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back to article IPv6 growth is slowing and no one knows why. Let's see if El Reg can address what's going on

Stop us if you've heard this one before: the rollout of IPv6 is going slower than expected. In fact, nearly seven years after the eternally optimistic World IPv6 Launch launched, we are still only at just over a quarter availability of the new internet protocol. But if that wasn't bad enough, the latest news is that even that …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A large proportion of DSL networks in the UK don't offer IPv6 and have nothing in the pipeline (and that includes LLU providers, not just the old BT resellers).

    But on the grand scheme of things, given the sorry state of UK broadband, lack of IPv6 is a bit of a "first world problem" !

    1. chuckufarley

      It's the same story...

      ...in the US. I live in the Chicago area and I my ISP doesn't support it. My cable modem has the ability built in to it's firmware and everything on my home network supports it but given that this is the USA we have bigger issues to worry about than breaking the internet. Don't worry though, we will get around to it someday soon. Breaking the internet that is, not implementing IPv6 on a national scale.

      1. matjaggard

        Re: It's the same story...

        BT does support it though. Which is quite annoying because now if I Google "What's my IP?" I get back an IPv6 address which doesn't work from my mobile.

      2. ecofeco Silver badge
        Unhappy

        Re: It's the same story...

        chuckufarley nailed it.

        1. AMBxx Silver badge

          Re: It's the same story...

          To those not involved in networking it still feels like a solution looking for a problem. I have my fixed IPv4 address, the rest of you can go swing.

    2. devlinse

      Re: "not to go through the motions of annual appraisals"

      > A large proportion of DSL networks in the UK don't offer IPv6 and have nothing in the pipeline (and that includes LLU providers, not just the old BT resellers).

      Sky does. I'm not trying to invalidate your statement, but they are presumably one of the "big boys"

  2. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
    Meh

    What's the revenue angle?

    Top of mind for any business will be to ask how adopting IPv6 will drive revenue or reduce cost. So far, there's no universal answer to either question.

    1. Ole Juul

      Re: What's the revenue angle?

      People selling servers to the public will see an advantage. With costs reaching almost $20 per unit in a /24 quantity, it's a real cost which has to be passed on to the customer. At the same time they can offer IPv6 for free, making for a cheaper overall product.

      1. J. R. Hartley Silver badge

        Re: What's the revenue angle?

        But IPv6 is 2 better than IPv4. That's gotta be worth a few quid per month extra...

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: What's the revenue angle?

          I'm holding out for IPv11

      2. Essuu

        Re: What's the revenue angle?

        Except that IPv4 clients can't talk to an IPv6 only server, so I'll always need an IPv4 address on my server unless I want to exclude a vast proportion of clients.

        1. Jellied Eel Silver badge

          Re: What's the revenue angle?

          Well, if you're in the business of allocating IP addresses, going out of stock is a problem. RIPE, ARIN etc don't seem to be running out of cash though.

          But strictly speaking, we haven't run out of IPv4 addresses. What has run out is the RIR's pool of allocatable addresses and it's ability to persuade holders to hand space back or use it more effectively. So some of the legacy /8s etc. Which got complicated by people deciding there's commercial value, ie the sale of Nortel's /8.

          APNIC and AfriNIC had different challenges by being late to the party, cover large territories & populations and tended to push for IPv6. Most of their IX's made v6 a requirement for membership. Or at least some plan to adopt it at some point because in the early days, v6 support on core-type routers was problematic.

          Then there was mobile. Who were big in pushing for v6 so every phone could have an IP address. Not that they need them, and many of the mobile operators don't use it. After all, that would give less control over how handsets are used. And being able to make a VoIP call to 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 might be nice, but it's not exactly an easy number to remember. And EUI-64 functionality isn't necessarily a help given the mobile operator may not control the MAC address and has the IMEI/IMSI to play with anyway.

          So for most users, it's not really an issue. They mostly care about URLs, email addresses, phone numbers. The IT department may care more, but probably want all external traffic routed/switched through a proxy/cache/firewall/compliance gateway and don't want their internals exposed.

          But over 20 or so years providing Internet in wholesale & retail around the world, I've had many RFPs wanting IPv6 support, but only 3 customers actually getting assignments. And then they were mostly used so the IT depts could test & play with v6 support.

  3. QuiteEvilGraham

    Not an issue if you already have an ipv4 address

    I guess that the basic issue is that for most people, IPV4 just works, and all their devices are behind NAT.

