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Comment by Loic | Hacker News Reader

Here in Germany (Telekom as ISP) IPv6 is now provided as a standard dual-stack. Your router/DSL modem gets a given IPv6 and another prefix to distribute IP to the devices. This is working surprisingly well, my last connection to the Cloudflare control panel resulted in a warning:

     Hi,
    
     Your CloudFlare account ... was logged in from an IP address we didn't recognize ... 
     following IP address: 2003:72:4f0e:3600:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx.

I had first a kind of "is it a bug?" reaction because I did not catch the IPv6 address at first read. I was expecting an IPv4 address.

For the matter, the connection is reliable with no particular latency problems. I cannot distinguish between a site on IPv4 or IPv6 from an end-user experience point of view.

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I used to complain about IPv6 until I got it. It just works, and per-byte 93% of my data traffic is IPv6 now.

Why can't Time Warner, Verizon, BT do that?

Is there a commercial interest for different companies to keep IPv4?

It's not commercial interest as much as very high cost.

It's a huge amount of work to convert to IPv6, which includes:

- almost all networking hardware in facilities, pops, switching centers, and on customer premises (basically every device in every home.) - almost all related software stacks like kernels, network control stacks, etc. - redesign and planning of addressing topologies, ranges, configuration, etc. - updates to all support systems: inventory databases, monitoring systems, provisioning systems, security systems, etc. - updates to tooling, documentation, UIs used by engineers, customer service, field techs.

As you can see, it's a shit load of work for most large organizations and service providers.

Time Warner does exactly this in my area (and I suspect it's fairly widespread).

The issue is, the modems they hand out to many of their users are not DOCSIS 3 (unless the user is paying for a plan that requires DOCSIS 3 speeds).

If you bring your own IPv6 capable modem, or sign up for one of their higher speed plans, you'll get IPv6.

I'm a Time Warner customer in North Carolina and have IPv6 service. It works well, but the IPv6 networks aren't statically assigned, so I can't reach my devices at home reliably.

Does TW use DHCPv6-PD to allocate networks to customer sites? If it does, are you sure that your router is presenting the same DUID to TW's DHCPv6 servers?

IME, as long as you present the same DUID to Comcast's DHCPv6 servers, and your equipment renews its DHCP lease before the expiry time, you retain the same IPv6 prefix.

Hope this helps. :)

I upgraded my parent's modem 1-2 years ago, soon after they implemented their bs modem rental fee. It seemed like TW was pushing DOCSIS 3 modems pretty hard. Every time I visit and check my Gmail, I see IPv6 addresses in the activity log. I'm kind of jealous, since my FIOS connection doesn't have IPv6.

With FIOS, you might have low enough latency to one of Hurricane Electric's tunnels to use that where you need a v6 address.

Fortunately, I've never come across a situation where I had to have v6.

> Is there a commercial interest for different companies to keep IPv4?

aside of the short-term practical issues, you also have a potential huge long-term advantage as you can stop all these pesky new disrupting services from causing you to lose money once they can't get a v4 address any more and all your subscriber are still only on v4.

Wide v6 deployment is a huge factor in helping us to keep the internet a free place where everyone can participate. At least in the long term.

Sadly, there is: IPv6 requires retraining your staff, and running dual-stack inceases the testing and administration workload.

IPv6 also brings the additional requirement for ISPs that they can't allocate a single outside address anymore, so no way to enforce one-machine-per-residence limitations (I wouldn't expect an ISP to try this in 2016, but it was still common five years ago).

> so no way to enforce one-machine-per-residence limitations...

Eh?

Have you ever seen an ISP that did this and wasn't foiled by attaching a NATting router to the ISP-provided bridge device? [0] (If the ISP is providing the router, then it's trivial to only allow traffic from either the first MAC address you see, or the MAC address configured by the customer during some setup procedure.)

[0] DSL or cable modem or whatever.

Of course it's technically trivial. But that didn't stop PHB's from inserting such language in consumer contracts, so why should we assume that the same PHB's would happily embrace IPv6, since "with IPv6, we must provide every one of our customers with 2^80 addresses"?

They actually do that, perhaps not for everyone but for new customers. For example Verizon made IPv6 mandatory when introduced LTE.

A lot of people not realize they even use IPv6. The sites which are IPv4 only are going through CGNAT.

The article says there's 10% adoption, but that's for the whole world, US currently has 25% now.

same on Kabel Deutschland, at least partially in Berlin.

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