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40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

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Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#201
post #157

I sure wish Starlink supported IPv6. They're a brand new ISP planning for millions of customers and decided from the start they couldn't get enough IPv4 addresses for everyone. Fair enough! But we're stuck with Carrier Grade NAT and it is a drag. On Starlink it's impossible to host a server socket directly, which makes any peer to peer networking a PITA. Geocoding IP addresses doesn't work so I have to bend over back…

> A little surprised that a new ISP created in 2021 wouldn't have IPv6 support as one of their launch features. Worse, they had it and turned it off at some point!

Unfortunately customers tend to be happier with IPv6 turned off. There are lots of ways to misconfigure IPv6 and have it kinda work but slow and unusable. This is especially the case when you let users bring their own router.

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#202
I am surprised of such a low number. ISP and mobile carriers have been supporting ipv6 for years already.

Is it because a large portion of the traffic is done through corporate enterprise networks and proxies? Enterprises are the ones slowing down the adoption of ipv6.

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are NATs getting costly? Don't quite understand.

To do NAT, you need to map (external) port numbers to (internal) IP addresses. This is done using connection tracking: tracking the state of the connection and the appropriate mapping. And connection tracking gets expensive at scale.

Not if you only allow each user 100 connections. That's 1200 bytes of ram per customer paying 100$ a month.

And you can charge them an extra $10 per month for 'pro' internet and let them have 1000 connections for 'all the family'.

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#204
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SpaceX'es focus is to scale up > Removing any unnecessary feature is a must in order to reduce risk. You can’t scale a space based planetary ISP without IPv6, this isn’t a feature, it’s a requirement.

IPv6 amounts to a firmware update which the current hardware is and any future hardware will be capable of. The major hurdle in scaling Starlink is fast and cheap deployment of 1000s of satellite hardware. At the moment, the sole focus of SpaceX in relation to Starlink is to get their V2 satellites to orbit in order to keep up with bandwidth demands. V2 requires the Starship system which is yet to make it to orbit. T…

They already had IPv6 support while they were still using google cloud for connectivity (not sure why they went with google for their initial phase instead of a more traditional carrier) and when they moved to their own network they disabled IPv6 for some reason.

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#205
post #2

Anyone go out of their way to disable IPV6 on all their systems, even at the hardware level, like on routers etc? What's a good reason to avoid IPV6?

Yes at my router for privacy. Not nat means no source device obfuscation. No source device obfuscation equals device tracking

RFC3041 (Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6) and it's successors have been around for 20 years now and are supported in every major operating system.

In fact, macOS is so aggressive about using temporary addresses that I had to turn off SLAAC in order to be able to ssh back into my desktop.

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#206
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CGNAT itself is a enormous risk. How? IPv6 isn't a substitution for CGNAT, it's an addition to it. You either have to keep CGNAT or replace it with dedicated IPv4 for each customer. Dedicated IPv4 is most likely too costly given the limited availability. SpaceX is also trying to cut cost aggressively.

True. As an ISP you are gonna need an IPv4 stack no matter what. Even if that stack is CGNAT'd up the ass. I can't even ping news.ycombinator.com or amazon.com with IPv6. That is the biggest problem with IPv6. Who is gonna be the first ISP to shut off their IPv4 stack? There is always gonna be some random website that is IPv4.

When all the big services become IPv6, the number of IPv4 megabits will become small.

You might just direct all the v4 traffic via a tunnel to another ISP which specializes in legacy services like IPv4, running SMTP/news servers, etc. Now you've saved all the cost of maintaining all the IPv4 peerings and config.

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#207
post #38

“In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF,[2] which subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.” 40% adoption after 25 years? Really highlights how terrible IPv6 is in terms of backwards compatibility. What we needed was an internet protocol with the benefits of IPv6 that runs as an extension to the IPv4 stack. The current approach to duplicate everything into IPv6 is wasteful…

IPv6 is perfectly backwards compatible with IPv4 with the IPv4-in-IPv6-address embedding and other technologies. The problem is that IPv4 is not forward-compatible with anything that has a larger address space. Thus a IPv4-only host will never ever be able to communicate with a non-IPv4 host, since there is no way to encode more than 32-bit of information in the IPv4 header.

So you will always end up in this situation where people just won't bother implementing the IPv4-replacement and you cannot simply switch to it.

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are NATs getting costly? Don't quite understand.

To do NAT, you need to map (external) port numbers to (internal) IP addresses. This is done using connection tracking: tracking the state of the connection and the appropriate mapping. And connection tracking gets expensive at scale.

Yes, I understand how NAT works.

But CPU/memory is going down in cost way faster than bandwidth demand is increasing.

Regardless, its way way cheaper than buying IPv4 blocks clearly, otherwise people wouldn't be doing it.

Edit: ok, the problem isn't hardware, it's comedy license fees. https://itprice.com/juniper-price-list/cgn.html

$470k for a license to do CGNAT at 100gbit/sec. Surely these guys are opening themselves up to be replaced with some cheaper open source based software solution?

Re: 40% of Google users now connect via IPv6

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To do NAT, you need to map (external) port numbers to (internal) IP addresses. This is done using connection tracking: tracking the state of the connection and the appropriate mapping. And connection tracking gets expensive at scale.

Not if you only allow each user 100 connections. That's 1200 bytes of ram per customer paying 100$ a month. And you can charge them an extra $10 per month for 'pro' internet and let them have 1000 connections for 'all the family'.

How do you ensure each user is capped at 100 connections without that check incurring additional resources?
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