Ars Says, “Remember how, a decade ago, we told you that the Internet was running out of IPv4 addresses? Well, it took a while, but that day is here now: Asia, Europe, and Latin America have been parceling out scraps for a year or more, and now the ARIN wait list is here for the US, Canada, and numerous North Atlantic and Caribbean islands. Only organizations in Africa can still get IPv4 addresses as needed. The good news is that IPv6 seems to be picking up the slack.”
ARIN have exhausted their available IPv4 pool, which isn’t such a surprise. What might be a surprise is that while IPv6 is picking up, it’s picking up very slowly.
The resistance to IPv6 is so strong that instead, network operators are turning to the IPv4 brokers to buy in blocks from other operators. This isn’t just a small time underground operation either; some deals are worth millions, and IP brokers can now be found at any network operator conference.
It’s not so much that IPv6 is picking up the slack, it’s that operators have just started fighting over IPv4 blocks.
I’ve had IPv6 on Comcast for a couple of years now.
So annoying how the the rest of the internet is still lagging behind.
There are very real privacy concerns with ipv6.
“On a mechanical level it works better in nearly every way. IPv6 however raises privacy concerns. A provider can have a set IP for each person on their network. This is convenient for a variety of reasons including:
• Throttling bandwidth and banning users
• Tracking an individual personally
• Giving information to big business for lawsuits
• Giving information to the police for criminal actions
• Giving information to the government
• Using someone else’s connection to get them sued or arrested “
judgen,
They state their IPv6 service is intended for single computers connected directly to the cable model, but of course this policy is utterly stupid, and encourages NAT for IPv6. I hope it will eventually be fixed, but it seems early adopters may be in for some problems.
I think adoption will be exponential; when you look at US and Belgian adoption over the last few years it has been once the big companies started rolling it out. I just wish the UK providers would pull their finger out. It is annoying, I’ve been using IPv6 via PoPs and now natively for 15 years, so it does seem to move slowly. But I think the running out of IPv4 will be the catalyst that forces the rest of the world to adopt it.
As another poster mentioned, many of the big websites are IPv4 only and don’t feel much pressure to change. And they are right–anyone can connect to their servers. But this doesn’t work for new and smaller companies (or at least, will become much harder). Consider that when companies can’t get an IPv4 address for their front-facing public servers they will be stuck, and while paying increasingly large amounts of money for an address will happen in the short term, in the medium term we’ll have a split between IPv4 “have’s” and “have not’s”, and ultimately we’ll end up with IPv6-only sites. At that point you’ll need IPv6 for real to deal with other companies, and this will drive companies to adopt IPv6 (even if they are currently IPv4 only) in order to be able to continue to communicate with the wider world. This still seems a way off even now, but changes like this often exhibit a sigmoidal relationship–we may well be toward the midpoint in a few months before people realise it.
Yes, you’d think that reality would be obvious, but that isn’t what’s happening.
One of the biggest barriers to IPv6 adoption is that the majority of CPE doesn’t support it, and that the majority of ISPs have no interest in upgrading their head end & edge network if they can possibly avoid it; so instead we get IP brokers and CGNAT.
I wouldn’t expect to see IPv6 beyond an average 50% globally within the next 10 years, frankly.
Edited 2015-07-17 20:42 UTC
Vanders,
Yes, this is exactly what’s happening. IPv4 is still a necessity – the majority of the web turns black without it. So instead of seeing IPv6 adoption, we’ll see more carriers switch on NAT to place new customers behind shared public IPs.
Not that this is an excuse for the lack of investment by ISPs. I absolutely hate that I can’t get IPv6 here without tunneling through a third party. But to be perfectly honest if our ISP only allowed us to have one or the other, I would be forced to pick IPv4 because I still need IPv4 connectivity, even if I have to pay more for it.
“The good news is that IPv6 seems to be picking up the slack.”
In your fevered imagination. The cold hard truth is that even lots of top websites are inaccessible under IPv6. No IPv6 at the time of writing this comment:
microsoft.com/live.com/almost all microsoft websites
amazon.com/ebay.com
twitter.com
linkedin.com
The pure IPv6 Internet is pretty much unusable right now.
Good point. On the other hand, OSNews has supported IPv6 since 2011.
Now you just need https
The bigger issue is that Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft Azure and other cloud providers are not pushing IPv6. By default it should be IPv6 with IPv4 for extra money.
That would pick up IPv6 support for many sites and services fast.
Definitely. I get that there are network kit lifecycles and entire software and orchestration stacks to deal with, but the problem is getting real[1], and those guys can make v6 a *whole lot* more visible in the mainstream IT market by having it available on their platforms.
[1] http://blog.azure.com/2014/06/11/windows-azures-use-of-non-us-ipv4-…
On the content side there is one thing that improved the situation with the use of IPv4.
You used to not be able to deploy HTTPS without using a separate IP-address per site.
There is a standard for it, but it wasn’t supported by IE and Safari on Windows XP and the default browser on older Android devices. But XP is now below 10% and those old Android browsers are below 5%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#No_support
This is going to be important now that more sites use HTTPS.
I think IPv6 adoption would spread quicker if more ISPs supported it. The last time I tried, my DSL provider didn’t support it. Had to switch completely over to IPv4 to get the DSL working. A lot of the older DSL providers have never bothered to update, and until they do, there’s no reason for their subscribers to do so, either.