ISP here. Deploying gigabit FTTH. No IPv6.
Customers have 0 complaints about IPv6. 0 Complaints since 2006.
The big guys in my area - Charter and AT&T - can do IPv6.
But I understand that not every ISP has the talent to deploy IPv6. A lot of people simply refuse to learn new things as they get older. The smaller the company gets it can go either way: steadfast refusal to learn new things, or jumps at the chance to learn something new. The former will try to say customers don't want it or no business case to hide their knowledge gap.
ISP here. Deploying gigabit FTTH. No IPv6.
Customers have 0 complaints about IPv6. 0 Complaints since 2006.
Do customers ever complain about double NAT's?
Mike
IPv4 doesn’t require NAT.
But to answer your question, I would say most if not all of the complaints about NAT/double NAT are the Xbox saying strict nat instead of open. These complaints are super rare.
IPv4 doesn't require NAT.
But to answer your question, I would say most if not all of the complaints about NAT/double NAT are the Xbox saying strict nat instead of open. These complaints are super rare.
CGNat -- which is the alternative -- creates a double NAT. I poked around and it seems that affects quite a few games.
Mike
Customers have 0 complaints about IPv6. 0 Complaints since 2006.
Asserting that IPv6 shouldn’t be a priority because ‘nobody asks for it’ is specious. What if customers saw Cloudflare’s “isbgpsafeyet” site and demented you stop running BGP because it’s “unsafe” ? Is that a valid reason?
Customers care about 1 thing only : Does it work when I want to use it, or not. And a lot of ISPs have learned difficult lessons in the last couple years when the small handful of customers who would complain that their work VPN didn’t work behind the CGNAT boxes they ran turned into a heck of a lot MORE customers complaining.
Right. And this view point (which I have /some/ sympathy for) is what
we're up against. The average person doesn't know IPv6 is a thing, so
of course they aren't going to ask for it. But they don't know IPv4 is
a thing either, they just want to connect to the Internet.
It seems to require an unusual, and difficult-to-justify, drive
to make IPv6 happen as part of a forward-looking strategy.
ISPs don't deploy it because equipment vendors don't really
supply it (or barely). Equipment vendors don't supply it because ISPs
don't ask for it (at least that's what my vendors tell me, and I don't
think they are lying).
Our standard PON and Metro services are dual-stack by default -
commercial and residential. Our supplied CPEs are dual stack by
default. We offer IPv6 in a variety of configurations on every
connectivity product that will support it.
However, I do not really blame those who don't, because in order
to get where we are I had to make it my personal mission in life to get
to a passive FTTP configuration that would work with functional parity
between v4 and v6...
For over a year I had to test gear, which requires a lot of
time and effort and study and support and managerial latitude. I had
to isolate bugs and spend the time reporting them, which often means
making a pain in the butt out of yourself and championing the issue
with the vendor (sometimes it means committing to buying things). I
had to INSIST on support from vendors and refuse to buy things that
didn't work. I had to buy new gear I would not have otherwise needed.
I also had to "fire" a couple of vendors and purge them from my
network; I even sent back an entire shipment of gear to a vendor due to
broken promises.
Basically I had to be extremely unreasonable. My position is
unique in that I was able to do these things and get away with it. I
can't blame anyone for not going down that road. I'm still waiting to
feel like it was worth it.
--TimH
Been bugging my ISP, which is also a gigabit FTTH outfit, for IPv6 ever since they opened their doors 4-5 years ago.
Nothing.
“We’re working on it.” they say.
“We’re waiting for wider adoption.” they say.
“We’re waiting for our upstream to support it.” they say (and HE is their upstream).
That comes from me politely emailing the CEO directly a handful of times.
What the heck. I’ll name-and-shame.
-Andy
Perhaps you should bake them a cake.
Yo Josh!
Customers have 0 complaints about IPv6. 0 Complaints since 2006.
Bull. I have not complained to any corporation in the last 5 years
where the stanard response was not "We've never heard that complaint
before". recently every one I my street complained about the same
things at the same time, but we all got that response.
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
RGDS
GARY
Loose translation:
“We’re working on it.” they say.
"There is only 1.5 of us; we're overworked and underpaid and this allows us to postpone this workstream for a while."
“We’re waiting for wider adoption.” they say.
"Not enough of you are complaining about the lack of IPv6, but we're still pushing 8.8.8.8 as our resolver so we have to fix that first."
“We’re waiting for our upstream to support it.” they say (and HE is their upstream).
"Our BGP edge router is a 7600 pieced together from several eBay purchases, and might blow up if we add the IPv6 DFZ."
The first one is all-too-common where I live, too. Fake it until you make it is rife. Getting fibre into the ground - past as many homes as possible - is the sole priority.
Don't you think there is a responsibility on those who know the technical details to do things on behalf of those who do not know any better?
You don't seriously think that the only reason anything should ever be done is because a customer specifically asked for it, do you?
This attitude is why IPv6 is not universal yet.
For what it is worth, both of the providers available to me in our small town have been IPv6 for well over a decade. One is Spectrum (formerly Time Warner). Residential support lagged a bit from our DIA circuits, but has still been solid for a very long time.
