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Comment by JdeBP | Hacker News Reader

Just to add to the 'but the ISPs do not' anecdotes, it has been six months since someone last commented so it is probably time to mention this again on Hacker News:

* https://havevirginmediaenabledipv6yet.co.uk/

A major ISP in the U.K., that said in a public statement on World IPv6 Day in 2011 that

> As well as our core and access networks being capable of supporting IPv6, we're rigorously testing our entire network to ensure that all customers have a smooth and simple transition when the time comes to flick the switch and turn IPv6 on. We're really pleased with how our tests are advancing and are happy to say that by the end of 2012, we'll be able to fully support customers looking to switch to IPv6.

has not managed to actually flick that switch in 15 years.

* https://ispreview.co.uk/story/2011/06/08/uk-isp-fluidata-hai...

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I once asked them if we could enable IPv6 on a 1Gb DIA circuit, and the response I got back was that "we can convert the circuit to IPv6, but you'll need to give up your IPv4."

I don't think I bothered asking them again!!

(Edit "them" = Virgin Media)

Sure they didn't just mean they'd change your static IPv4 address to a different one?

Quite possibly.

But the way that they dealt with the whole thing smelt very "we don't know what we're talking about", enough to put us off.

And shifting all the IP space about would have had costs with very little return, so little business appetite to go through it.

Was that real DIA??

I’ve seen this commonly from them with residential service. They mostly give you a private v4 address behind CGNAT in addition to IPv6. If you want a public v4 they put you on their old network which has no v6.

in my case, they did this without input from me.

I only found out because I could no longer access a swath of things I used to be able to.

not virgin media, but in the EU

The way to pressure ISPs to support IPv6 is stupid but effective:

1. Sites that help shoppers choose can add a big visual red flag to any ISP that doesn’t support IPv6. Consumers don’t know what IPv6 is by and large but they do understand seeing a big red flag.

2. Same thing for websites. Add a banner that says “hey your ISP doesn’t support proper internet connectivity which this site utilizes. Contact them to let them know that you are having internet issues.” Again, consumers do not know what’s IPv6 is, but they do know what annoying banners are.

What would be the incentive for site owners to reduce the appeal of their site? The user has connected to the site, so there's obviously no immediate problem.

Back when Https deployment wasn't widespread, Chrome added a deliberate delay to http sites so Https sites appeared faster. That was the incentive for deployment for many, because until then Https was generally slower (extra round trips to set up the tls connection).

Regular person, “This site requires some weird technology, I’ll shop somewhere else.”

This is one of those “if everyone just” solutions that doesn’t work because shopping websites would never do that. Amazon has tons of evidence that even the slightest bits of friction result in noticeable drops in sales.

And yet Amazon's site seems to be half baked and buggy every time I visit.

From a US perspective, for your #1, the idea of people “shopping” for broadband, is astonishing. Most people here have available to them one single DOCSIS provider and that’s it. A few lucky ones have a FTTP option too, but that definitely not available to more than 25% of addresses.

(It’s true that you can use cellular for your home internet, but I consider that extremely compromised.)

Starlink shattered this monopoly in my area.

A single extra provider does not mean a monopoly is "broken". Especially if they aren't even competing in the same niches

> Starlink shattered this monopoly in my area.

The parent was noting that most of the US lives in a region, that is under a monopoly of wireline ISP (DOCSIS, FTTH). Starlink can't shatter a wireline monopoly because it is OTA.

I fired my DOCSIS provider for starlink. For many consumers the service is fungible.

You have to decouple the physical infrastructure from the service provider - how else are you supposed to have competition in a market with a natural monopoly? It's just about the only thing the EU did right during the mandated privatization of infrastructure.

This is exactly what Australia did.

The government laid the fibre (sorta) and then the ISP can use the fibre in any location to serve customers. We can select from nearly 100 different ISPs with many different plans (up to 2Gbps) and the switch over can take as little as 10 minutes if provisioned correctly.

* The Australian governement originally elected to roll out fibre everywhere. The next government decided it was too costly and designed "Multi Technology Mix" (MTM). The MTM consisted of Satellite (Skymuster), 4G/5G Towers (Fixed Wireless), FTTN (Fibre to a Node, then Copper to House), FTTC (Fibre to Curb, then copper to house), FTTP (Fibre to the Prem). Many years later, all of this is overtuned and effectively all FTTN/FTTC customers can get a free FTTP upgrade.

