Imagine if I'm a medium-sized ISP, or a medium-sized software company, or a medium-sized website.
There's a bunch of hassle involved in deploying IPv6. Who knows what it'll do to my users' privacy? Or whether everyone's firewall rules will keep working right? Or whether it'll have some random impact on e-mail deliverability? Or something else?
The main benefit of IPv6 is providing routable addresses for home users, thus avoiding CGNAT.
But zealous firewalling and the rise of mobile devices mean these days almost everything is sent over HTTPS to a cloud server. I haven't had software ask me to open a port on my router in a decade or more. Even games and video conferencing software know they have to work out-of-the-box on networks where the user can't adjust the NAT.
So who's going to benefit from all this hassle - the 0.1% of users who are hosting websites from home?
The sad part to me is that the original IP header included variable-length addresses up to 128 bits, using two 4-bit fields called Source Address Length (SAL), and Destination Address Length (DAL). [1]
Early hardware implementations could have settled on 32-bit, but 48-bit would make more sense to be in line with EUI-48/MAC-48 (ethernet frame). The world could then gradually upgrade hardware over the decade to handle a larger address.
If home router manufacturers would get their shit together, IPv6 would not be hard to deploy. I get it, it's chicken and egg, but nothing about IPv6 is inherently more difficult than IPv4 other than the length of the address.
The reason IPv6 on a home network is still difficult is because the routers everyone buys at Best Buy still blow at supporting IPv6. Ubiquiti blows at supporting IPv6. It is laziness and/or incompetence of device manufacturers, primarily, holding us back. (and incompetence around IPv6 in general - I talked to a network guy at a large company recently and they were deploying /58s. WHY?!)
The benefits of IPv6 may not be just for you - it's for the planet, it's for the developing nations, it's for the future where IPv4 does not cut it. It's bigger than your home network.
IPv4 cuts it everywhere. IPv6 does not do anything to save the planet. IPv6 does have privacy concerns stated by many on this page. IPv6 could be shut down tomorrow and the Internet would continue working well.
No it wouldn't. Basically all mobile networks would break and have to do even more layers of NAT to meet demand.
> IPv6 does not do anything to save the planet.
The world doesn't have enough IPV4 addresses. It literally solves the problem. It is crazy to me so many people here are arguing for multileveled NAT instead of the obvious solution we have had for 20 years.
If 8 billion people wanted to host their own email and web, yes, we'd not have enough addresses for each person to have one. That isn't the case though. It will never be the case. If we look into the future and say well in 2023 5% of the world's population ran their own email and web for personal or business purposes and that number were to grow by 5% every year then in 20 years we would run out. That's a worse case, contrived scenario but even in that case, we'd still have 20 years to come up with something better than IPv6 that truly respects privacy and doesn't track each person.
The world has been out of IPv4 addresses for more than a decade. Which is horrible news for competition alone.
Try starting a new ISP. You’ll either do CGNAT on a single /24 of v4 space, or you’ll have to spend tens of millions for some pointless, legacy IP addresses.
I don't think EUI-64 being built into link-local fe80 addresses is a privacy issue. Link-local addresses don't get routed, so nothing outside of that network will see or know about them. As far as the router itself, e.g. your ISPs router, it can already gather MAC addresses if it wanted to, so IPv6 using the MAC to generate link-local addresses doesn't add or remove to that situation.
CGNAT is not the Internet working well. CGNAT makes you have to have your ISPs permission and coordination to originate outgoing traffic--imagine if you had to ask the power company for permission to operate each electrical device in your house.
What I don't understand is why governments seemingly ignore this problem ??
Look at what they did with broadcast digital TV : it was announced that it would be illegal in a couple of years to sell hardware not compatible with the new standard, then a couple of years later on illegal to sell hardware compatible with the old standard...
Some are...
China, India, Israel all mandate IPv6 support from ISPs in their territory and the equipment they provide to users, as do some others.
The US has mandated IPv6 support for federal contracts since 2009, although they don't get involved outside of those directly providing services to the government itself. They now have plans to go IPv6-only, and eliminate the use of legacy IP within the federal government.
Allocation of legacy address space was always based on first come first served, so developed countries got the lions share of address space and left developing countries with scraps. This creates a severe inequality, and holds developing countries back. This is also why India and China are leading, as they have a huge disparity between their population and the number of legacy addresses available.
Pushing all your traffic through a third party cloud server causes a lot of problems.
It costs that third party real money to run that server...
What happens when they decide to shut if off because they no longer want to bear the costs? Your applications are a ticking timebomb...
What about privacy? What if the operator of that server decides to fund it through selling your data?
Sending your traffic through a third party server adds latency, sometimes a LOT of latency if that server is far away. This is very bad for certain latency sensitive things (gaming, calls etc).
If you're dependent on a third party server then you're screwed if it goes down, even if your own connection is fine.
Doing away with that and going back to peer to peer is MUCH better in most cases.
To "avoid domination by huge centralized services", of course. What if you want to run something like a website from your own IP, but you can't because you're behind CGNAT?
I use a public VPS and Wireguard. Costs $3.50 for the VPS which has a static IP. I host on my laptop. I can take my laptop anywhere in the world there's an Internet connection and my email and web sites continue to work right from the same VPS IP because my laptop connects to the Wireguard server on my VPS when it comes up.
Another reason is that NAT is making IPv4 live longer than it should, making IPv4 addresses more expensive. Maybe you don't want to host cloud services from your home, but if IPv4 addresses start costing millions of dollars (I know blocks of them can go for that much--if we're already there do you want to go further?), that drives up the cost for anyone using the Internet even if you are super okay with CG-NAT (which you shouldn't be).
Imagine if I'm a medium-sized ISP, or a medium-sized software company, or a medium-sized website.
There's a bunch of hassle involved in deploying IPv6. Who knows what it'll do to my users' privacy? Or whether everyone's firewall rules will keep working right? Or whether it'll have some random impact on e-mail deliverability? Or something else?
The main benefit of IPv6 is providing routable addresses for home users, thus avoiding CGNAT.
But zealous firewalling and the rise of mobile devices mean these days almost everything is sent over HTTPS to a cloud server. I haven't had software ask me to open a port on my router in a decade or more. Even games and video conferencing software know they have to work out-of-the-box on networks where the user can't adjust the NAT.
So who's going to benefit from all this hassle - the 0.1% of users who are hosting websites from home?