ISPs are a massive monopoly in the USA. IPV6 can't be adopted by software until a sufficient number of the backbone works. I've heard that "the backbone is all working for ipv6". Um, is comcast? Wasn't last time I had comcast.
If the ISP monopolies aren't 100% ipv6 (and you see lots of comments here that ipv6 support in ISPs is still "substandard") and convenient, then you can't blame the software people.
Look at your success story in mobile (which is behind a huge NAT to translate things to the "real" internet by the way). How did that work? Oh, you probably wrangled the three or four mobile companies into a room and got them to agree on protocols. Wow, success.
This needs to happen for the rest of ISPs. The fact it hasn't isn't a software issue, it is a governance issue. The failure is in the governance, the outreach with the real policy hammers like the FCC and ISP monopolies.
The governance has failed. It's been failing about 15 years longer than it should. FIFTEEN YEARS OF FAILURE!
Stop blaming reticent programmers, because IPV4 networking is still much much much easier than ipv6 in software, and IPV4 networking SUCKS between NATs and bridges and internal/external IPs and port mappings and what's-my-ip-on-the-other-end and dynamic DNS. Ohmygod it sucks. And ipv6 is worse than that!
Stop blaming the software people. IPV6 governance and outreach failed. Failed failed failed failed.
I don't want ipv6 to fail. I WANT STATIC IPs! EVERY PROGRAMMER WANTS STATIC IPS!
Get the ISPs and FCC in a room. Get google and microsoft and whoever else you need to lean on them. Get Amazon and google and microsoft IAAS into a room (hm, look, the same companies basically) and lean on them to support ipv6.
Eh I'd say the users of IPv6 (that includes ISPs and Enterprises) aren't to blame for not adopting the protocol.
The committee in charge of selecting IPng should have demanded interoperability or at least a proper transition plan. Neither happened and we have 25 years of IPv6 with abysmal adoption.
I do blame "Happy Eyeballs". Broken IPv6 has become invisible and therefore unimportant for ISPs.
Disabling IPv6 because of some -maybe imagined- problem is akin to disabling every new tech because it might be to blame. Tech will just progress one admin funeral at a time here.
I don't think it's fair to blame the technology. The problem is that the computing industry has changed.
The things that IPv6 would enable (direct end-to-end connectivity) is now seen as a negative by the industry that has since pivoted on rent-seeking, walled gardens and restricting user's potential. The industry is now even legally making money on many things that would've been considered outright malware just a decade ago.
People being able to host things themselves, or local-first apps that communicate directly without the need for any middlemen is a negative for the industry. The industry wants there to be a technical need for a middleman, so they can provide that and seek rent over it.
There is no user-level demand for IPv6 because the industry is no longer making any apps/devices/services that would take advantage of end-to-end connectivity (even if it was available now - let's say in a hypothetical world where IPv6 adoption is 100%) since it's more profitable not to, so as a result there is no pressure on ISPs to offer it.
Really, IPV6 has failed because of human reasons. I know because almost everyone demonstrably hates it, as evidenced by their behavior.
The big issue is that the router vendors hated it, the OS vendors hated it, the programming language people hated it, and the software writers hated it. How do I know? NOBODY WANTS TO ADOPT IT except by force, even now.
Worryingly, pro-IPV6 people are consistently arrogant and dismissive. Essentially their argument always boiled down to "ha, you'll be forced to use it eventually and then I'll be RIGHT!!!" which is why IPV6 people hate NATs with a vehement irrational passion, because it floated IPV4 for, what, two decades at least?
I'm guessing it is because IPV6 was a tossed-over-the-wall protocol that didn't get reference implementations from the biggest router vendors first. Here's a very very very very very very troubling link:
That is Cisco bragging about it's IPV6 website on a pdf from 2011! 2011! Fifteen years after the birth of the protocol. If Cisco did not have an IPv6 site up until FIFTEEN YEARS after protocol definition ... oh god.
Comcast routers weren't IPV6 functional back in 2015, at least they weren't on my cable modem. If an ISP that makes bank on renting and turning over its consumer routing hardware can't roadmap ipv6 adoption within 22 years... ugh.
