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What drives IPv6 deployment?

potaroo.net

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Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#21
post #9

The outliers that surprised me the most are the big Chinese providers (ChinaNet and China Unicom) in the provider table. Despite them having much less IPv4 addresses than users, they appear to make no significant effort to get IPv6 deployed. What are they doing instead? Putting all users behind carrier-grade NAT that don't need dedicated IPv4 addresses? That must be hundreds or even thousands of users behind a single…

> That must be hundreds or even thousands of users behind a single address

No, ChinaNet has 2.86 users per IPv4 address. China Unicom has 2.79. Far less than Indian carriers.

Source: TFA

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#22
post #7

> Three surprising numbers in this table are those of 94% adoption in T-Mobile USA, 93% in BSkyB and 92% in Reliance Jio. They are surprising in that prior to these deployments we had though that an ISP deployment of IPv6 was only a part of the story. It was up to the connected user network to also use IPv6-capable equipment within their edge network... Upgrading equipment in the home or office takes time.. . Why can…

> BSkyB is a fixed line broadband provider, but in the UK it's usual for the ISP to supply the router

Yeah, this is where the “IPv6 is different^Wcomplicated to set up” argument falls flat for me. For most (consumer) users (at least in the UK), they get a free router from their ISP that’s already configured to do IPv4 NAT. For the minority that buy their own hardware, IPv4 NAT is enabled by default in hardware targeted at consumers. If it were configured to firewall inbound IPv6 traffic by default there should be nothing else to do. If you need to forward ports you’re in the admin screens anyway (unless you use UPnP).

This is like arguing IPv4 is inherently complicated because if you opt out of the provided hardware and buy some Cisco monstrosity you have to configure NAT by yourself. Which is perfectly true but the massive majority aren’t going to do that.

What really didn’t help adoption is that IPv6 support was an afterthought at best for a lot of router makers, and for a long time was riddled with bugs.

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#23
post #10

I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm happy with CG-NAT because of the security and privacy benefits. This thing of having a per-device IP address looks like the wet dream of marketers and those newspapers that won't let you look at more than X articles a month. No thanks.

As sneak says, almost everything uses privacy extensions by default.

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#24

We're an ISP, most of our customers are businesses. Of those, around 50% opt for a pre-configured LAN (i.e. we do NAT and usually CGNAT too). For the rest we provide a static IP address, so we'll allocate a /30 (block of 4), and they get a single usable address which they will assign to their own manged router/firewall. For the majority of our customers "networking" is either handled as overflow for their in/out IT r…

Is there a reason you assign a /30 instead of doing point-to-point routing?

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#25
post #21
post #9

The outliers that surprised me the most are the big Chinese providers (ChinaNet and China Unicom) in the provider table. Despite them having much less IPv4 addresses than users, they appear to make no significant effort to get IPv6 deployed. What are they doing instead? Putting all users behind carrier-grade NAT that don't need dedicated IPv4 addresses? That must be hundreds or even thousands of users behind a single…

> That must be hundreds or even thousands of users behind a single address No, ChinaNet has 2.86 users per IPv4 address. China Unicom has 2.79. Far less than Indian carriers. Source: TFA

I've seen those numbers, but they are idealized and only of theoretical nature. They do not account for unusable IPv4 addresses due to subnet structures, of which there are probably some within the theoretical IPv4 space available to a provider, and they do not account for self-used addresses by the provider that aren't within the blocks used to assign to customers. In addition, as I described, I assume the providers also have some customers who need fixed IPv4 addresses, maybe even whole ranges of them, like businesses often do. Those also greatly diminish the number of addresses left over for the "regular" customers.

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#26
post #24

We're an ISP, most of our customers are businesses. Of those, around 50% opt for a pre-configured LAN (i.e. we do NAT and usually CGNAT too). For the rest we provide a static IP address, so we'll allocate a /30 (block of 4), and they get a single usable address which they will assign to their own manged router/firewall. For the majority of our customers "networking" is either handled as overflow for their in/out IT r…

Is there a reason you assign a /30 instead of doing point-to-point routing?

Too many customer devices don't support /31 subnets unfortunately, for example with Draytek we've seen an issue where it would accept the 255.255.255.254 subnet but we'd see a whole raft of connection issues making the connection unusable.

