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IPv4 to IPv6
Ian_Dot_Tech
Member, Patron Provider
in General
I wanted to make this thread out of pure curiosity about how people feel regarding IPv4.
A general consensus of a lot of the IP brokers I talk to who are selling IPv4 swear IPv4 will be relevant and in high demand for at least 10 years to come.
Their opinion may be bias for the fact they sell and lease IPs.
As end-users of IPs, what are your thoughts on the lifespan and demand of IPv4.
With the new China law regarding the switch to IPv6, will IPv4 be in less demand sooner?
I have heard some people want to buy IPs as investments, but with a 5-year return on the cost would you consider it risky?
Comments
look at hetzner, it already says enough how much demand there is
Yes though could it have a reverse effect? As providers increase IPv4 pricing will it force more users to go to IPv6 thus lowering the demand?
The law only applies to new networks, not current. Besides, it's government mandates. Even with China, good luck.
Buying IP's right now as an investment is probably a bad idea. There's a good chance it doubles in price, but there's just as much of a chance it goes sideways from here.
Many believe we'll break well past $100/IP before we see any movement on V6.
You gotta realize, there's a lot of companies that have invested a lot into IPV4 and don't want to spoil that investment.
You need to be 99.9%+ adoption on IPV6 before any business looking for IP's decides to go V6 only.
Francisco
I honestly think v6-only is off the table for many decades - as in no v4 connectivity anywhere for a new deployment.
I do think there's a tipping point though, where enough traffic is going over v6 that you can start to get away with less v4 - CGNAT on the eyeball side, proxies/load balancers on the content side.
IP prices above $100, $150, $200 etc and ISPs can't justify buying more so they roll v6 and CGNAT v4 for the remaining traffic. That push forces content side to roll v6 because the CGNAT experience is shit for their users.
Nothing will be overnight, but I can see this scenario playing out over the next decade. Price action in v4 will drive v6 deployment as it becomes too expensive to stick to the old model and keep buying addresses. More v6 deployment means less v4 needed - but the demand curve is still going to be insane so prices will go up for awhile.
I think even if IP's hit $100 tomorrow it'd be 5+ years before we see any real movement on it. Those that have V4 are good. CGNAT and the likes will stop them. The people that are screwed are the new businesses getting into the market, or those looking to grow.
My take is CGNAT will dominate the mobile (like it already has) and will also cover lower tier home internet connections.
Granny doesn't need a dedicated V4 to use facebook, but the SOHO or gamer will (and will pay for it).
Francisco
I think IPv6 traffic will overtake IPv4 traffic within the next 5-10 years. IPv4 will probably still be in demand but it won't really be a necessity any more once everything is IPv6-first.
You don't think providers will use 464XLAT rather than CGNAT?
FWIW Facebook has had more IPv6 traffic than IPv4 traffic for years in the USA (~61% IPv6 traffic), India is around 70%, and there's a few countries getting close to 50% IPv6 traffic. That data is all public here: https://www.facebook.com/ipv6/. Worldwide traffic to Facebook is around 32% IPv6 now compared to 17% three years ago.
In the USA in general, traffic from T-Mobile is ~96% IPv6, traffic from all major US mobile carriers combined (AS3651, AS6167, AS10507, AS20057, AS21928, and AS22394) is around 90% IPv6, and traffic from Comcast is over 75% IPv6. (and I reckon most of the non-IPv6 Comcast traffic is from people with old models that don't properly support it, or routers like mine that sometimes like losing their IPv6 address on reboot)
Companies not keeping up with new tech is how they slowly die over time
I suspect many (sensible) businesses are monetising their IPv4 assets while maximising IPv6 usage where possible. But huge progress won't be made until there is a detriment to using IPv4, sadly.
How much of facebooks traffic is also mobile though? Does it fall into similar %'s?
I expect mobile networks to all be v6 where possible. You don't need a dedicated IP, never had one, it was NAT even back in the v4 days. T-Mobile has done full presentations bragging about how little V4 they have in their network now so that lines up with you.
Francisco
Residential ISPs? No. They'll NAT444.
Although when I said CGNAT I was referring to the concept of having to use large scale NAT equipment to get users to the v4 web - not highlighting a specific transition mechanism.
Yeah that's a good point... I think something like 90% of Facebook traffic is mobile now? It's mentioned in the quarterly public earnings reports (either that or it mentions the percentage of ad revenue from mobile, which roughly correlates with traffic). Worldwide, over 50% of internet traffic is from mobile (according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-traffic-coming-from-mobile-devices/, although I need an account to see their sources, so I'm not sure how accurate it is <_<)
Akamai's data shows ~40% IPv6 adoption in the USA, while Google's shows ~49% (Google is likely primarily mobile now, similar to Facebook). Google's data also shows that latency is reduced by ~10ms for IPv6 connections compared to IPv4.
