IPv4 is almost gone (in Europe anyway)

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/ncc-announce/2012-September/000615.html

by mstevens • 14 years ago

78 51 14 years ago

indiecore• 14 years ago

Yep and nothing will be done by ISPs until they are all completely gone (and maybe not even then, scarcity is good for business).

oasisbob• 14 years ago

This isn't true.

Comcast, Verizon, and T-Mobile are a few of the big eyeball networks who are making large infrastructure investments in IPv6. ISPs are far ahead of most content and hosting providers in this area, as they bear the pain of IPv4 scarcity when providing addresses to their subscribers.

Transit providers are on the whole prepared for v6 as well.

As an ISP, you don't want to wake up one day and see analysis that your network numbering is at odds with your growth plans.

zaphoyd2• 14 years ago

Not only are they making large infrastructure investments, a many of their customers (including myself) can get IPv6 service from all three of those companies today and have been able to for some time.

andyking2• 14 years ago

This seems to have been rumbling on for some time now - at least for the past five years or so.

My OS supports IPv6, my home router supports IPv6, but at no point have any of the home ISPs I've used (three in the past five years - BT Internet, Be and Origin Broadband) made any mention of any sort of IPv6 support.

I'm not au fait with the workings of such huge operations, so is there any reason for ISP adoption of IPv6 to be so sluggish? It's not like it's been an overnight thing. I'm aware it's unlikely to be a simple case of flipping a switch, or installing a new software package - but we do appear to be approaching an IP crunch.

Are there any consumer ISPs that do offer customers a block of IPv6 addresses for use, rather than (or as well as) a single IPv4 address?

daurnimator• 14 years ago

I'm in the opposite situation.

My ISP and wifi router support IPv6; but my modem does not. And without this modem failing, I probably won't shell out $150 for a new one.

michaelt• 14 years ago

According to [1] there are a few - no big names, though. As [2] says, running IPv6 is fairly boring; you get access to the same web as everyone else.

[1] http://www.sixxs.net/faq/connectivity/?faq=native&countr... [2] http://bens.me.uk/2011/adventures-in-ipv6

X-Istence• 14 years ago

I'm running on IPv6 on Comcast in the US, and yes while I get access to the same web, I have noticed that I was having issues with IPv4 that I don't have on IPv6. Such as limits per IP/account tuple logged into certain servers.

So my iPad, iPhone, and MacBook Pro being logged into the same Google account over IMAP would sometimes cause issues because of too many connections for that specific account, now with IPv6 that isn't an issue because all of my devices now have their own unique IPv6 address. Perfect.

kiallmacinnes5• 14 years ago

[2]'s comment "you get access to the same web as everyone else" really only applies to consumers of "the web".

And - more importantly - soon no longer applies even to that. IPv4 is essentially gone, and when it is, not having IPv6 will mean your web is smaller.

IPv6 gives you much more freedom in configuring your network as both a service provider and consumer. This isn't boring :)

kiallmacinnes5• 14 years ago

Eircom (an Irish ISP) are trialing IPv6 currently, and the routers they have been shipping for the last year or so support it.

Other than that, our co-location provider Blacknight offer IPv6 to their customers.. but that's not exactly residential!

philjr• 14 years ago

BT / Esat were trialling IPv6 as early as 2005 and giving native allocations around that time also

blahedo• 14 years ago

> This seems to have been rumbling on for some time now - at least for the past five years or so. ... It's not like it's been an overnight thing.

To say the least! This particular rumble ("we're out!") may be new-ish in the last few years, but the general rumble ("we'll run out!") has been going on a lot longer, and the transition is pretty much the opposite of an overnight thing. I learned about how IPv6 was imminently needed and right around the corner when I took a networks class in college. In 1996. Tanenbaum's book (from four editions ago!) includes ten pages on IPv6 that could appear in a book published today nearly unchanged.

pm215• 14 years ago

My ISP (Andrews&Arnold, UK) offer IPv6, so I have a /48 and (since I bought a new modem recently) all my machines are now natively IPv6 with no tunnelling involved. (A&A also support tunnelling if your modem/router is IPv4 only.)

andyking2• 14 years ago

Excellent. I currently use a local ISP, because it's the only way I can get a decent speed where I live (there's a local FTTC network called Digital Region).

But I'm likely to be moving out of their coverage area at some point, so I'll add this to my list to consider when I do. Thanks!

agwa5• 14 years ago

> Are there any consumer ISPs that do offer customers a block of IPv6 addresses for use, rather than (or as well as) a single IPv4 address?

Comcast, at least in some parts of the country (e.g. SF's East Bay). You don't even have to ask them. One day I noticed my router was being advertised an IPv6 route. I switched on DHCPv6 and got an IPv6 address, as well as a /64 prefix for the rest of my network.

Unfortunately /64 is all you can get for now, which isn't really sufficient, but they've promised to delegate shorter prefixes in the future.

jerf• 14 years ago

"Unfortunately /64 is all you can get for now, which isn't really sufficient"

Not sufficient for what? (Honest question.)

IsTom• 14 years ago

I'm not sure about other places, but I wrote some software for an ISP in Poland. It seems damn hard to coordinate whole country worth of people in normal operation, leave alone make a transition to new technology. Remember that many people won't be happy with transient trouble related to the switch.

tveita• 14 years ago

And in Asia: APNIC initiated last block measures in April last year.

http://www.apnic.net/publications/news/2011/final-8

ginko• 14 years ago

I'm afraid of the possibility that instead of adopting IPv6, internet providers will just switch to ISP-wide NAT, making the internet even more asymmetric than it already is.

kiallmacinnes5• 14 years ago

I sincerely hope not! ISP wide NAT is bound to cause countless issues for internet services and businesses.