If we provide a dedicated IP for a connection where we provide the LAN we just put a single /32 on the loopback and NAT onto this which is obviously much more economic with addresses.

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#27
post #10

I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm happy with CG-NAT because of the security and privacy benefits. This thing of having a per-device IP address looks like the wet dream of marketers and those newspapers that won't let you look at more than X articles a month. No thanks.

I don't think IPs were ever a viable tracking tool besides detecting the country. NAT has been the default for most home networks and as a marketer you really don't want to confuse a mid-forties dad with their 14 year old daughter. So you've always had very very different marketing profiles share an IP. Besides that browser profiles are just soo much more exact.

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#28
post #22
post #7

> Three surprising numbers in this table are those of 94% adoption in T-Mobile USA, 93% in BSkyB and 92% in Reliance Jio. They are surprising in that prior to these deployments we had though that an ISP deployment of IPv6 was only a part of the story. It was up to the connected user network to also use IPv6-capable equipment within their edge network... Upgrading equipment in the home or office takes time.. . Why can…

> BSkyB is a fixed line broadband provider, but in the UK it's usual for the ISP to supply the router Yeah, this is where the “IPv6 is different^Wcomplicated to set up” argument falls flat for me. For most (consumer) users (at least in the UK), they get a free router from their ISP that’s already configured to do IPv4 NAT. For the minority that buy their own hardware, IPv4 NAT is enabled by default in hardware target…

What isn't really helping adoption of IPv6 support now is attitude of some ISPs.

There are ISPs that use migration to IPv6 as a way to tighten their reign over users. They will give you DS-lite only (ok...), but with /64 (no /56, no /48). They will force their router on you, where in past with IPv4 they would provide an option for bridge. Their router cannot do PD (if it had more than /64, so maybe that's the reason why they do not provide that), so if you want a virtual net with VMs on your machine, you are going to waste your time playing around with IPv6 NAT, which doesn't work correctly anywhere. You can't control RA/DHCPv6 on the router, you cannot really control firewall rules. Suddenly, the ISPs has ony free reign over your network, but also over policies on your network.

So for undemanding users that's fine, it will work with Facebook and Netflix. For a power user, the IPv6 offer is unacceptable, not because of IPv6 properties, but due to limiting implementation that the ISPs force.

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#29
post #5
post #2

I have the joy of living in a community with FTTH and a 1Gbps symmetrical connection for I have the pain of that connection requiring an additional $10 / month just so I can get 1 (or 4, same price) static IPv4 address which is apparently “required” for me to get IPv6. After using a HE.net tunnel for a few weeks, the slowdowns induced led me back to IPv4-only world. So even in an advanced situation, you might still b…

The problem here is not that HE.net tunnels require a static IPv4 address, it's that your ISP won't connect you to the whole Internet. Tunnels are garbage. You should either switch ISPs, or complain and wait.

> Tunnels are garbage. You should either switch ISPs, or complain and wait.

While the HE tunnel is somewhat limited (does it peak at 50 Mbps?), I find it's implementation way better than some ISPs that provide native IPv6.

HEnet at least provides more than single /64, and does not force a specific, limited router on you.

Re: What drives IPv6 deployment?

#30
post #10

I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm happy with CG-NAT because of the security and privacy benefits. This thing of having a per-device IP address looks like the wet dream of marketers and those newspapers that won't let you look at more than X articles a month. No thanks.

NAT, including CG-NAT really provides no security benefits. Too many comments, blogs, etc, have been written on this topic for me to reiterate the specifics here.

NAT, including CG-NAT, provides near zero privacy benefits. Nobody is tracking by IP address - there are far, far, far, more accurate ways, again, I won't reiterate all the ways this happens, Google it (or is the TLS session resumption one still on the front page as one example?)

NAT, and CG-NAT provide real drawbacks. Drawbacks most people won't understand, and that's OKAY. Not everyone needs to understand them, but when you don't understand something, please don't advocate for it with specifics like "happy with CG-NAT because of the security and privacy benefits", instead, just leave it as, "happy with CG-NAT, I don't see any drawbacks".

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