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Comment by gspr | Hacker News Reader

> - The benefits over the older model are a bit nebulous

This is far from the case with IPv6!

Is it? There are many benefits in principle to IPv6, but if my ISP continues to assign me a single dynamic IP, those benefits are entirely moot for me.

Right, but just because you don't happen to have IPv6 right now, how does that remove the benefits for others to have IPv6? That's like saying having a faster CPU wouldn't mean faster performance, because I don't have that CPU yet.

Your ISP assigns you a single dynamic /128? Which ISP is that?

My ISP (Bell Aliant) doesn't support IPv6 at all. Rogers though, for example, assigns you a /56 block but it's dynamic.

Is the argument that there are no benefits to IPv6 for anyone/society because your specific ISP messes it up?

Of course not. The argument is that the benefits are nebulous.

... if you use ISPs that don't deploy the technology correctly. Faced with multiple providers of a technology, are we to judge its benefits by the worst ones?

If your ISP is assigning you a single IPv6 address, they are doing IPv6 wrong. You should be getting your own /56.

Even a /64, while wrong, would be a significant improvement over IPv4.

Even a /128 would be, since most of them don't even have enough IPv4 addresses anymore and use CGNAT extensively.

Every time you use the word "should" you're fighting reality.

Plenty of ISPs do it right (examples: my last 3). That the parent poster's apparently doesn't isn't an argument against the technology their ISP fails to deploy correctly.

Reality is that lots of ISPs do this right. And have for a very long time.

If an ISP chooses to deploy a technology in a bad way, that is not the technology's fault. Even if most ISPs were just giving users a /128 address (which to be clear, is very much not the case), that would not be some kind of failure of IPv6.

IBM and to a larger extent Microsoft's business tactics in the 80s and 90s were not a failure of Amiga, Linux, or Apple (technology and capability-wise).

The fact that porn was allowed on VHS wasn't a failure of the Betamax technology.

Preventing key-jamming on typewriters is not a failure of Dvorak.

The technology does not matter, the real world decides. Right now, there is no reason for people to care about IPv6, other than when it's the cause of issues.

Do they actually or do you just assume they do because your computer gets one address?

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