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Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

In considering the rollout of IPv6, end users often get marginalized. This is frustrating to me. When we try to highlight ISPs who refuse to deploy IPv6, mobile services get highlighted - as if homes and businesses could just use them instead of wireline. If that doesn't end the discussion then IPv6 acolytes will go on about transit traffic or anything else until IPv4-only users go away and stop ruining their optimism.

Personally, I'm very positive about IPv6. I find a lot to like in the protocol. From an end user standpoint tho, it's very much a club. If your ISP is in you're golden. If not, you don't exist to other members.

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It even happens to ISPs themselves to get marginalized in this way. I work in a small local ISP, and we're fully IPv6-ready, but the publicly funded optical networks we use to reach our clients are not IPv6 ready. It should just be a simple VLAN, transported how they please, that connects us to our client, but no, the infrastructure operator built a mess just to connect us to our clients, I suppose just transporting a VLAN was too simple for them (we do get a VLAN, but they do some weird DHCP interception on it, and dynamically route IPs in their iBGP based on that, and didn't set it up for DHCPv6, so no IPv6 for our clients).

This is one of the biggest FTTH networks in France, where IPv6 is deployed a lot.

Of course, the bigger operators can collect their traffic straight at the OLT, so they don't have to go through this mess, and get better quality of service (the DHCP interceptors fail often) as well as native IPv6.

We small operators need to set up tunnels to provide IPv6 to our clients. Even for additional IPv4s or just anything bigger than /32 we need a custom tunnel. And these tunnels are a mess to manage when the customers have their own CPE. It's so sad, and that's all done with public money.

And yes, of course, this infrastructure operator, Covage/XPFibre is owned by Altice, who also owns SFR, one of the big four operators. How surprising.

> the publicly funded optical networks we use to reach our clients are not IPv6 ready.

> We small operators need to set up tunnels to provide IPv6 to our clients. ... And yes, of course, this infrastructure operator, Covage/XPFibre is owned by Altice, who also owns SFR,

I might be misunderstanding who the private and public actors are. To clarify, is Altice is over the tunnel infrastructure?

Rollout isn’t a problem for anyone it’s when services start to become unaccessible to IPv4 but accessible on IPv6 end users can get marginalized. We’re still many years from that though which greatly amplifies how much an issue it’ll actually still be when that time comes.

Rollout is still pretty slow: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6...

But services supporting it is the other side of the problem. Both need to be addressed.

Wow. Sweden is disappointing.

I find it interesting how in some countries IPv6 on mobile is more common than wired. Here in New Zealand not one of our mobile carriers offer IPv6. All have no plans to do so stating that there is no demand for it. This also extends to wireless broadband. This is in contrast to fibre/DSL type connections where customers have a choice of several ISPs offering IPv6. Fascinating to see the different market dynamics in different countries.

But there is like gazillion tunneling etc options for people whose isp doesn't provide IPv6; I don't think it's fair to accuse the IPv6 community for ignoring people with ISPs that do not provide IPv6 connectivity when there is so much work put into making viable adaptation paths for them. What more could the community do?

> But there is like gazillion tunneling etc options for people whose isp doesn't provide IPv6

Last I looked, a lot of these either require a public IP address (do not work behind CGNAT), are defunct (not accepting new registrations, or even have a parked domain), or no longer work as well as they used to (both 6to4 and Teredo depend on public anycast relays, and their connectivity seem to have gotten worse; and Teredo also requires that the native IPv6 hosts do not filter ICMPv6 Echo Requests and Echo Replies, which unfortunately are too commonly filtered by overzealous sysadmins).

> Personally, I'm very positive about IPv6. I find a lot to like in the protocol

Please expand on this (besides ‘wow such large numbers’…). I’ll take my answer off the air.

I enjoy how RA handles address assignment. I like how the address space feels huge and uncrowded (almost private), like how internet v1 once did. I like it when the lightbulbs go off the first time I get a service working.

I like feeling like a member of the club.

> I like how the address space feels huge and uncrowded…

^^ in case anyone is wondering why IPv6 is where it’s at after a decade…

Sigh.

I don't see anything wrong with this being a pro.

At a previous company I worked at, this was literally the impetus for going IPv6. We were in a regional business and were growing by acquiring companies in other regions. Every new company we acquired, we had the major pain of making the networks talk. Almost everyone is using 192.168.0.0/16 or 10.0.0.0/8. IP conflicts were a given, and re-address networks was a big painful operation. NATs were an option, but came with their own permanent complications. IPv6 made it go away. If the new site already had IPv6, collisions were still a non-issue, and if they didn't, well getting them IPv6 ready was easier than re-address everything. Once they were IPv6 ready we could go ahead and establish VPNs, and with most traffic now going over IPv6 we could re-address IPv4 without causing significant outages.

IPv6 has other advantages, better multicast, better routing, flow labeling, automatic link-local addressing, but the large IP space is definitely the elephant in the room.

VMs able to assign themselves an address via SLAAC without involving DHCP is lovely

The best thing is autoconfiguration, of course.

It not evident if you are an admin of localhost, but working with hundreds devices make you really appreciate it.

This is the whole config what allows the device to talk to IPv6 and provide IPv6 addresses to the clients in the vlan3003. No DHCP, no ip helpers, nothing.

    interface Vlan2999
     ipv6 address 2000:1111:1:1::2/126
    !
    interface Vlan3003
     ipv6 address 2000:1111:1:4::1/64
    !
    ip forward-protocol nd
    !
    ipv6 route ::/0 2000:1111:1:1::1

> in case anyone is wondering why IPv6 is where it’s at after a decade

But.. I'm tired to juggle this nonsense. We have /21, a couple of /24 and a bunch of /28. I recently decided to move out our services from /21 and /24 to some specific /28 and despite what all those /28 are pretty close (most of them sits in one /23) I can't have a few laconic network rules with aggregates for separating our own and customers traffic. I would need to have a whole let of rules, almost for each /28.

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