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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

What I don't understand is what is the cost to an ISP of switching. Whether it is network devices or users devices, unless they are more than 10yo, I would expect them to be all IPv6 compatible. So yes it will involve some reconfiguration, training engineers and support, but it looks like a relatively small investment to me. The switch to optic fibre is a way bigger investment.

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Financial cost, even in training, isn't high. It's mostly two things - Inertia, and ROI. All of the network engineers know IPv4 ins and out really, really well, and have a mindset of not messing with stuff that's working. And ROI - what financial incentives does an ISP have to switch to IPv6, either in increased revenue or reduced costs?

There's also considerable cost in being an early bird. You get to find all the chinks in the protocol, all the bodgy firmware issues... all for no substantial change to the income stream.

The cost (in addition to those that other replies have pointed out) is also one of support. While a <10yr old device may support IPv6, it is often that they don't always perform exactly as designed. IPv4 & IPv6 co-existence is a little bit of a crapshoot at the device level.

This translates into super-large ramifications, especially for companies like Comcast--I can only imagine that they don't want to add yet another possible moving part, especially when there's almost zero benefit to the average customer.

That's a very reasonable position, especially with Comcast. Comcast has, in fact, led the IPv6 charge in terms of sizable US ISPs. The flip side of that coin is they have the money to invest in the engineering costs. I assume they did some analysis, computed the cost of NAT vs. IPv6, knowing full-well they'd have to do IPv6 sometime, and plowed ahead.

It's the smaller ISPs that are just used to fixing stuff "when its broken" that are really in trouble.

The cost and inertia is certainly very understandable, and it's nice to see Comcast being somewhat proactive here when compared with the rest.

What does surprise me though is that IPv6 hasn't seen steady uptake when new companies set up new infrastructure from scratch or existing companies upgrade their kit. I would have thought that using IPv6 exclusively internally with DNS64/NAT64 to bridge the external IPv4 internet would offer some advantages.

It's not just a matter of implementing "enable_ipv6 = yes" on a cisco router.

Here's an enterprise perspective:

It's IP address management. it's massive reconfiguration of every node and network endpoint. It's auditing and completely redeploying security measures that are network based. It's training every IT employee on network basics from the ground up.

It's millions upon millions of dollars in man-hours and infrastructure and tooling for something that might have marginal benefit on an internal network. I agree the new world will be better with larger subnets and many of the features of IPv6, but it's more complex.

Fiber-optic and hardware level upgrades touch a lot fewer devices, and are transparent to users and applications.

>What I don't understand is what is the cost to an ISP of switching

From what I've heard from cable companies is Cisco. They've had many issues with Cisco interop IPv6 on HCF networks.

Most ISPs have boxes that sit in racks many kilometers from the closest employee and Simply Have To Work. Of course they are conservative about configuration changes.

training and reconfiguration - and more pointedly B/OSS changes - are generally more expensive (opex) than upgrading equipment (capex)

I personally believe the biggest driver for IPv6 adoption will be Apple requiring support in iOS apps. Right now, IPv4 space is still comparatively "cheap"

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