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Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]

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Re: Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]

#51

Post by Arnt »

ahbs66 wrote: post #35
bogomipz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>" It depends on the opinions of the network personnel, on the hardware they have in their core network, on the hardware their customers have (CPEs), on the support contracts they have, etc." Are you saying there are network engineers/management at ISPs who don't believe IPv6 is an imperative? As someone who in a former life worked inside large ISPs on the networking side I can tell you that that view would be quite…

>Are you saying there are network engineers/management at ISPs who don't believe IPv6 is an imperative? If the rest of your message is true, why are the ipv6 numbers so low, if it's not because of politics?

IPv6 growth has been an almost flat curve for many years. Now suddenly it's not.

I personally expected IPv6 growth to slow down gradually. I find it very odd that the growth hit a wall like that. Oversimplifying somewhat: The number of new v6-capable users increased every month, then boom, zero.

I also find it odd that politics would have no effect at 13% or 14% deployment and then block growth entirely at 15%.

Re: Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]

#53

Post by bewo001 »

lokedhs wrote: post #39

Knowing what I know about how corporations are run (which is nothing more than anyone else who has worked for multiple large organisations) the ISPs are dragging their feet on IPv6 because they can get away with it and it saves them money. I switched ISPs for my fibre connection because my previous one had an absolutely terrible IPv6 implementation. I made sure to let them know why they lost me as a customer, but it'…

To get a project going you need to convince mgmt that it can make or save money. And you need a shiny demo. With IPv6 migration, this was tricky. It costs a lot of money up front to get IPv6 support for all routers and backend systems. There aren't really new products you can show. Being able to give retail customers a fixed IPv6 address will reduce the demand for more profitable business access products. The best argument was that IPv4 address depletion would make it difficult to add customers.

Re: Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]

#54

Post by M_Bakhtiari »

jwhite wrote: post #44
daurnimator wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that a lot of ISPs in Australia are stuck on IPv4 as their whole billing systems (written in early 2000s) use IPv4 addresses for everything. Including techniques like mapping an array of size 2^32 (entirely possible with virtual addresses) to keep counters for each user. It would be a complete rewrite of their billing systems to work with IPv6, and they no longer have many/any programmers on staff.

Most residential customers don't have static IP addresses -- how does that work when a customer's IPv4 address changes?

>Most residential customers don't have static IP addresses

Where is this? What do you have to back up this claim?

>how does that work when a customer's IPv4 address changes?

As far as I can tell, it wouldn't. But I don't see what your point is.

I'm not in Australia, but I've had the same IP for decades, even having gone through multiple routers, so it's probably tied to the DSLAM port I'm connected to, which makes sense for such a billing scheme. Also might be why I don't have IPv6 yet either.

Re: Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]

#55

Post by toyg »

lmm wrote: post #19
toyg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming is hardly a major driver of infrastructure choices, with all due respect. The issue is that most businesses are now so well-acquainted with NAT-ting, they don't really care for IP addresses. In fact, the more opaque your network topology is to the outside, the better from a security point of view. Every app works through http these days (because proxies are mandatory, again for security), so there is little ne…

> Gaming is hardly a major driver of infrastructure choices, with all due respect. When it comes to consumer ISPs, who are the people paying for the high-end packages? > The issue is that most businesses are now so well-acquainted with NAT-ting, they don't really care for IP addresses. In fact, the more opaque your network topology is to the outside, the better from a security point of view. Every app works through h…

> IPv6 suits the startups

That matches what the presentation says: IPv6 is growing roughly as the internet grows, i.e. new ISPs go with it, because if you are starting from scratch, might as well do things in the modern way. (If you mean vanilla web startup, I think they have enough problems without risking to bork things up by misconfiguring a feature nobody really asks for...)

> When it comes to consumer ISPs, who are the people paying for the high-end packages?

Movie watchers and other media addicts; and they don't really care about IP addresses.

IMHO a lot of bigger ISPs have looked at the struggles of early adopters and decided the effort is not worth it. Most of their budgets these days go towards traffic shaping and caching, where IPv6 doesn't really help much. Established businesses are not clamouring for the feature, so why bother?

I agree that at some point things will change. I think the point of the article was that we thought we had reached that threshold a few years ago, but it looks like it wasn't really the case.

Re: Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]

#56

Post by zaarn »

ahbs66 wrote: post #15
lmm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NAT is an annoyance. Peer-to-peer gaming or voicechat becomes laggy, or doesn't work at all. With the popular internet becoming more and more centralised, maybe it doesn't matter so much to the average end user, but there will come a point where people notice that gaming is better on ISP A than on ISP B even if you don't know exactly why.