In my specific use case, IPv6 connections from my home to my office are much faster than IPv4.
-Randy
Over here in AsiaPAC we ran out of readily available IPv4 many years ago. I’ve been deploying dual stack CGNAT v4 + Public V6 to ISP networks for at least 10 years. Virtually all modern RGW’s and devices (except *** play station) have supported V6 transparently for many years and the customer’s have no clue they are using V6. V6 accounts for about 60% of customer traffic due to widespread support on CDN’s and this reduces the requirement for services card capacity (ISA/ESA on Nokia, MS-MPC on Juniper) on the CGNAT device’s. As a general rule if a customer actually notices and complains about CGN (again *** Playstation) the rule has generally been, sure here is a static v4 ip, bye now. Those customers who notice run at about 100 per 10,000 customers as a general rule. So 10K customers = a /24 for CGN pools and a /25 for static IP’s and you are good to go. Every customer gets a /56 of v6. While I’m not a V6 fanboy it really does work just fine and works well enough that the end customers have absolutely no clue its turned on. It takes little extra effort to enable it when you are deploying a new network element and there is almost universal device support.
John Gilmore wrote:
Whatever the IPv6 transition might require, it isn't comparable to the
small effort needed to upgrade a few laggard OS's to support 240/4 and
to do some de-bogonization in the global Internet, akin to what CloudFlare
did for 1.1.1.1.
It may be a good idea to offer 127/8 for relocation. Even if
the range may be used internally by some devices (though, for
double NAT, rfc6598 shared address should be used), it is a
local problem for people using bogon addresses.
Masataka Ohta
Same. And if we don't voluntarily agree to do something to it, it'll
be the same in 2042, we fucked up and those who come after us pay the
price of the insane amount of work and cost dual stack causes.
It is solvable, easily and cheaply, like most problems (energy,
climate), but not when so many poor leaders participate in decision
making.
Saku Ytti wrote:
Same. And if we don't voluntarily agree to do something to it, it'll
be the same in 2042, we fucked up and those who come after us pay the
price of the insane amount of work and cost dual stack causes.
Indeed, we don't need IPv6 at all at least for the next 20 years,
which is long enough to have 32bit port length for TCP and UDP to
make NAT save address space more efficiently.
Masataka Ohta
I am reading your response as to imply that this is somehow my fault
(for my networks) and that I am a poor leader for not having embraced
v6. If that's not what you meant, great, because I feel like there's
been systemic issues.
There are several ASN's I run infrastructure for, on an (as you
put it) "voluntary" basis, for organizations that run critical bits
of Internet infrastructure but which aren't funded like they are
critical bits.
The problem is that I really don't have the ability to donate more
of my time, since I am already 150% booked, and I'm not willing to
hire someone just to donate their time.
I have no idea what it is I can agree to do to make something happen
here that is accomplished "easily and cheaply". From my perspective,
IPv4+6 is many times the effort to deploy as just IPv4, somewhere
between 5x-10x as much work depending on the specifics. I love many
of the ideas behind v6, but adoption seems tepid. I had to fight
years ago to get IPv6 via broadband, and most common end-user gear
still does not seem to support it, or enable it by default.
Looking at the results, I think we've screwed this up. Just like the
e-mail ecosystem was screwed up by poor design and then stupid bolt-on
fixes, so we've finally arrived at a point where people just don't
even want to deal with the problem. At least with e-mail, you can
plausibly outsource it if you're not masochistic. I feel like IPv6 is
that same sort of problem, except you can't outsource it. You can
avoid it by throwing some more IPv4 NAT and proxies into the mix
though. And tragically, that seems to be what's happened.
... JG
So you guys keep combining IPv4 and CGNAT. These two things are not the same. They do not require each other. If you’re small, you get space straight from ARIN (I got mine in January 2022). If you’re big, buy a block (after completing an ARIN ticket!) If you don’t want to pay for a big v4 block, then do the cheaper thing: v6. But you’re still deploying v4 anyway, it’ll just be with (CG)NAT.
For me, I see 0 value in v6. I do see customer issues and I have experienced v6 (dual stack) issues myself. So when I have customers demanding I get them FTTH every day and 0 customers demanding I get v6, which do you think I’m going to do?
Gary,
I’m the owner of the business. I answer a lot of tier 1 support calls. I read every single ticket summary. It’s not denial, it’s just that I’m small enough to be able to follow up on every support issue. You can claim bull if you want but my evidence can beat up your claim.
I would like to ask an earnest question here, because I work in an environment where IPv6 has been deployed for more than a decade, and it’s just automatically part of things we do and have to solve for, so I will openly admit my perspective can be warped. I am truly curious about what the perceived blockers are for you, and others with the same perspective.
You appear to run a residential ISP. There are essentially 3 things you would have to do to deploy IPv6.
- CPE would need to support it.
- Your network infrastructure would have to support it.
- Subscriber services ( DHCP / DNS / IPAM ) would have to support it.
Putting aside the ‘zero value’ idea, if you were to decide to take steps today , what are your blockers?