What Malcolm Turnbull did to the NBN was absolutely disgraceful

The reforms also resulted in a lot of people never getting FTTN/FFTC in the first place - so will forever be 5G only unless there’s a new scheme rolled out

I firmly believe it was Murdoch’s plan to delay FTTP NBN because he could see it would scuttle his Fox empire preemptively.

I understand your point and generally agree. But I do see some exceptions like the Railway networks (usually a natural monopoly) in Japan being successfully privatized between so many different companies with their own parallel train lines.

Exactly. And because the infra was never public in the US, and thus no “privatisation with rules”, it’s been a bit of a disaster.

> Most people here have available to them one [wireline] provider [mostly DOCSIS] and that’s it.

Three FTTH providers deployed fiber infra here (thanks to BBB funds && before the WhiteHouse clawed those funds back).

The upshot of adding 3 wireline providers is this: I complained to one that I was switching service to the FTTH that had IPv6. My ISP quoted me a 40% lower rate and added a /38 IPv6 to their ASN.

It's like living in a fantasy.

Indeed.

This is a funny legacy of how telecoms was run and regulated in different countries.

Now the US has the least consumer choice, and shitty ISP practices from exploiting peering relations to selling user data.

I often said net neutrality was fine, but it was an answer to a problem created by the legally-enforced monopolies in the US.

This will work on nerds (aka the HN crowd) but the average person will read that and wonder why they should care when the page loaded. Also, if you keep displaying the banner people will grow accustomed to it and ultimately ignore it.

I think this is a classic chicken and egg problem and the only way to solve this issue is government regulation. Anyone aware of the mandatory IPv6 in Europe? I heard that the Chech Republic is doing something about it. I Poland, only Orange and probably TMobile supports it, the smaller ones - almost none.

I noticed when using some Chinese services, a lot of them have "IPv4" and "IPv6" flags when opening their apps for some reason.

Purely from a business perspective, for VM there is no point. They have more than enough v4 to keep them going, customers (outside of a tiny technical minority who probably wouldn't chose VM anyway) do not see any benefit.

That plus other ISPs v6 implementations breaking things randomly, I understand why they don't bother.

Right. Which is why this is not a choice businesses should be allowed to make.

Of all the things to regulate why bother with this one? It's not like IPv6 is better for the environment or useful to the consumer.

It reduces the monopolization power of big cloud providers. This is especially relevant to countries that aren't the US, because it reduces reliance on the US.

It also just reduces resource waste (of labor time). Countries like China that have insufficient IPv4 addresses and political power have mandated it. One IP per home is manageable, for now, but CGNAT is really bad.

depends on how you look at it. Right now it's very much a tragedy of the commons.

IPv6 not being supported in many places means the internet is more centralised, less likely to use proper p2p tech- because it's a lot harder to make it work rather than throwing up a TURN box and relaying everything.

"The latency? Who cares? IPv6 sometimes breaks right now" - because nobody is testing it, so why should people be the first to support it? There's no easy upside.

The only real upside for businesses is not having to pay for increasingly expensive IPv4 allocations. But they don't really care, its not nearly expensive enough yet. Customers will get GCNAT, businesses will continue as normal.

All that will happen is that the internet gets slower and less equal.

Which is exactly the same thing that's happening with inefficient memory hungry software: people either have to buy a more expensive laptop or they have a shitty experience.. Nobody is advocating for them, they just feel things getting shittier year on year and many are just choosing to avoid technology instead.

Maybe the solution is to make IPv4 prohibitively expensive.

Or even just expensive.

It definitely costs them a lot.

Implementing v6 without doubt saves money for ISPs. Especially in the CGNAT game as those boxes aren’t cheap.

>IPv6 not being supported in many places means the internet is more centralised, less likely to use proper p2p tech-

Realistically nobody outside some devoted HN readers are going to self host their own content. At best you'd see something like netflix trying to offload their video hosting costs onto their customers.

The sheer amount of times Airdrop has been the "best" way to share files takes away from your point a bit.

It's almost always faster than anything else available, and ipv6 would make that method of sending files closer to the default for most people.

Having VOIP in games or 1v1 lobbies is, in the strictest sense, "hosting" something in the same way.

FD: I work in video games so I speak from this bias.

IPv6 doesn't solve the Airdrop problem. It'll only work at reasonably-fast speeds in the rare case that both people are connected to the same wifi network - but there's already tools like LocalSend[0] for that. Having a file go via cellular provider A, halfway across the country, through some IX, halfway across the country back, and via cellular provider B tends to make things a bit slow.