    I stuck IPV6 support into the products I support some years ago, and from the occasional customer logs I see, it seems to be a thing, but that's all. Also, you can't really use it without a DNS; the addresses are impossible.

    So who is going to volunteer for that?

    1. Ole Juul

      Re: Not an issue if you already have an ipv4 address

      There are indeed some simple issues with IPv6 such as they're difficult to deal with in the same simple manner as we've gotten used to with IPv4. But there are other problems for the end user. Because of the current state of adoption and sometimes broken implementation, IPv6 can cause troubles.

      My ISP doesn't offer IPv6 so I need to use a tunnel, which in my case will mean that I'll be seen as coming from the US instead of Canada. That means that some Canadian shows will not let me watch unless I turn off IPv6. Note that Firefox defaults to IPv6 for sites where it is available - which also makes some misconfigured sites not load when they otherwise would. This sort of thing just makes me say, the *ell with it. I'll wait until this all gets sorted out. I'm probably not the only one who's starting to develop that attitude. If so, then we can indeed expect a downswing in IPv6 usage at this point.

      1. Jay Lenovo
        Holmes

        Re: Not an issue if you already have an ipv4 address

        IPv6, the Betamax of internet protocols.

        Sure it seems better, except all the content prefers to live in VHS land. Why change?

    2. JohnFen Silver badge

      Re: Not an issue if you already have an ipv4 address

      "you can't really use it without a DNS; the addresses are impossible."

      Yes, this is a rather serious downside to IPV6.

      1. Christian Berger Silver badge

        Re: Not an issue if you already have an ipv4 address

        ""you can't really use it without a DNS; the addresses are impossible."

        Yes, this is a rather serious downside to IPV6."

        Well with IPv6 you can have "vanity addresses". For example "Fefes Blog", one of the largest German blogs has the IPv6 address 2001:4d88:3508::fefe:b106. Since the 2001:-prefix is almost universal, you end up with "4d88:3508" you actually need to remember. Those are 32 bits and therefore just as much information as an IPv4 address.

        1. JohnFen Silver badge

          Re: Not an issue if you already have an ipv4 address

          "Well with IPv6 you can have "vanity addresses"

          I don't see how that eases the problem, except (perhaps) for very specific network destinations.

        2. Pascal Monett Silver badge
          Flame

          Re: Well with IPv6 you can have "vanity addresses"

          Oh great. We have to go through all this shit for the sake of having vanity addresses ?

          Now I'm pissed off.

  4. Lee D Silver badge

    Well, Reg, it's because no sod ever IPv6 enables their website despite it not taking very much at all to do so.

    Of course, a large, famous tech news site which constantly posts IPv6 articles with a mocking tone and uses an IPv6-capable host and CDN etc. would never do that right? They'd be right on it, like they have said every year for the past... 6 years I think?

    IPv6 validation for http://theregister.co.uk

    Tested on Mon, 21 May 2018 22:03:20 GMT

    AAAA DNS record no AAAA record

    This website is not ready for IPv6

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Why should they; nobody wants, needs or uses IPv6.

      I've commented before - we offer IPv6 and nobody except Googlebot uses it.

      1. Frumious Bandersnatch Silver badge

        Why should they; nobody wants, needs or uses IPv6.

        Well, I'll answer the wants/needs part of that. Say you're stuck with a bog-standard "home" level broadband connection. You're stuck behind a NAT along with quite a few other home users. You decide that you want to put an FTP service up so that your aunts can see all the old photos that you've been digitising. Or some other such service (like email) that you want to self-host. You go to your ISP and ask them to open up a certain port and forward it to the right machine in your DMZ. What do they say? They say "sod off", followed by "unless you upgrade to a business package"...

        1. EveryTime

          Reply Icon

          > You go to your ISP and ask them to open up a certain port and forward it to the right machine in your DMZ. What do they say? They say "sod off", followed by "unless you upgrade to a business package"...

          With the justification that the terms of service for a consumer-level specify that you won't be running a server.

          NAT killed the primary motivation for IPv6. Most of the other motivations are weak or flat out use flawed logic. (Remember the claim that IPv6 would stop spam? Instead it would make spam even more difficult to block.)

          As a technical community, we need to go back and figure out what we want in IPv4-next. If we are honest with the evaluation, it's certainly not going to look like IPv6.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            NAT

            I think NAT in IPv4 is a _huge_ deal, because by default it gives good (although not perfect) protection to consumer devices running in a domestic setting where users tend not to have a clue about firewalls.