>Peer-to-peer gaming or voicechat becomes laggy, or doesn't work at all. It's 2018, nobody would be insane enough to try that

Ghost Recon Wildlands, a 2017 Game, uses P2P game lobbies.

It's still very popular because it's cheaper; no expensive servers to run for customers and they can still play if you eventually shut down your services.

Re: Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]

#57

Post by daurnimator »

jwhite wrote: post #44
daurnimator wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that a lot of ISPs in Australia are stuck on IPv4 as their whole billing systems (written in early 2000s) use IPv4 addresses for everything. Including techniques like mapping an array of size 2^32 (entirely possible with virtual addresses) to keep counters for each user. It would be a complete rewrite of their billing systems to work with IPv6, and they no longer have many/any programmers on staff.

Most residential customers don't have static IP addresses -- how does that work when a customer's IPv4 address changes?

I believe they take a snapshot (which can be as simple as fork(), hooray for COW memory) of the array every minute to see how much you've downloaded. The same IPv4 address isn't reused by another customer until a day has passed.

Re: Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]

#58

Post by dx034 »

scrollaway wrote: post #41
lokedhs wrote: post #39

Knowing what I know about how corporations are run (which is nothing more than anyone else who has worked for multiple large organisations) the ISPs are dragging their feet on IPv6 because they can get away with it and it saves them money. I switched ISPs for my fibre connection because my previous one had an absolutely terrible IPv6 implementation. I made sure to let them know why they lost me as a customer, but it'…

None of this explains why the growth suddenly slowed down. My best theory is it has to do with adoption of mobile ISPs.

It would appear to me that a lot of the previous growth came from Jio in India which added a lot of users in 2016&2017. That has slowed down now so that the overall growth has slowed. You'd probably need to see very large providers switching over to see further jumps of that size.

Re: Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]

#59

Post by dx034 »

lmm wrote: post #19
toyg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming is hardly a major driver of infrastructure choices, with all due respect. The issue is that most businesses are now so well-acquainted with NAT-ting, they don't really care for IP addresses. In fact, the more opaque your network topology is to the outside, the better from a security point of view. Every app works through http these days (because proxies are mandatory, again for security), so there is little ne…

> Gaming is hardly a major driver of infrastructure choices, with all due respect. When it comes to consumer ISPs, who are the people paying for the high-end packages? > The issue is that most businesses are now so well-acquainted with NAT-ting, they don't really care for IP addresses. In fact, the more opaque your network topology is to the outside, the better from a security point of view. Every app works through h…

> When it comes to consumer ISPs, who are the people paying for the high-end packages?

A family of 5 where you need the bandwidth if everyone starts streaming videos at the same time. For gaming you'd advertise ping times, I haven't really seen that recently.

Re: Is IPv6 only for the Rich? [pdf]

#60

Post by bogomipz »

stephengillie wrote: post #43
bogomipz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>" It depends on the opinions of the network personnel, on the hardware they have in their core network, on the hardware their customers have (CPEs), on the support contracts they have, etc." Are you saying there are network engineers/management at ISPs who don't believe IPv6 is an imperative? As someone who in a former life worked inside large ISPs on the networking side I can tell you that that view would be quite…

> Are you saying there are network engineers/management at ISPs who don't believe IPv6 is an imperative? Unfortunately, this is true for at least one major ISP in the USA. IPv6 support is seen as a low priority internally, as they work to merely keep their devices online. One huge secret about Juniper devices is that the hardware is remarkably unreliable. At one company, a partial Juniper SSG failure prevented a fail…

>"One huge secret about Juniper devices is that the hardware is remarkably unreliable."

This is patently untrue. The MTTF is the same as Cisco gear. The only reason this would be a "huge secret" is because it is not widely held opinion.

There are bad revision of chipsets on certain boards from time to time yes. And if you place a large order you will likely feel that pain if you're shipped boards with those revs. I know this first hand and with SRXs. Firewalls are but one segment of their product line and the one that was never their core strength(in fact this was the Netscreen acquisition.)

The T4000 and MX 960s are both "big iron" and in both the core and edge of Tier 1 ISPs. The reputation of these are exceptional and for good reason. Their EX/QFX ToR switches also have a well-deserved reputation.

To use your anecdotal experience with on particular segment of their product line and make a sweeping generalization of the quality of their entire offering is absurd.

I say this as someone who doesn't have a horse in the race and has very little love for network hardware vendors in general.

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