Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]

> Let’s measure the “wealth” of an ISP by the aggregate wealth of its customer base

You can't measure the wealth of an ISP by the wealth of its customer base. ISP businesses are very different in each country. In one country there could be no ISP-hostile regulations, low barriers of entry, a lot of competition, cheap labor, resulting in like $5 ARPU in urban areas and low margins. In another country ISPs could manage to monopolize the market with regulations creating a lot of burden for smaller players, resulting in like $20 ARPU and very high margins. In some countries it is also possible for rent seekers that provide infrastructure for ISPs to suck all the revenue, still allowing competition and leaving them with big ARPUs but low margins.

I suspect the hunch in the title is right though. ISPs from the least competitive markets and therefore rich can afford and do deploy IPv6. While ISPs from the most competitive markets cannot afford bothering with IPv6 and since there is no demand for it yet at all, they don't deploy it. But if demand for IPv6 starts growing for some reason, ISPs from competitive markets will of course deploy it.

How much would you pay to access the ipv4 internet?

How much would you pay to access the ipv6 internet?

What are support costs for ipv6 endpoints / compatibility needs / help desk / securing / understanding / training all techs etc vs ipv4?

= ISP motivation?

ipv4 is relatively well understood, existing infrastructure to serve it, and people are willing to pay MORE to access the ipv4 internet, and basically won't pay anything to access ipv6 only internet.

If you've used ipv6 actively, plenty of stuff doesn't play well, lots of weird hangs on connections etc in deployed contexts, and even with ipv6 you can't seem to actually go endpoint to endpoint (ie, printer at work from computer at home easily). My ipv4 based vpn works great though (and doesn't support ipv6 properly). I started down path of hassling vendors, but it's not worth it. You've got your work ISP to hassle, then fix work internet gateway, then get firewall sorted, then get internal network sorted (yes, the copier runs some ancient crap), then get each employees home internet sorted, then all their machines, then all the related software. They couldn't have made the migration path harder if they had tried.

Also, IPv4 exhaustion doesn’t affect Africa yet, only the American, Asian and European RIR.

Even where ISP's support IPv6, hardware is often the impediment. I've finally enabled IPv6 at home now that Ubiquiti has enabled support.

My office is on Meraki hardware, which is not yet IPv6-ready. Can't quite wrap my mind around the latter. I didn't pay for the hardware or initial 3 years, and I certainly won't be extending the license if support isn't ready.

As a side note, I'd look closely at router implementations as you deploy in home and other small networks. Too many consumer-grade hardware companies rely on NAT versus proper firewall rules to restrict inbound traffic. I don't expect the majority of them to get the basic protections right as we move to publicly addressed IPv6 networks.

I had IPv6 with Time Warner, but then they merged with Spectrum and my IPv6 magically disappeared. My networking and internet infrastructure knowledge is limited, so I have no clue why they would would be incentivized to do that. This happened some time last year.

EDIT: The only reason I know this is because at some point last year I asked google what my IP address was and was surprised to find it was an IPv6 address, but then later on apt broke, because one of the packages (node?) was only checking an IPv6 address and so now whenever I update I have to force apt to use IPv4.