgement on a) medium.com articles, b) Comcast or c) pfsense here is an article that covers making IPV6 work in that specific instance. https://circuitguy.medium.com/home-network-virtualized-pfsen... - Worst case scenario someone can take this and adapt it to opnsense or their OS of choice.
This is done because many routers were built with bad IPv6 support that requested a /48 even though they only needed a single /64 for a LAN and Comcast was handing out /60's (their largest size) like candy with almost no use.
So my config was to request two prefix delegation, one tagged 0, which would always get a /64, and then one tagged 1 which would get a /60.
Not sure if you still can do it or not, but at one point you could continue to ask for prefix delegations (/60's) and get even more address space.
Here's the dhcp6c.conf:
interface em0 {
send ia-pd 0;
send ia-pd 1;
send ia-na 1;
};
id-assoc pd 0 {
prefix ::/64 infinity;
prefix-interface lagg0 {
sla-id 0;
sla-len 0;
};
};
id-assoc pd 1 {
prefix ::/60 infinity;
prefix-interface vlan10 {
sla-id 1;
sla-len 4;
};
prefix-interface vlan11 {
sla-id 2;
sla-len 4;
};
prefix-interface vlan20 {
sla-id 3;
sla-len 4;
};
prefix-interface vlan21 {
sla-id 4;
sla-len 4;
};
prefix-interface vlan22 {
sla-id 5;
sla-len 4;
};
};
id-assoc na 1 {
};
Yes, this means you get 16 + 1 /64's to use.
On top of that I pull a single /128 for the external interface of my router.
I personally don't think there is an issue with handing out /60's like candy, but I am not Comcast and can't speak for their network engineering team which made the decisions they made for their millions of customers.
Usually happens if the customer's computers connect to the Comcast gateway directly. If they have their own router, it usually gets an IPv4 address.
But for many other thinks there are to often to many problems including bad availability of speeds about 50Mb/10Mb and they still selling you faster speeds which technically can't be delivered.
And for many areas of Germany it boils down to:
- If you live in a city and only go for 50Mb it's often ok (but even in cities there tend to be areas with faulty installations causing problems for the citizens in that area for years, e.g. my sister and a co-worker of mine had/have that problem).
- If you live in the metro area but not in the city it's spotty sometimes going with LTE is better, sometimes it's not, sometimes you should by both to make sure at least one of them works (my former co-worker had that problem).
- If you live outside the metro area it's random either you get reliable reasonable fast internet if you buy from the right provider or you get less then 1Mb no matter what provider you choose (multiple of my friends had/have that problem).
All in all, I had so many troubles with setting up anything behind IPv6 or DS-lite, that I asked my ISP to give me an additional IPv4 address, so that I don't have troubles. While they usually provide bad service, this came for free -- but other ISPs, for example my parents' ISP, want you to pay 50 or more euros per month for an "enterprise contract" to get a dedicated IPv4. I still haven't found a way for my dad to setup his old webcam server at home such that others can reach it from the outside world, and I tried every couple months over the last 6 years or so.
For example when the webcam server is reachable on LAN at 192.168.1.2:1337 you can do
$ ssh -N -T -R 1338:192.168.1.2:1337 user@cloudserver.com
on a raspberry pi on the same LAN or locally in the webcam server and then you can access the webcam server from anywhere using cloudserver.com:1338
At least I ran into this frequently (multiple times a week, I really need to fix my sleep cycle).
Not affiliated, just a happy user.
I do VPN from the router, giving me a proper /64 block...
I've been on FiOS for almost 10 years. Every few months, I check to see if I or any other FiOS customer has IPv6. It's been on in one testing market (or two) for years, but nothing else outside that.
I first discovered this when I started presenting a terraform demo from home, and it broke because at least one of the AWS modules didn’t support IPv6. When developing I only used my Xfinity connection, which gives an IPv4 address. Apparently my laptop had switched to my other wifi Network right before the presentation. Luckily the interviewer was understanding, and we used the experience as a troubleshooting exercise.
I'm also on FiOS, in a major MSA, and nope, IPv4 only.
Any day now...
I've been using ipv4 because I use LTE with ATT or TMobile links for the past 7 years (RV full time) and I can't wait for a modern internet connection that doesn't suck.
1. Mandate that all ISPs have a fully functional IPv6 assigned for each IPv4 given to customers. It must route just as their IPv4 does. If a customer doesn't have an IPv4 number, they must assign as many IPv6 as if the customer had one IPv4. 1. Mandate that all servers and all services accessible over IPv4 be accessible over IPv6 1. Institute sufficient fines for businesses that don't follow these requirements.