Worldwide IPv6 Adoption: Where Do We Stand Today? 327
skade88 writes "IPv4 is much like a limited natural resource; it can't last forever. The well of new IPv4 addresses is already running dry in many parts of the world. The solution to this problem, which was presented decades ago, is to switch to IPv6. With peak IPv4 far behind us, why do we still see limited IPv6 adoption? Ars takes a good look at where we are and where we are going with the future of IP addresses, the internet and you. Quoting: 'As with all technology, IPv6 gets better and cheaper over time. And just like with houses, people prefer waiting rather than buying when prices are dropping. To make matters worse, if you're the only one adopting IPv6, this buys you very little. You can only use the new protocol once the people you communicate with have upgraded as well. Worse still, you can't get rid of IPv4 until everyone you communicate with has adopted IPv6. And the pain of the shrinking IPv4 supplies versus the pain of having to upgrade equipment and software varies for different groups of Internet users. So some people want to move to IPv6 and leave IPv4 behind sooner rather than later, but others plan on sticking with IPv4 until the bitter end. As a result, we have a nasty Nash equilibrium: nobody can improve their own situation by unilaterally adopting IPv6.'"
IPv6 Internet is "here" for some of us (Score:5, Informative)
I have a native, public, non-tunneled IPv6 address at home through my non-business Comcast cable Internet service. My computer and phone automatically use IPv6 whenever available.
I can use IPv6 at work too.
It's already here and adoption seems to be accelerating.
Re:That's easy. (Score:3, Informative)
How so? Many (if not most) end system addresses have the MAC address embedded in the v6 host address, so you get more information out of a v6 address than you do out of a v4 address (including the ability to trace the same device even if it changes layer-3 networks).
Since most vendors aren't supporting RFC 3972, tracking is probably going to be easier, not harder.
Re:That's easy. (Score:5, Informative)
>Many (if not most) end system addresses have the MAC address embedded in the v6 host address,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Privacy [wikipedia.org]
Privacy extensions are enabled by default in Windows, Mac OS X (since 10.7), and iOS (since version 4.3).[39] Some Linux distributions have enabled privacy extensions as well.[40]
Re:IP6 addresses are a pain (Score:5, Informative)
For example, you can omit segments that are 0, and collapse consecutive such segments, which is why you can write the loopback address as ::1.
To be fair, you can do that with IPv4 too. Using 127.1 for the loopback address or 192.168.1 for a typical NAT gw address works just fine.
Re:IPv6 Internet is "here" for some of us (Score:5, Informative)
It's very nice. I was in the process of setting up a tunnel between my home gateway and a Linode machine (Linode provides native v6) and making Linode my publicly visible exit point to the Internet. A few weeks into the project Comcast implimented v6 making my tunneling efforts redundant.
Comcast currently allocates a /64 to each customer but they say they'll hand out shorter prefixes later.
I currently use "privacy addressing" with my Linux machine which I do with: /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/wlan0/temp_valid_lft /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/wlan0/temp_prefered_lft /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/wlan0/max_addresses /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/wlan0/use_tempaddr
# IPv6 privacy stuff
echo 209600 >
echo 10800 >
echo 128 >
echo 2 >
This is mostly so that I'm trying out the most extreme end of IPv6 where I'm going through addresses quickly and have up to 128 at a time.
Re:IP6 addresses are a pain (Score:4, Informative)
Re:IP6 addresses are a pain (Score:5, Informative)
Give me a good reason why someone shouldn't be using DNS instead of direct IP address
Here's 4. Not trying to be a wiseass, but there are times when bypassing DNS is preferable.
1) When you cannot trust your DNS source
2) DNS is not working or too slow
3) You didn't want to/need to spend $$ registering a domain
4) Your IP changes but DNS hasn't updated yet
Re:End to end (Score:4, Informative)
Don't call us, we'll call you. I actually had an Internet connection like that years back, entire campus hidden behind a single IP and no incoming ports. It was rather crippled but as long as the other half of the connection had a normal connection I could always connect to their servers and up/download. On modern IM services it'll even negotiate so that other people can send you files because under the hood you connect out instead. Worst case if you're both stuck behind such solutions you can always pass files via some third party file host. It's not pretty but it's not useless either, I bet enough people just browse and check their mail to not even notice.
Re:Still not working... (Score:4, Informative)
I run the Firefox plugin SixOrNot [mozilla.org]. Google - a green 6. Youtube and Facebook ditto. Slashdot, a red 4. There are major sites out there running IPv6.
I have a free tunnel [tunnelbroker.net] from Hurricane Electric [he.net]. The only issue is that Google thinks I'm in the USA, which can't be a bad thing.
Now that there are no more IPv4 addresses available in Europe, it's in the interests of the established players to suppress IPv6 and lock out disruptive new startups: e.g. ISP's or Co-Lo's.
Re:IP6 addresses are a pain (Score:3, Informative)
Umm... Seems you haven't understood how IPv6 addresses work. Everything starting with fd is private. So you could assign the addresses ...
fd00::1
fd00::2
to your private VMs. Quite a bit shorter than then IPv4 192.168... madness.
Re:IPv6 isn't the solution (Score:4, Informative)
6to4 is an extension which is optional as opposed to an intrinsic part of the protocol. This distinction is important.
Moreover the fact that 6to4 was developed at all, after IPv6 was proposed, proves my point and shows that my criticisms of IPv6 were/are shared by many.
Re:IP6 addresses are a pain (Score:5, Informative)
The right-most octet in the abbreviated address substitutes for the right-most octets of the full address.
e.g.:
127.1 -> 127.0.0.1
192.168.1 -> 192.168.0.1
192.168.257 -> 192.168.1.1
10.65536 -> 10.1.0.0
Re:IP6 addresses are a pain (Score:4, Informative)
But nobody is saying we should burn all traces of IP addresses, just that manually writing them should be a negligible use case. One can just copy/paste the IP from some file if DNS happens to break.
Re:It ain't working (Score:4, Informative)
IPv6 ain't working. This should pretty much be clear to all, since it is not being widely adopted.
All major ISPs in US are in the process of testing and rolling it out.
Google, Netflix, Akami, Federal government, Facebook all on IPv6.
All major CPE vendors shipping IPv6 enabled gear.
Perhaps you know something they don't?
There will be a long tail and it will take forever to move enough for the plug to be yanked on IPv4. Nobody is saying RFC 801.
A more constructive approach was to take steps to facilitate its adoption, such as tunneling, the IPv6 day and the IPv6 experiment.
All these "steps" did was throw a wrench in the process of adoption. This is 2013 and people demand a production quality network. Tunneling does NOT provide that.
Content is not going to deploy to a shit network with no bandwidth and crappy availability that tunneling provides.
IPv6 day was necessary mostly to identify and fix what went wrong with the tunneling nonsense already deployed.
still only 1% of the internet. At this point we have to believe that nothing short of a completely new protocol will succeed.
We all get to believe what we want. I choose to believe publically available bandwidth charts showing an exponential curve and the interface statistics on my router showing ~30% of my traffic by volume is IPv6.
Re:IP6 addresses are a pain (Score:4, Informative)
just so you know, the 2001:db8 is reserved as a fictitious subnet to use in documentation. You'd be better off using that instead of 2001:123:45