Similarly, using P2P for game VOIP is a Really Bad Idea as it basically doxxes the player. Even 1v1 lobbies aren't always with people you trust enough to invite them into your house, so you shouldn't be handing them your IP address! In 99% of cases it is better to proxy it via a server instead.

[0]: https://localsend.org/

> Really Bad Idea

Brother, if I can do something to you based on your IP address you are already totally fucked.

This whole "the thing that I use to be addressed on the internet is dangerous" myth needs to die. It's a telephone number, not a home address. You can block numbers.

Well yeah, because they can't. Maybe if they could, they would do it more. You probably wouldn't want to host a permanent website from home, although some people do, but you could share a file. It would be popular with game servers, too.

>You probably wouldn't want to host a permanent website from home, although some people do, but you could share a file.

bittorent has been around for decades and nobody used it. They emailed files to themselves instead, or used dropbox. This all happened before the ipv4 shortage and people getting moved to CGNAT.

Nobody used BitTorrent? LoL

ISPs had/have whole groups trying to stomp it out.

And it was a nightmare due to NAT even then.

It just got worse with CGNAT.

I think the commenter you’re replying to is pointing out that nobody used BitTorrent for legitimate cases. And that take is sadly correct. Despite having huge upsides, everyone just hosts on centralized CDNs, file syncing services (gdrive, Dropbox, etc).

Even Linux distros push you so direct downloads now rather than pointing to trackers.

BitTorrent only has healthy usage for content that’s untenable to host legitimately.

That is because BitTorrent has been targeted so much.

Also, hey now - I have a lot of (actual) Linux disk images, and it works well for that!

internet is used by billions of people, not just you.

You sure you don't have this reversed? The average person uses the internet to watch tiktok videos and join zoom meetings, all of which is centralized. The people self hosting their NAS or minecraft server is a tiny minority.

> join zoom meetings

no reason this has to be centralised.

in fact, Jitsi uses p2p with WebRTC until a third person joins the call: then migrates the call to be relayed.

A really nice latency win.

maybe because centralised is the only way you can do it

> Realistically nobody outside some devoted HN readers are going to self host their own content.

How about Xbox/PS multiplayer/P2P gaming? Hosting a Minecraft server?

When Skype first came out it was P2P, but had to come up with the "supernode" concept (basically STUN/TURN/ICE) because of NAT: now all of our communication methods basically have to phone into the mothership.

Do we want the Internet to be more centralized (possibly given more power to the tech bros) or more decentralized?

Would you give your personal phone number to random strangers on the internet, or even publish it on a website? Probably not, due to the possibility of harassment, right? IP addresses aren't any different, which immediately kills a huge portion of the game server self-hosting.

A hosted and managed Minecraft server is available for less than the cost of a cup of coffee per month. At that price point it makes very little sense to deal with the hassle of having to run your own home server. Even if you want to geek out and manage it yourself, a VPS is a very attractive option.

And for the handful of people that remain and really want to homelab a Minecraft server for their friends but are stuck behind CGNAT, there's always software like Hamach - which solved the gaming NAT problem back in 2004.

So no, self hosting isn't a problem which needs IPv6 to solve it.

> Would you give your personal phone number to random strangers on the internet, or even publish it on a website? Probably not, due to the possibility of harassment, right? IP addresses aren't any different, which immediately kills a huge portion of the game server self-hosting.

You talk of a singular number in this analogy, but that is completely non-sensical in the IPv6 context: even brain dead ISPs assign /64s to residential connections, so you could give random strangers a random IPv6 address that's valid for a few hours and then you remove it from service.

Want to provide a service? Generate a new address, assign it to the server, publish it to whomever you wish. When you're done remove the ip addr alias. Give each rando their own IPv6 address for the service that's only live for a finite amount of time.

In fact you could generate a new IPv6 address each second in your assigned /64 and you wouldn't run out for 584,942,417,355 years.

1. The claim that IP addresses aren’t different from the phone numbers requires proof

2. Until very recently, just before the Covid pandemic people regularly exchanged physical business cards with their mobile phone numbers. So, yes, people do that.

> Even if you want to geek out and manage it yourself, a VPS is a very attractive option.

And some VPS providers already started charging extra for hosting the server on Legacy IP.

Obviously I can't see the future, and I live in my own bubble....