            Move everyone to IPv6 and suddenly many of those devices become directly accessible from anywhere on the internet. Prepare for a huge spike in botnets and other 0wnage.

            1. onefang

              Re: NAT

              "Move everyone to IPv6 and suddenly many of those devices become directly accessible from anywhere on the internet. Prepare for a huge spike in botnets and other 0wnage."

              Just like malware is mostly written for the most popular OSes, coz you get a bigger result with that, the low adoption of IPv6 currently means a lot less nasties on it. If my firewall logs are any indication. Everyday my logwatch report has pages of IPv4 buggers bouncing off my firewall, and rarely one or two IPv6 ones.

              Though you are correct once IPv6 overtakes IPv4, if that ever happens.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Quote: "...You go to your ISP and ask them to open up a certain port.."

          Misleading. Three steps are needed and ANYONE can run an external ftp service on their home network:

          1. Make the proposed server on your home network have a fixed IP address (say 192.168.1.90)

          2. Run vsftpd on the proposed server on a port of your choosing not the standard ftp port, say port 2001

          3. Set port redirection on your ISP device so: redirect port 2001 traffic to 192.168.1.90

          *

          Done....no need to tell (or ask) your ISP anything at all.

          *

          Some comments though:

          a) BT changes the IP adress of your internet connection about every two weeks. You will need to tell your aunts what the revised IP address is every time it changes. (DynDNS might help)

          b) Please don't use ftp.....ssh/sftp is a much better choice for remote access.

          1. Christopher Slater-Walker

            Indeed, it is easy as long as you have a real public IPv4 address.

            Personally I don't know whether this is a thing or not, but I've been hearing rumours about carrier-grade NAT and how it's going to be widely used by ISPs in the near future. This means that one public IP address gets shared by multiple users, each of whom has a private (RFC1918) IP address.

            It's already used (and has been for years, I think) on the mobile networks. At least I assume it is, since my phones always seem to get an RFC1918 address from the network.

            1. DougMac

              > Personally I don't know whether this is a thing or not, but I've been hearing rumours about carrier-grade NAT and how it's going to be widely used by ISPs in the near future.

              CGNAT is widely deployed, and customers typically have no clue it is in use, until of course things break and nobody can figure out what is going on. Every tech I've met has no idea why customer one has "public IP" 100.64.1.5 when customer two also has "public IP" 100.64.1.5 when they live in different states when they get allocated IP's out of RFC6598 space.

              Of course I get brought in when everything is fubar. The ISPs doing CGNAT are doing heavy rate limiting to make sure their CGNAT gateways aren't overloaded, and doing dirty tricks like redirecting all speed test sites internal so they look like they have great speed, until of course you have to transit outside of their network and find that you have almost no bandwidth besides the tricked out ports the carriers play around with.

              But IPv4 is "good enough", except when it isn't. IPv4 won't die until it is too painful to use. Too many techs are blind to the world outside what they know.

              1. Chronos Silver badge

                @DougMac

                Phew, a bit of front-line common sense. I had to check for a moment to ensure I was actually on ElReg as it seems the commentards aren't getting this at all.

                Considering we've all been banging on about net neutrality for ages, even though people on this side of the pond give less than an airborne fornication for the US and its rules, this seems a little strange. What about peer neutrality? It was - and still should be, although I don't know how far up the tree the AOLers have been promoted at this point - one of the things that made the Internet possible. And by "internet" I don't mean the Big Blue E™ but the free exchange of ideas and knowledge and the free choice of protocols and infrastructure over which to do so.

                Now I hear that not only is there a risk of a two-tier system emerging, it's actually happening. I know PlusNet trialled CG-NAT a while ago but I seem to recall it was dropped. Sadly, exactly the same thing happened to IPv6, it was trialled and then they bottled out.

                If we want a world where the same bunch of corporate robber barons who micromanage our lives also control the only sites to which we can connect with our second-class connections, carry on ignoring IPv6.

          2. Jamie Jones Silver badge
            FAIL

            Quote: "...You go to your ISP and ask them to open up a certain port.."

            Misleading. Three steps are needed and ANYONE can run an external ftp service on their home network:

            It's OK to be wrong sometimes.

            It's less cool to be wrong when "correcting" someone. Do some research next time.

            FB actually wrote: You're stuck behind a NAT along with quite a few other home users.

            Hint: Google "carrier grade NAT"

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              "...stuck behind a NAT..."

              @Jamie Jones

              Don't understand the correction of the previous post.