And my biggest complaint about ipv6 is that they didn't increase the number of ports. Really. We have to keep shoehorning apps into 64k ports rather than a sensible 4 billion, but maybe there's some OS mapping concern with that, doesn't matter, the ship sailed.
Somewhere in IPV4 is an options header (up to 40 bytes). Why that didn't provide the necessary space for some degree of backwards compatibility somehow is beyond me.
What should have happened is that the big router vendors got together and agreed on a standard protocol. Then the major OS vendors and language standards bodies got together and made reference implementations for basic networking.
Once that was working / adopted by next gen hardware and software releases, then things might have gotten rolling.
I mean, how much work was that relative to the mind boggling amount of work done to implement NAT and firewall traversal/busting code in, say, Skype? Ever seen those whitepapers? Wow are they doozies. Holy crap are people willing to write code.
You're going to hit a wall with every ISP in the US and any country whose major telecos don't give a shit.
Fundamentally, why do they have to support ipv6? Especially when they have monopoly power over their customers? Its not like the customers can see the difference, and if a website doesn't work for a network of millions because the site v6 only the only loser is the website.
I'd be surprised if we hit 15% this year. Web services are doing a good job supporting v6, but now you have to get all ISPs to do it as well, and those ISPs are always ranked as some of the most consumer unfriendly companies in a lot of countries because they have no market pressure to improve or serve their customers well.
I have IPv6 through my ISP, Comcast. It's completely broken and unusable due to a bug in the router they upgraded me to last year and force me to use because I have a business account. It took me half a day to figure out the cause of the problem. I'll probably wait another six months to look at it again. This is just one of many sad details plaguing the rollout of IPv6. Maybe the solution will come by skipping it entirely and using something backwards-compatible with IPv4, only with a larger address space (baby steps).
"although software support is virtually a requirement these days"
Who's fault is this again?
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"- IPv6 is absolutely ready for prime-time and has been for awhile
BUT
"- About half of the internet sites I rely on support IPv6 natively, so there needs to be more pressure on site admins and CDNs to support IPv6 natively"
That is a contradiction.
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"There seems to be a lack of drive (judging by forum posts) to enable IPv6 on internet services by admins, either because they don’t care to, or it’s more work to manage a public IPv4 and public IPv6 presence"
Again, who's fault is it that its so hard? What is the payoff for the extra work?
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- Networks should be designed IPv6-first instead of IPv4-first, and this design approach largely solves most of the major issues
K thanx, but that's not the way virtually every company works. Mayyyyybe a startup? This is unrealistic.
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"Other operating systems are bit of hit or miss"
so... IPV6 is NOT NOT NOT ready for prime time, is that what you are saying?
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What dream world are the ipv6 people living in?
I love this. Who should be implementing ipv6 stacks in OS's? Probably ipv6 people, but ... where are they again? The amount of blame is crazy.
A protocol switchover of this magnitude is about outreach and assistance. The ipv6 crowd has NEVER displayed that, just arrogance, dismissal, and waited for things to get "so bad" in ipv4 that it transferred.
Which is why ipv6 people HATE HATE HATE NAT. It has delayed their grand moment by decades.
...
In an ideal world, the ip++ protocol would have been easier, not harder. BLog posts wouldn't be victim blaming, throwing around NAT64, 464XLAT, DNS64
DNS64 kills me. WHy is there a totally different service for ipv6? Isn't DNS just a key-value store? People put all types of crap into DNS, including, I believe, ipv6 addresses.
Why isn't there a DNS record type that basically lists both an ipv4 and ipv6 for a name, along with negotiation information? Might that make transition a lot easier? Maybe it does, but it isn't in this article.
Just ... all the same problematic attitudes, no progress on issues, my way or highway, and denial.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem. ISPs have very little incentive to deploy IPv6 when not enough of their customers are demanding it. Meanwhile, people don't demand IPv6 when all of their services work just fine over IPv4.