Isn't self hosting, and small, private/semi-private communities the only way forwards for much of the internet? AI has made content extremely valuable, which in turn has started to destroy the openness of the web. Things are getting more and more siloed, with entry fees.

There's a world where self hosting comes back in a big way. AI ironically makes it much easier.

Self hosting doesn't mean home hosting.

Someone DDoSing the $10 VPS hosting my personal website is no big deal. I don't care about it strongly enough that it must stay online, so they'll eventually get bored and move on.

Someone DDoSing my home internet connection? That's going to be a serious inconvenience - especially with WFH. No internet for a week isn't an option.

> Realistically nobody outside some devoted HN readers are going to self host their own content.

P2P is not “self hosting”.

It’s video/audio conferencing working with less latency. It’s the ability to send a file directly and not via some file sharing site. It’s multiplayer gaming simplified. It’s faster software updates via BitTorrent.

The p2p tech argument doesn’t work anymore. Most routers ship a stateful IPv6 firewall enabled by default now because IPv6 was resulting in people’s vulnerable shit getting popped.

So p2p stuff still doesn’t work without explicit configuration that rules out 99% of your users. It’s super annoying.

Yeah, it's impossible to do anything about a stateful firewall to get p2p connections.

It's a shame because if we could only get over stateful firewalling we'd be one step closer to the impossible task of using voice chat in console video games.

Right now they don't have that of course and the only hurdle is "NAT Types" which, as we all know, is a much easier problem to solve for the average person...

(this was sarcasm, if it wasn't clear).

Hole punching works fine for IPv6 p2p.

It even mostly works fine on IPv4 NAT, but there are a bunch of edge cases (often involving CGNAT) where it breaks down so you can't rely on it, which are solved by IPv6.

https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works

Hole punching works fine for IPv4 as well outside of endpoint dependent NAT, which most ISPs don’t use because it visibly shows up to normies as a bad connection in PlayStations/Xboxes.

Once you have to hole punch, you’ve lost the thread of why people bother switching to IPv6.

Actually not as much point now.

The reason to regulate in maybe 2000 or so was that staying with IPv4 led to NAT. NAT led to it being impossible for users to receive incoming connections. Inability to receive incoming connections led to (a) horrendous protocol complexity, (b) probably some applications never even being invented, and, (c) everybody using ultra-centralized services. Ultra-centralized services led to advertising-driven distortions of service utility, concentration of political and economic power, and choke points. Choke points led to surveillance state bullshit that's just fully ripening today.

And, yes, this was (in broad outline) foreseeable in 2000. I wasn't the only one.

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago...

> Of all the things to regulate why bother with this one? It's not like IPv6 is better for the environment or useful to the consumer.

If I'm with a small-time ISP that has to use CG-NAT because they don't have the cash to buy/lease enough IPv4 addresses to give one to each CPE WAN interface, then using things like Xbox/PS multiplayer/P2P gaming is no longer possible. Want to host a Minecraft server? Too bad.

Are those two use-cases "useful to the consumer"?

You are right, but ISPs will tell you that you're not allowed to host servers anyway. Most have it in the AUP.

1. Is trying to use Xbox/PS2 multi-player functionality "hosting"?

2. Perhaps our expectations of what you should be allowed to do is too low?

1. I'd say "no", but if it involves opening a port, I could see the ISP argument even if I disagree with it. 2. I agree. The Internet was supposed to offer end-to-end connectivity. That went out the door with NAT...

I did port forwarding in 2010 for a Minecraft server. Basically every router supports it.

It wasn't meaningfully more difficult than setting up the server.

You can't do that with CGNAT.

You can, it just requires the ISP to play nice.

CGNAT doesn't have to draw a random ip:port combo out of a hat for every new connection. Nothing is stopping an ISP from implementing it by taking one ip and assigning ports 1-10.000 to customer A, 10.001 - 20.000 to customer B, and so on. Similarly, nothing is stopping an ISP from adding long-lived mappings to an otherwise-random pool which outlive the initial connection.

Some ISPs offer CGNAT traversal by letting you request a fixed ip:port combo via their self-service website. It's pretty much the same as regular NAT traversal, except that you can't freely pick the outside port. And because the number of people who actually care about it is so small: some ISPs even let you request to be exempted from CGNAT altogether! They'll already have a pool of legacy non-CGNAT customers and a pool of new CGNATted ones, so assigning a handful of nerds to the legacy pool to prevent them from complaining isn't a big deal.

