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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

There isn't one until IPv6-only ISPs (or plans) pop up offering cheaper connectivity because you don't need an expensive v4 address. NAT sucks and everyone's job would be easier if they didn't have to deal with it, but the CEO likely doesn't care about that and probably just sees the "add IPv6 support" scope and cost estimate and NOPEs out.

I love IPv6 btw. I just don't think you'll see anything meaningful happen until FAANG drop IPv4 support. Imagine that. People would convert pretty quick if Google couldn't crawl your site or you couldn't buy an iPhone without IPv6...

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An IPv4 address still isn't very expensive. I'm paying about $1.30 per month to have a static IPv4 address from my home ISP.

Your ISP probably hasn't tried to acquire IPv4 addresses recently. https://ipv4.global/reports/ shows prices around $40/address, so it would take 2-3 years to break even at $1.30/month.

(Although, people rent apartments with break-even periods well beyond 10 years, so maybe 2-3 is still fine.)

That's not really the price of an IPv4 address: you don't have control over it, it's just not changing because they made a DHCP reservation or something. Owning an address means you can announce it to peers via BGP, set up PTR records, etc.

IPv4 addresses are expensive right now. Registries run out of new allocations years ago, so if you ask them you'll be put in a waiting list[1] hoping one for a block to be recovered. To get one right know you have to go on the market and negotiate a transfer: blocks are selling at ~50$/address right now. The price more than doubled in the last year or so: people are even speculating on it [2].

[1]: https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/ipv4/ipv4-pool

[2]: https://teddit.net/r/investing/comments/qdple3/i_am_planning...

It's not just speculating, there is even large-scale IPv4 address allocation fraud going on:

https://www.internetgovernance.org/2021/08/19/a-fight-over-c...

> There isn't one until IPv6-only ISPs (or plans) pop up offering cheaper connectivity because you don't need an expensive v4 address.

This has been happening for years with VPSes.

Consumer ISPs don't need an ip per customer. They just stick 1000 users on the same ip address behind CG-NAT

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