A big drive for IPv6 adoption seems to be that some ISPs are genuinely running out of addresses. They are forced to re-engineer their network stack in order to switch to CGNAT anyways, so deploying IPv6 along with it isn't too much extra work. As long as the ISP has plenty of IPv4 space remaining, their engineers are going to have a hard time selling spending time on IPv6 to management.
But that's what I mean: lots of ISPs have supported IPv6 for 1-2 decades. Most hardware & software already supported it a decade ago, and nobody should be using anything that old without updates. The only reason for an ISP today to not provide it is incompetence.
Two decades ago I was a member of a ISP consumer group, and we discussed it with a couple ISPs back then. They all were working on a planning for it (one smaller ISP even already implemented it back then!). Apparently in other countries ISPs were allowed to behave irresponsibly.
Really, the only way to force such incompetent ISPs out is if governments get involved, or if all/most backbone providers and IX operators set a date where IPv4 will become very expensive, and then one where it will be switched off...
Because nobody has fixed the bad UX yet, I'm still on IPv4, and like 5 million other people, have no incentive to move to IPv6 until the consortium of PMs of IPv6 do some user research (e.g. read HN) and work together to make the UX better or invent a better successor that people actually want to use.
They're all wondering why IPv6 adoption is so slow, I'm telling them right here plain and simple.
Good point, although that's a different rant after I found out that my ISP has an IPV6 enabled backbone but won't allegedly roll out IPV6 to their clients until late this year.
I really really don't get ISPs' difficulties in deploying IPv6. The only conclusion I can reach that actually makes sense is that they don't have the in-house talent to deploy it and refuse to hire someone who does. I guess there's just not enough pain in staying IPv4-only or halfway implementing IPv6 to make them get up and do something about it?
First of all, it is not reasonable to blame the protocol for your ISP's inability to configure it properly.
Secondly, I don't get this mentality that IPv6 is some totally inferior thing and I really don't get people advising others to disable IPv6 just because they don't understand it.
Statements like "IPv4 does everything I need!" are, ultimately, totally missing the point. The fact is that we have hit the scale ceiling of the IPv4 address space and other cracks are showing and now the entire world needs something that will scale for the next few hundred billion devices.
IPv6 is the protocol that will lift the scale ceiling higher, not just for you and your needs, but for everyone. It won't really change anything performance-wise, nor will it change how higher-layer protocols like TCP and UDP work, but that's intentional.
You can hold out on principle if you like but it won't gain you anything. The world will just migrate around you eventually.
The ISPs still haven't adopted it after 25 years.
ISPs are a massive monopoly in the USA. IPV6 can't be adopted by software until a sufficient number of the backbone works. I've heard that "the backbone is all working for ipv6". Um, is comcast? Wasn't last time I had comcast.
If the ISP monopolies aren't 100% ipv6 (and you see lots of comments here that ipv6 support in ISPs is still "substandard") and convenient, then you can't blame the software people.
Look at your success story in mobile (which is behind a huge NAT to translate things to the "real" internet by the way). How did that work? Oh, you probably wrangled the three or four mobile companies into a room and got them to agree on protocols. Wow, success.
This needs to happen for the rest of ISPs. The fact it hasn't isn't a software issue, it is a governance issue. The failure is in the governance, the outreach with the real policy hammers like the FCC and ISP monopolies.
The governance has failed. It's been failing about 15 years longer than it should. FIFTEEN YEARS OF FAILURE!
Stop blaming reticent programmers, because IPV4 networking is still much much much easier than ipv6 in software, and IPV4 networking SUCKS between NATs and bridges and internal/external IPs and port mappings and what's-my-ip-on-the-other-end and dynamic DNS. Ohmygod it sucks. And ipv6 is worse than that!
Stop blaming the software people. IPV6 governance and outreach failed. Failed failed failed failed.
I don't want ipv6 to fail. I WANT STATIC IPs! EVERY PROGRAMMER WANTS STATIC IPS!
Get the ISPs and FCC in a room. Get google and microsoft and whoever else you need to lean on them. Get Amazon and google and microsoft IAAS into a room (hm, look, the same companies basically) and lean on them to support ipv6.
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