Can we at least stop claiming that IPv6 is "more complicated" than IPv4 when we're making it a requirement for IPv4 ISPs is to create CGNAT management portals.

> Nothing is stopping an ISP from implementing it by taking one ip and assigning ports 1-10.000 to customer A, 10.001 - 20.000 to customer B, and so on. Similarly, nothing is stopping an ISP from adding long-lived mappings to an otherwise-random pool which outlive the initial connection.

I’m pretty sure that the scarcity of Legacy IP addresses and port numbers (!) is exactly what stops providers from doing that, at least by default. I’ve seen NAT running out of ports way too many times, and shortening of connection tracking lifetime comes with a whole set of hard to spot bugs.

Most isps, you can’t do that anymore as you no longer have a publically reachable IPv4 address. It moved the ‘just configure your router’ part to their equipment, as they now use CGNAT.

It’s gotten much worse.

We are locked into apple and google backup services because of CGNAT. If ipv6, and symmetric fiber internet, was ubiquitous when smartphones came out, there could have been a competing option that backs up your own data to an appliance in your own home.

The slow adoption of IPv6 by many older companies is at least in part a paradoxical result of the success of IPv6 elsewhere, particularly in new builds where there is practically no overhead in deploying IPv6 in a green-field environment - see for example the mobile telecoms market in developing countries, where new builds are IPv6-first.

This has taken pressure off the IPv4 legacy address pool, reducing the urgency for older providers.

End-users are typically completely unaware of whether their traffic is being carried over IPv6 or IPv4, and so simply do not care one way or the other. (This particular post is more than likely being made over IPv6, since news.ycombinator.com has an IPv6 address and my OS, browser, router and ISP all support IPv6 straight out of the box, as is now true for the majority of users in my country.)

In NL we have this one: https://heeftodidoipv6.nl

Their core network has IPv6, but not their customers, 17% market share in telecom in the Netherlands.

Are there more?

They also got hacked recently and all their customer details were published.

PS: From the millions of customers' details leaked it sounds like their market share is a hell of a lot higher than 17%!

Yeah I looked it up, they're talking about 6.2 million customers' details.

That's 30% of the NL population.

A lot of those people might be ex-customers. People who moved, died, or switched to another company. I worked for a mobile company in the US, and once you were in our customer database, you stayed there. We never got hacked, at least, not so far, but if you got access to customer data the total number would be substantially higher than the current customer count.

Like the other reply says, this is not allowed in the EU. You can't just 'stay there'. They must be violating the GDPR if that was the case.

Also their response has been really bad. It was basically them saying "oh well it's not so bad if your details are leaked". And giving some free antivirus crap.

That's because Odido violates the GDPR by retaining data of ex-customers. The hack also included data from people who stopped using their services several years ago.

I finally managed to get Xfinity giving me a /60, and then figuring out a SLAAC setup that works across my layer 3 home network (mostly me realizing that SLAAC was the way to go versus trying to figure out DHCPv6 and Ubiquiti Edge stuff).

We're finally getting there in the US, though. Top ASNs are >75% IPv6 capable.

It's Optimum Communications and Frontier (my provider) that are really holding the numbers down at ~15% each. The latter is improving very slowly, but not a lot of evidence of change in the former.

Indeed. The U.S.A. is currently well above the U.K. in the APNIC statistics hyperlinked-to by the headlined article.

* https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6

After several decades, IPv6 has proven itself as a supplement to IPv4.

Here in Brazil most ISPs provide IPv6 by now... But what happens a lot, when field technician are installing your broadband, they just... don't configure IPv6. As if IPv4 (CGNAT!) wasn't enough. With bigger ISPs this is less common.

With mobile carriers this is even worse. For some reason, some default config are IPv4 by default, while literally all of them supports IPv6.

Having interviewed with them for a SRE role I can definitely see how they are awful. The amount of technical debt is hilarious.

15 years is plenty of time to switch away from them. IPv6 is just one reason. It's a shit ISP. I ditched them as soon as I could and cited IPv6 as a reason, in case it made a difference (I also questioned my new ISP before I joined).

Virgin Media exist for two reasons: first they were given a monopoly by their Tory chums (Thatcher) and, second, all ISPs are allowed to make you sign absurdly long, anti-competitive contracts (18 months is common). If ISPs were treated the same as utility suppliers we'd probably be in a better place.

If you sign up with + in your e-mail address, it breaks their backend too

Fun fun

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