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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

It would really help if there were real ISP competition in the USA. There's only one actually broadband ISP provider where I rent, which is in the suburbs near Seattle. It's NOT a rural area by any definition, and yet Comcast is my only option. Their price and service reflect that reality...

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> yet Comcast is my only option.

Thank endless lobbying that make legally mandated monopolies a thing in this arena. They did it with phone companies too.

It's not "just Comcast" by happenstance. It's "just Comcast" by legal regulation.

AFAIK, most areas in the U.S. have wireless ISPs available.

Comcast supports ipv6 though, in 2016 they hit 98% ipv6 support.

And Comcast were the biggest proponents of building IPv6 support into the DOCSIS specs, because they exhausted 10/8 in the management network for their modem fleet.

Consumers don't know or care about IPv6, so competition won't incentivize ISPs to implement it.

Funny that you complain about Comcast, when I was with Comcast I actually had native IPv6. With my current provider I only have IPv6 through NAT46.

> Comcast is my only option

Maybe Starlink is another option. It has some drawbacks like reduced performance during heavy rain, but I've seen some positive reviews as well.

Starlink doesn’t have capacity for a large urban area. There’s only so many satellites available per square mile, and if you have a sizable fraction of a major city using starlink, they’d all be bottlenecked on a handful of satellites at best, even with the huge number of satellites. Starlink only makes sense for low-geographic-density deployments, where the number of customers on the same satellite is (relatively) low.

IPv6 adoption is only going to further the consolidation of customers onto the big monopoly providers. They will be the only ones who can afford to add the dedicated network engineering staff to make it work reliably.

Most people don't realize there are two IPv6 internets right now, the Cogent side and the Hurricane Electric side. Both are equally sized and refuse to connect to each other, so you need to know that and either buy transit from both or buy transit from a network that buys from both. At least one major provider I know of is still running v6 over tunnels. In many places your v6 traffic is taking suboptimal routes, whereas an enterprise network may have v4 connectivity at each datacenter, v6 all gets sent to that one box under Dave's desk.

But we continue to measure v6 adoption at places like Google and Cloudflare where dedicated teams make sure packets arrive and pat ourselves on the back.

> two IPv6 internets right now, the Cogent side and the Hurricane Electric side

Cogent engages in peering spats on IPv4 too; this dynamic is not new with or unique to IPv6, or limited to Cogent/HE. The lesson here is to not go singlehomed under Cogent, not to reject IPv6.

The takeaway here was that you need to be aware of it to make IPv6 work. Again, your average operator of a small regional WISP may try to deploy v6 because they lack v4 space and face customer complaints because they single home behind HE and can't reach the other half of the internet.

Currently v6 is like connecting to the late 90s internet. It dosen't work as well as people think.

You need to be aware of it to make v4 work, too. I once saw an issue where a network similar to your example WISP (singlehomed behind HE) was unable to reach a network that was advertising its v4 prefixes NO_EXPORT to HE at a distant IX. Adding a second upstream would have fixed (and indeed, did later fix) the issue. It's been advisable since the early days to have multiple upstreams because of routing table holes created by situations like this. Again, not unique to v6, and the HE/Cogent schism is not the only one (though admittedly it is likely the largest).

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