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Comment by mdaniel | Hacker News Reader

> Those customers will complain to their ISPs, which will provide incentive to get IPv6 deployed

Your experience with huge ISPs has obviously been different from mine. I am deeply grateful that I've benefited from two "first world" advantages: Comcast has (surprisingly) been very proactive about IPv6 support, and here in the Bay Area I have actual competition available for me to switch to. But in other parts of the country, that's for sure not true

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to address the dig portion of your comment, the AAAA record (err, or lack of it) for github.com likely is a lot more impactful than HN

It's not that I think major users are going to switch, but I'll point out that GitLab actually does have AAAA records

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fun fact: comcast have been proactive about ipv6 because their management network grew so large and unwieldy, through various acquisitions and long term inefficient use of space, that ipv4 RFC1918 10/8 (and 192.168 etc) was no longer sufficient to address all of their individual netblocks.

turns out that if you allocate a private /24 to every POP you can absolutely exhaust 10/8 in a big last mile ISP.

they started with ipv6 for their own management network before any public netblocks started getting rolled out to customers.

The issue is that each set top box, cable modem and everything else gets a management IP address on the network as well for allowing configuration changes/validating status/all that fun stuff.

The large push for IPv6 was started so that management of set top boxes/cable modems no longer required large islands of RFC1918 space where they had to deploy multiple NAT's to get traffic in/out of those environments.

yes, from what I've heard, they specified full ipv6 as a non-negotiable "must have" with their CPE vendors (and CMTS) almost 16, 18 years ago. Comcast gets a lot of shit for its poor customer service practices, as does any huge cable company, but the people who run the core IP network knew, and still do know what they're doing.

Here’s a deck that describes some of this (2006!): https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog37/presentations/ala...

I never thought about the scale of their internal network. It’s nuts.

Does that mean they will need to deploy IPv8 with 256 bits of address space?

Or will IPv8 go straight to 1024 bits?

;)

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