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Comment by Prolixium | Hacker News Reader

Is it really that popular nowadays? How many folks still use a tunnel broker at all in 2026?

I've been thinking about starting. My current ISP (Comcast) has native IPv6 but you can't get a static prefix (maybe if you are a business class customer, IDK). It would be nice to have a prefix which is statically assigned to me for stuff that I host at home, so I've looked at doing an HE tunnel instead. The main drawback seems to be that some networks still refuse to peer with them so not everything is reachable.

> The main drawback seems to be that some networks still refuse to peer with them

cogent gonna cogent. i think you're still probably good for the most part.

Comcast has a very strict peering policy as well. They, like Deutsche Telekom, like to hold their proverbial customers hostage to make other networks pay to peer.

You don’t need your ISP to assign a static prefix just to have static addresses on your home network. Instead choose your own prefix inside the fd00::/8 block. There is a procedure using hashing that you can follow to help guarantee that your prefix is unlikely to be shared with anyone else, but you don’t actually need to use it. Configure your router to advertise that prefix in addition to any prefix assigned by your ISP and all of your computers will give themselves an address in both prefixes. If you set your servers to base their address on their mac address, then every one of your servers will have a single unique address. Your client machines can keep their privacy–aware addresses that change frequently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_local_address

For my network I wanted something I had some chance of remembering so I consulted a dictionary and ended up with fdbe:aded:cafe:babe::/64.

> You don’t need your ISP to assign a static prefix just to have static addresses on your home network. Instead choose your own prefix inside the fd00::/8 block.

I do have a ULA network I chose for myself. But when I'm not at home I would like to be able to reach things I self host (e.g. my Navidrome server), and I need routable IPs for that. My /60 from Comcast is stable but not guaranteed to be static, and it would be nice to have a truly static allocation so I won't run into the need to redo my DNS records if Comcast ever changes my prefix. I know I could script something to do that, but static is a bit nicer.

Ah, of course. They probably want you to pay extra for that. :)

An HE.net tunnel has advantages, but they’re also quite bandwidth–constrained. If you need anything more than ~1MB/s then you should build something yourself instead.

I have an ipv6 only wireguard connection from my phone to my house which is also comcast. Lets me hit my ULAs just fine.

> The main drawback seems to be that some networks still refuse to peer with them so not everything is reachable.

A bigger drawback is that you end up in a bad neighborhood. 20 years ago, most traffic from tunnelbroker users were people excited about ipv6 with isps that didn't care about it. In 2026, nobody is excited about ipv6 anymore and tunnelbroker traffic is mostly abuse or trying to circumvent georestrictions... Expect to fill out so many captchas if you set it up.

I don't have statistics on that, but I can say that Verizon FIOS NG-PON2 service in the US (which is what I have) does not offer native V6, so yes, sadly I am forced to use a tunnel broker in 2026.

At home, my ISP gives me native IPv6. At work, we don't have IPv6 (or it's just disabled on the router), so I sometimes use one to test stuff (I use 6Project).

Tons.

A lot of US ISPs have no ipv6 configured.

(There are roughly 3,000 different ISPs in the US.)

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