              Everyone (even a retail broadband user) is "stuck behind a NAT". And most retail broadband users are at home with other people on the same LAN, i.e. with "quite a few other home users".

              Maybe the original post meant that there were multiple broadband customers (i.e. multiple "home users" each with a separate contract with the same ISP)......but that's not exactly what the post said.

              Perhaps you can amplify your statement about "wrong"?

              1. onefang

                Re: "...stuck behind a NAT..."

                'Everyone (even a retail broadband user) is "stuck behind a NAT".'

                I'm not.

              2. Jamie Jones Silver badge

                Re: "...stuck behind a NAT..."

                Don't understand the correction of the previous post.

                Everyone (even a retail broadband user) is "stuck behind a NAT". And most retail broadband users are at home with other people on the same LAN, i.e. with "quite a few other home users".

                Well, I'm not. And in fact, most residential customers are behind a NAT by choice - they aren't 'stuck' in that they can remove the NAT and have a NATless single IP4 address.

                However, I think the confusion comes in in the reading of the following sentence:

                You're stuck behind a NAT along with quite a few other home users.

                He meant "you and a few other home users are stuck behind [the same] [CG-]NAT" not "you are stuck behind a NAT and other home users are also stuck behind their own NAT"

                Add to that, I'm a grumpy old git...

            2. Peter2 Silver badge

              As a technical community, we need to go back and figure out what we want in IPv4-next. If we are honest with the evaluation, it's certainly not going to look like IPv6.

              If everybody did that, the honest answer for that IPv7 would probably be IPv4 with the addition of an extra 2 coulons to the address space, leaving everything else the fuck alone.

              If we are honest, nobody really wants IPv6 for any reason other than "we are running out of addresses". The only interest served by making every computer directly and individually addressable on the internet is hackers,if we are totally honest about it. Nobody else actually wants IPv6, which is why the adoption is moving with the speed of a kneecapped sloth.

              Adding an extra 2 coulons to the address space boosts the address space from IPv4's 254*254*254*254= 4,162,314,256 addresses (four billion, one hundred sixty-two million, three hundred fourteen thousand, two hundred fifty-six addresses)

              to 254*254*254*254*254*254 = 268,535,866,540,096 (two hundred sixty-eight trillion, five hundred thirty-five billion, eight hundred sixty-six million, five hundred forty thousand, ninety-six addresses)

              Perfect? Nope. It'd no doubt annoy the architect level types for being a kludge. But good enough? Yep. It gives everybody alive on earth several hundred thousand addresses each which is enough for the forseeable future.

              Implemented easily? Yes. Ok, it requires a massive rewrite of networking code on the same scale as IPv6. But nobody needs to actually learn anything new to use it because everybody who knows IPv4 carries their entire knowledge and skillset over to it intact and can just carry on using it. So as soon as equipment is available it's going to be able to be used as default without any problem whatsoever as it's basically "no change" for all intents and purposes.

              1. Tridac

                "If everybody did that, the honest answer for that IPv7 would probably be IPv4 with the addition of an extra 2 coulons to the address space, leaving everything else the fuck alone."

                That's the most sensible comment in this thread, and is an engineering solution that solves the problem at hand. No added BS just for the sake of goldplating things. Trouble is, protocols are designed by committees, with each member wanting an input.

                There's also the serious security issue when every device on the net must have unique worldwide identifier, rather than being behind nat, which again was an engineering solution designed to solve a particular problem. IPV6 is disabled in everything here, and even removed from kernel rebuild options...

                1. AbeChen

                  You may want to have a look at the following a proposal, EzIP (phonetic for Easy IPv4) that we submitted to IETF:

                  https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-chen-ati-adaptive-ipv4-address-space-03

                  The EzIP utilizes the original IPv4 protocol standard RFC791 and the long-reserved yet hardly-used 240/4 address block to expand the IPv4 pool by 256M fold.

                  Basically, this approach will not only resolve IPv4 address shortage issues, but also largely mitigate the root cause to cyber security vulnerabilities, plus open up new possibilities for the Internet, all within the confines of the IPv4 domain. In fact, this scheme even may be deployed "stealthily" for isolated regions where needed.

                  Abe (2018-07-19 22:29)

                  1. AbeChen

                    IPv4 Address Pool Expanded

                    Our study now indicates that there is practically no more shortage of IPv4 address, let alone going through the trouble to deploy IPv6.