The first and mose obvious examples I can think of:

* Internet services (eg websites, netfix etc) can no longer blacklist IP addresses without blocking entire ISPs.

* Businesses can no longer offer "direct to the office" VPNs for remote workers.. Actually - even site-2-site VPN's will break if both sides are behind an ISP wide NAT.

bad_user• 14 years ago

Look on the bright side: users will have more privacy.

andreasvc• 14 years ago

The first is a feature. The second is not true: a VPN can tunnel through TCP in the worst case, and most NATs allow VPN over UDP using some tricks.

ay4• 14 years ago

To be clear: transitioning to IPv6 is a two step process:

1) you need to enable IPv6 everywhere 2) when that is working, you can sunset IPv4

So, every transition strategy involves both the life support for IPv4 and the delivery of IPv6.

Sometimes the ISP has no choice but to use it. And iff the ISP also rolls out IPv6 in parallel, this is fine, the users can access the dualstack websites over IPv6, while still using IPv4 for the rest of the content. And this is the key.

A lot of folks here are building products that have their front door on the Web.

And this is where all of you, as a "content provider", can make a difference for those users who already have IPv6 by providing the service both on IPv4 and IPv6.

kiallmacinnes5• 14 years ago

Agreed - ISP wide NAT will be necessary, but if they choose that instead of ISP wide NAT+IPv6, then we're in trouble!

EDIT: Also - Everything I have a hand in is accessible via both IPv4 and IPv6..

zokier• 14 years ago

From what I understand (which admittedly is not all that much) implementing so called carrier-grade NAT would be almost as expensive as transitioning to IPv6 would be. And even private ranges are finite, which afaik was one cause for Comcasts applaudably early transition to IPv6

kiallmacinnes5• 14 years ago

For those of you curious about IPv6, and wanting to experiment with it at home or in the office, have a look at SixXS[1] and Hurricane Electric IPv6[2].

They both offer free IPv6 "tunnels" which can be used to provide IPv6 to your home/office.

We use SixXS in the office, and the tunnel has been alive without issue for 83 weeks and counting..

(P.S. SixXS is probably the easier choice if you have a dynamic IP, or are not setting the tunnel up from your router directly..)

[1] http://www.sixxs.net/ [2]: http://ipv6.he.net/

baq2• 14 years ago

worth noting that HE has tunnel endpoints all over the world. i'm using one right now in europe and it works really well.

sjwright2• 14 years ago

IPv6 is just like the transition to Python 3: it'll happen... eventually. But the only people with an incentive to put the hard work in are people who are genuinely enthusiastic about the transition. Everyone else is sticking it in the too-hard basket.

ay4• 14 years ago

This is a fairly outdated meme by now. Just that the enthusiasts are loud about it. Everyone else does not rush tell the world about their plans - it takes on average about 3 years to get everything in place, so this is a pretty good head-start against the competition :-)

sjwright2• 14 years ago

I didn't realise I stumbled upon a meme!

diminoten3• 14 years ago

Hey 2004 called, they want their headline back.

When you consider the ability for inter-RIR transfer of networks, not to mention the market being developed (already released?) by ARIN (do other RIRs have markets?), and you've got a great recipe for a run on IP addresses.

TazeTSchnitzel4• 14 years ago

"almost"?

I'm still stuck on an IPv4 connection at home, in Britain. My phone still can't get IPv6 on mobile internet. My VPS host still doesn't support IPv6 on my server. And PHP still fails to properly parse some types of IPv6 address.

Things have got better, sure, but don't say it's almost gone. Far from it.

ryannielsen• 14 years ago

The notice is about IPv4 allocation, not about IPv6 market penetration. RIPE NCC has just begun allocating IPv4 addresses from the last available /8 block.

TazeTSchnitzel4• 14 years ago

Ah, fair enough.

juan_juarez2• 14 years ago

> PHP still fails

It still fails to reject February 31, I'm completely not surprised to hear that it fails on IPv6.

TazeTSchnitzel4• 14 years ago

I don't know which specific function you're talking about, but there may be a good reason for it.

_suoiruc• 14 years ago

I know these folks are well-meaning but I find these constant "warnings" to be insulting. What people really need to be aware of is that the folks making decisions of how the internet should run, "the experts", are not always as smart as they think they are. They make mistakes. And it's hard to get a bunch of know-it-all's to agree.

It's also hard to get the entire `net to switch their behaviour, and adopt something that is incompatible with IPv4, without telling them what benefit they will gain by doing so. Can you blame them? But the "experts" and their zombie followers sure are trying.

IPv4 works. NAT works. NAT can be traversed. So what is the problem exactly?

As a home user, I can set up my own NAT'ing scheme with private IPv4 space far easier than I can learn to deal with the added complexity of IPv6.

OK, now I will get skewered by IPv6 fanatics. How many of them are getting paid to do IPv6 consulting work?

IPv4: It Just Works. "Experts": They make mistakes, just like everyone else.

Now, let's hear from the "experts".

devdas• 14 years ago

What happens when your ISP has to NAT you?

IPv4 is almost gone (in Europe anyway)

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