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Are we past peak IPv4?

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Re: Are we past peak IPv4?

#31

Post by gmuslera »

profmonocle wrote: post #3

> IPv6 users now account for 45 per cent of Google visitors. It's hard to estimate how increasing percentage of users with IPv6 access is impacting the demand for public IPv4 addresses. My instinct is "not by a lot", but it's interesting to think about. Currently IPv6 does not allow you to simply do away with public IPv4 adderesses. On the ISP side that would mean providing a product that couldn't access a huge chunk…

There are 2 sides of the problem. Consumers and services. Adding ipv6 from the side of services, that is something not so diverse, is easier than from the side of consumers (i.e. multiple ISPs, devices and so on).

If most if not all services are available also on IPv6, the demand for IPv4 may go down.

Services are the most forced side for using IPv4. Consumers can be behind some sort of NAT, so you can have a lot of users behind single IP addresses. But the destination, if it must be IPv4, is not so trivial.

That is the low hanging fruit of IPv6 adoption, having for all interesting services IPv6. Then ISPs will be free to do at their own rhythm their migration to v6 only. If interesting services start to be only for v6 (because they decided that public adoption was high enough, at least for their main target markets) ISPs will start to add ipv6 to their users, or provide some of the transition mechanisms like NAT46 if that is too complex/expensive because local infrastructure.

But still a lot of very used services are IPv4 only (https://whynoipv6.com/ have a recent enough list ), or worse, have faulty IPv6 implemented (i.e. AAAA records but nothing listening there or with routing problems)

Re: Are we past peak IPv4?

#32

Post by foofie »

profmonocle wrote: post #3

> IPv6 users now account for 45 per cent of Google visitors. It's hard to estimate how increasing percentage of users with IPv6 access is impacting the demand for public IPv4 addresses. My instinct is "not by a lot", but it's interesting to think about. Currently IPv6 does not allow you to simply do away with public IPv4 adderesses. On the ISP side that would mean providing a product that couldn't access a huge chunk…

> Currently IPv6 does not allow you to simply do away with public IPv4 adderesses.

You make a great point, but I would stress that the problem is not posed by IPv6 but by major ISPs with a global presence, such as Vodafone, which unexplainably have been dragging their feet on IPv6 support.

Re: Are we past peak IPv4?

#33

Post by Dylan16807 »

bastage wrote: post #23
Dylan16807 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain this analogy? The way you structured it, I feel like the analogy for "living on Mars" would have to be "merging company networks", but that happens all the time . If Mars is supposed to be IPv6 then I can't figure out what the utilities are supposed to represent.

It was in response to the implication that it would be nice if all the new companies that big businesses acquire have everything (like ipv6) "ready to go" upon acquisition. I was making a "joke" that it's as likely as us getting to another planet and it being already setup to be habitable by humans.

I think that would be a pretty good goal if we were going to new planets every day!

Re: Are we past peak IPv4?

#34

Post by [deleted] »

ghusto wrote: post #28
profmonocle wrote: post #3

> IPv6 users now account for 45 per cent of Google visitors. It's hard to estimate how increasing percentage of users with IPv6 access is impacting the demand for public IPv4 addresses. My instinct is "not by a lot", but it's interesting to think about. Currently IPv6 does not allow you to simply do away with public IPv4 adderesses. On the ISP side that would mean providing a product that couldn't access a huge chunk…

I've often wondered about this chicken and egg problem. It seems that IPv6 is only really useful once we aren't forced to also provide IPv4.

[deleted]

Re: Are we past peak IPv4?

#35

Post by rstuart4133 »

profmonocle wrote: post #3

> IPv6 users now account for 45 per cent of Google visitors. It's hard to estimate how increasing percentage of users with IPv6 access is impacting the demand for public IPv4 addresses. My instinct is "not by a lot", but it's interesting to think about. Currently IPv6 does not allow you to simply do away with public IPv4 adderesses. On the ISP side that would mean providing a product that couldn't access a huge chunk…

> Currently IPv6 does not allow you to simply do away with public IPv4 adderesses. On the ISP side that would mean providing a product that couldn't access a huge chunk of the web. On the hosting side that would mean providing a service that isn't available to a huge chunk of users. It's not viable.

The biggest telco (Telstra) in my country (Australia) allocates IPv6 addresses (only) to mobile phones. I'm not sure when the change over happened, because no one noticed / mentioned it. The WiFi hotspot on my WiFi phone hands out both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Each host gets it's own /64 routable IPv6, so there is no NAT on IPv6. By Debian laptop prefers to use IPv6 when it's available, so when hotspotting to my phone I'm entirely IPv6.

I'm not sure when that happened, because I didn't notice. As far as I can tell, no one noticed.

Re: Are we past peak IPv4?

#36

Post by hot_gril »

neilalexander wrote: post #29
hot_gril wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only practical reason you'd want to use ipv6 at home is if you want to expose multiple devices on your LAN to incoming TCP/UDP connections from the Internet without doing port mapping, since your ISP likely gives you a whole ipv6 block instead of just one address like with v4.

The real practical reason, everything else aside, is that you’ll need IPv6 connectivity to reach IPv6 services as the world continues to adopt and transition over to IPv6.

So far I haven't encountered any ipv6-only services. It may happen some day, then again there might be some bridge to v4 anyway.

Re: Are we past peak IPv4?

#37

Post by hot_gril »

fmajid wrote: post #27
graphe wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was zero speed difference or any changes I noticed last I configured my router, which is why it's still disabled. I haven't seen a single good use for enabling it.

Not having to use all sorts of NAT traversal hacks or use relay servers means P2P communications like video calls will be faster, but only if both sides are on IPv6, so yes, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg. Most mobile phones are dual-stack now, and apps like browsers do “happy eyeballs” where they attempt both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously and pick the best.

Besides both sides being ipv6, the chat app has to intentionally support some p2p mode, and both sides have to be NAT-free and have firewalls allowing incoming connections.

Re: Are we past peak IPv4?

#38

Post by [deleted] »

hot_gril wrote: post #37
fmajid wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not having to use all sorts of NAT traversal hacks or use relay servers means P2P communications like video calls will be faster, but only if both sides are on IPv6, so yes, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg. Most mobile phones are dual-stack now, and apps like browsers do “happy eyeballs” where they attempt both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously and pick the best.

Besides both sides being ipv6, the chat app has to intentionally support some p2p mode, and both sides have to be NAT-free and have firewalls allowing incoming connections.

[deleted]

Re: Are we past peak IPv4?

#39

Post by gargalatas »

hot_gril wrote: post #21
graphe wrote: post #5

I've always disable IPv6 on my router because I heard it wasn't secure since it was worthless to enable, and was another ingress into security. What benefits are there if any of using it?

The only practical reason you'd want to use ipv6 at home is if you want to expose multiple devices on your LAN to incoming TCP/UDP connections from the Internet without doing port mapping, since your ISP likely gives you a whole ipv6 block instead of just one address like with v4.

CGNAT is also a thing lately..

Re: Are we past peak IPv4?

#40

Post by hot_gril »

gargalatas wrote: post #39
hot_gril wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only practical reason you'd want to use ipv6 at home is if you want to expose multiple devices on your LAN to incoming TCP/UDP connections from the Internet without doing port mapping, since your ISP likely gives you a whole ipv6 block instead of just one address like with v4.

CGNAT is also a thing lately..

Right, some home ISPs that don't give a public v4 might give you a public v6 without a firewall. Cellular ISPs will probably have CGNAT even on ipv6, for example my AT&T is like that.
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