                    Since EzIP can multiply each public IPv4 address by 256M (Million) fold without affecting current equipment, this enables over 75% of nations to serve their respective countries starting from just one IPv4 address that is already assigned to that nation. This is in addition to the current Internet services.

                    Essentially, the CIR (Country-based Internet Registry) model utilizing IPv6 proposed by ITU-T a few years ago can now be stealthily implemented under IPv4, even without forming the sixth RIR at all. With two styles of operation disciplines and conventions, the consumer will have truly two options to choose from.

                    Thoughts and comments would be much appreciated.

                    Abe (2018-08-18 22:15)

              2. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Watch your spelling!!

                colon, not coulon

                ...and definitely not coulomb

          3. devlinse

            My aunt hasn't got to grips with key pairs yet but she can manage Flickr :)

          4. Ben Tasker Silver badge

            Quote: "...You go to your ISP and ask them to open up a certain port.."

            Misleading. Three steps are needed and ANYONE can run an external ftp service on their home network:

            I think he was referring to a user behind CG-NAT and not simply referring to NAT on their home router ;)

        3. Tom 38 Silver badge
          Mushroom

          You decide that you want to put an FTP service up so that your aunts can see all the old photos that you've been digitising.

          I'd rather kill hundreds of thousands of people to free up some IPv4 addresses than guide my aunts through accessing photos over FTP.

      2. Number6

        I run a few low-traffic sites and find that the bots that visit are invariably IPv4. I do get traffic from what appears to be phones on IPv6, and a sprinkling of others. Because I have IPv6 set up on the home network here, I find that it will often access the rest of the world using IPv6 if the far end offers it.

        That's the other side of the coin of course, your average punter just connects his router to the cable modem (or uses a smart cable modem that does both jobs). If that magically broadcasts the IPv6 magic on the local network then most modern devices will set up and use it and said punter will be none the wiser for it. If he's got to go into a configuration menu and tick a box somewhere then all bets are off.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          other parts of the world

          I run a website which mainly serves the Indonesian market. We see a lot of traffic coming over IPv6. I don't have any real insight into whether ISPs in Indonesia are running up against IPv4 address limits and so choose to issue IPv6 addresses, we just run dual stack and a lot of people there use IPv6.

      3. Chronos Silver badge
        FAIL

        "we offer IPv6 and nobody except Googlebot uses it."

        And your target demographic? Lemme guess, cat videos. Auntie Mabel reading her e-mail wouldn't know an IPv6 from an IP Freely.

        For the rest of us, there's IPv6 or CG-NAT. The choice is yours but don't come crying to me when you can't run a simple e-mail server on your endpoint because it's behind multiple layers of unpredictable NAT and the incumbents have you stitched up like a kipper. Want your own domain? Want to access that NAS from the wider 'net? Need to run a VPN? KER-friggin'-CHING!

        Follow the money, son. YKIMS.

        1. katrinab Silver badge

          Re: "we offer IPv6 and nobody except Googlebot uses it."

          An IPv6-only mail server is not likely to be able to receive mail from most of the world, so what's the difference?

          1. Chronos Silver badge

            Re: "we offer IPv6 and nobody except Googlebot uses it."

            "An IPv6-only mail server is not likely to be able to receive mail from most of the world, so what's the difference?"

            EHORSECARTORDER

            If IPv6 were widely deployed, this would be a non-issue. Using it as an excuse not to deploy is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

            Have you lot all got secret stacks of /16s that you want to (ugh!) "monetise" in the near future, or what?

    2. batfastad
      Big Brother

      Especially when Reg is behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare make it as simple as ticking a box to enable IPv6.

      More likely is that Reg needs to get its user tracking, ad punting and data logging systems fixed to handle IPv6 addresses.

      1. Marco Fontani

        Especially when Reg is behind Cloudflare. Cloudflare make it as simple as ticking a box to enable IPv6.

        You're half right. Enabling IPv6 on Cloudflare is indeed a flick of a button. Unfortunately there are still a few internal systems which wouldn't work when clients start sending them requests using an IPv6 address. In fact, we _had_ it enabled "for testing" on the old channelregister.co.uk site, and that showed us we had a lot of things to fix before we could enable it on thereg also.

        We have a branch which purportedly fixes everything IPv6 related on our systems, and I'm now in a position to properly test it.

        So, Soon®

        1. ZeroSum

          >We have a branch which purportedly fixes everything IPv6 related on our systems, and I'm now in a >position to properly test it.

          >So, Soon®

          For the love of all that is holy an unholy make it soon.

    3. damian_nz

      Indeed, when?

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