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Comment by yalok | Hacker News Reader

Still waiting for someone to do the same in Bay Area. Many parts of it don’t have any fiber optics options, even though Sonic does provide some in the north.

AT&T put an optic cable at my curb 10 years ago (most likely due to imminent competition from Google Fiber internet), but then never lit it (most likely because Google dropped their effort due to complications with cities)…

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Sonic is doing this in sfba. Used to be att reseller now they lay their own fiber, 50% cheaper plans, byo router, ipv6 that actually works, great service.

Pardon my ignorance but what is the benefit to ipv6 for local, consumer internet?

For regular folks there isn't much benefit tbh. Mainly I think it simplifies ISP architecture and offers slightly faster (like 10%) performance but ISPs have to support IPv4 stack for foreseeable future anyway so kinda moot point. If you game a lot p2p (i don't) you should, in theory, see lower lag.

For me personally, I work on networking startup so I'd like to be able to run IPv6 stack from my home network to test things.

If you don't currently have IPv6 service, have you looked into something like Hurricane Electric's IPv6 tunnel broker? [0] It's how I got my first IPv6 subnet, and worked really well for me. I stopped using it when Comcast finally got around to providing IPv6 for non-business accounts.

[0] https://tunnelbroker.net/

It’s been like two decades since i last used this but at the time HE 6in4 tunnel required static ipv4

It has also been about that long since I used the service. According to my very, very distant memory this requirement was implemented by having you punch in your IPv4 address into a form to configure their end of the tunnel. I know for an absolute fact that Comcast was not providing me with a static IPv4 address, and the HE.net tunnel worked just fine.

Most video games don't work with ipv6 at all, which is ironic since in theory they're the exact use case for it

The big customer-visible feature is that every machine on their LAN can be globally reachable. For ISPs that absolutely cannot get enough IPv4 space to give their customers even a single globally-reachable IPv4 address, this would be the only way to get any global IP space. IME, edge routers that are intended for networking noobs to use often set up their firewalls so that they block inbound unsolicited IPv6 traffic, but (unlike with IPv4 NAT) there's the option of opening up multiple hosts to some or all inbound traffic.

Another feature that I find to be pretty stupid (but that some folks seem to really like) are IPv6 "privacy" addresses. Because each host usually is assigned an IPv6 address in a subnet that's 64 bits wide, most mainstream OS's have configured their IPv6 address autoconfigurator to set one stable, "permanent" address, and to set a parade of periodically changing "temporary" addresses. The OS is usually configured to prefer the permanent address when software asks for a socket to listen on (and sockets that handle replies to that listen socket), and those temporary addresses are preferred for sockets that initiate outbound traffic. The idea is that this is supposed to confuse tracking, but I'm very skeptical of its efficacy in the real world.

Finally, a customer can also usually get enough IP space to make globally-reachable subnets on their LAN. Depending how the ISP has configured things, a customer can get between four and 256 subnets. These subnets are handy to provide networks that provide globally-reachable IP addresses, but that can be easily logically isolated from the rest of the LAN by the router.

My feeling with privacy extensions is that it's more to prevent enumeration of a network by looking at outgoing traffic. It may have a degree of tracking protection too, but that's probably less important, and is about equivalent to everything being behind a single NAT address.

The RFC 4941 problem statement [0] notes that an attacker who can look at outgoing traffic from a network will not be thwarted by "privacy" addresses. The background section of that document goes on to say that "privacy" addresses do little-to-nothing to thwart correlation attempts against client networks that have few hosts on them.

IMO, something like what's described in RFC 7217 [1] (changing the interface identifier used for "permanent" addresses from the interface's MAC address to something that mixes in the advertised prefix) is a much better way to address the concerns described in section 2.3 of RFC 4941.

[0] <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4941#section-1.2>

[1] <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7217#section-4>

Pretty much negative, I always disable it

Online gaming: No "strict NAT" program. No conflicts with having multiple consoles at one locations. No port forwarding needed.

VPNs: Business IT usually uses some weird IP range like 172.xxx.xxx.xxx so avoid conflicting with the popular 192.168.1.xxx or 10.xx.yy.zz. When two companies merge there is now an IP range overlap and a renumbering has to be done.

P2P file transfers: No port forwarding needed.

Self-hosted servers: No port forwarding needed.

Video chat/VoIP: One reason video chat still suffers from bad quality is that video is proxied through cloud servers to deal with NAT. With more IPv6 video chat services can use more direct connectivity lowering costs and improving quality.

Avoiding CGNAT. If anyone on the same CGNAT group in your ISP got banned you will also be banned. Many Internet services don't have IPv6 and they often cite IPv4 based reputation as the reason why they won't deploy IPv6.

> When two companies merge there is now an IP range overlap and a renumbering has to be done.

That has nothing to do with OP's question about consumer internet concerns. However, I've been through several corporate acquisitions. The thing that took the longest to work out? Getting the new company's name on the paychecks.

The thing that took the second longest to work out? Renumbering networks and consolidating and decommissioning hardware for which there just wasn't enough RFC 1918 space available. Every. Damn. Time. this process dragged on and on and on, when IT could have saved 6->18+ months of future work [0] by generating a /48 ULA and using that for every internal thing but the stuff that was IPv4-only.

[0] ...and god only knows how many dollars in labor costs...

Unfortunately Sonic does not cover the whole bay, and certainly not all SF. I am still waiting for Sonic to cover the heart of the City (Eureka Valley).

Downtown San Jose is nice - I have fibers from both AT&T and Sonic. I switched from AT&T to Sonic a couple years ago and have been impressed. I pay half what I did, get 10x the speed, and customer service is much better.

Downtown SJ has sail internet as well, great local isp!

Thanks for saying so - I got a flyer and didn't realize they are local.

I am on it, still a little bit pricer than Comcast, but worth every penny.

In my condo complex the cost for Sail is the same as the lowest Comcast internet plan. Possibly Sail and others have forced Comcast to go down finally, which is great.

Also the Sail support is really good, fast responses (even the CEO sometimes answers tickets).

I have two lit fiber cables to my house in exurban maryland and I find it hilarious that many places in the Bay Area have zero.

In most of San Francisco and parts of the East Bay, there's MonkeyBrains: https://www.monkeybrains.net/

Does Monkeybrains offer fiber now ?

I have been a customer for 14 years now. Would love to move to higher bandwidth.

It could just be mundane technical debt or just organizational bureaucracy .

I recently moved into Menlo Park and had no problems getting 2.5Gbps from ATT fiber.

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