I think a provider focusing primarily on IPv4 is going to be like a TV network primarily focusing on analog TV stations once everything started going digital. Sure, it works now, they understand it well, and there's going to be overlap for years, but it'll be eventually be outdated and they'll have to either switch over or close up shop.
I think we need the IPv6 guy @yoursunny in here.
Most new mobile phones now from the big carriers ATT, T-Mobile, Verizon all push V6. Hell even my LTE Laptop is V6 first over V4.
Comcast, ATT and X BIG Name ISPs are pushing V6 to the homes.
Personally I think it just comes down to older hosts/ISPs being stubborn on pushing v6.
We will not see the 99,9% adoption before the end of IPv4 (to many dickheads that sit on a shitload of IPv4 and don't want to use their brain). I think we will the soon see movement by RIRs like, no IPv6, ok your IPv4 space is gone now or goverments forcing you to implement IPv6 or fucking you with antitrust lawsuits because other companys can't get IPv4 space and have a disadvantage.
Not sure if you can really govt regulate this while the DOD is sitting on all those /8s.
I agree though that 90% will be extremely difficult. We could see ipv6 kinda stall out. Some wonder if we have already gone through the big run up growth of ipv6 and we won’t get much past where it is now.
I could see bigger email providers remove their ipv6 (or never deploy it) that way it’s easier to blacklist and punish isps.
Francisco
I don't see it going away anytime soon. Even at $150 per IP it will still take years.
The only way it would move faster is if all the big players started forcing it. Example Netflix and YouTube now only works for IPv6. This would force the ISP's to change things up a bit, however nothing is quick.
In the US it's already half decent for IPv6 support. However Canada still has a ways to go at least it did a few years ago when I was last there.
Other problem is some old games and applications which only have v4 support.
IPv6 itself flawed.. what can we expect now..
If IPv6 concept is to avoid the scarcity of IP address like in IPv4, then the design of IPv6 should not follow /48 or /64 for default roouting.. those routing are wasting a lot of alot of alottttt of IP addresses..
ref:https://www.taterli.com/8155/
There is a table at the end of the article.
Do you really need 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,175 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 addresses?
A more fine-grained route would make the global BGP routing table very large.
If you want people to move, then you need to give them a reason. Personally, I've gone fully v6, but what incentive is there to an established business?
I think we'll increasingly see a lot more NAT-like options server side for IPv4, and frankly there is still quite a bit of movement on the provider side to save IPs.
It's stagnating for the past year (even dropped a little), so that's about as far as it will go. And my country is at whooping 3%
And basically block access to 2/3 of the world? Why would they do that? It might force some ISPs to do something about it, but not all.
This will never happen unless governments start doing something about it (for example force all ISPs to have IPv6). Price increase won't do anything, actually might do the opposite. If you spend a lot of money on buying IP blocks why would you push for IPv6 and make your IPs worthless?
That is expected, because they want to solve scarcity of IPv4, the BGP routing table should be increased as effect for the "right" IPv6 usage.
when will be a single ip $100 ?
waiting for my pension funds... at $100 I can be happy selling my /21 and quitting.
who knows? Price has doubled this year but the IP's aren't flying off the shelf at that price. Still, the very big clouds are buying up everything they can.
At some point that will force the price up.
Francisco
I don't think the US will do that, this will be more a EU thing like GDPR.
Yea, that is the magic retirement price for many of us in the industry... hehe
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Maybe the ISPs will at least have tunnelled IPv6 then. It's like Apple removing the CD/DVD drive from their computers... Eventually people adapted to it. Similarly, large sites dropping support for old IE versions was a driver for a very large number of people using the old versions to migrate to newer browsers.
I can get static ipv4 from my ISP but no Dualstack, horrible
IPv6 has priority over IPv4 so anyone dual stacked will show as IPv6 (in case anyone is assuming these are all non-IPv4 IPv6 users).
The "killer app" for IPv6 was supposed to be IOT devices, which were supposed to be churned out in the billions of devices per year... But the infrastructure needs to be there first.
Out of curiosity, as I am not well versed on the subject, what are the disadvantages for someone deploying a new VPS going IPv6 only?
You can not access IPv4
Why would I need to access IPv4? Do you mean I couldn't send emails to IPv4?
china will have ipv6 but does not affect the outside world.