It could be 'five to ten years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4
- Reference: 1591381807
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/06/05/ipv4_v_ipv6/
- Source link:
Marco Hogewoning, public policy for the Amsterdam, Netherlands-based European regional internet registry, told The Register that despite the best efforts of IPv6 proponents over the last eight years, it might take "five to 10 years" before the world starts to truly abandon the IPv4 address space.
IPv6 was first defined in 1996, but with today marking the 8 th anniversary of [1](the second) IPv6 "Launch" Day , RIPE NCC was keen to talk up the tech, whose chief benefit is that it provides a much greater pile of internet addresses for all the stuff humanity has dumped online in the last few decades.
You. Drop and give me 20... per cent IPv6 by 2023, 80% by 2025, Uncle Sam tells its IT admins after years of slacking [2]READ MORE
As techies know, everything on the internet has an address so your granny's fondleslab knows where to fetch her cat videos from. When what we currently know as the internet came into widespread use, the system for allocating those addresses was called IPv4. That had capacity for about 2 billion IP addresses.
After the last decade of dolts connecting fridges, lightbulbs and other junk to the internet, each one of those devices needing access to an IP address, humanity [3]ran out of unallocated IPv4 addresses in November 2019 .
[4]Smart people had foreseen the problem of IoT vendors' natural growth over time. About a decade ago, IPv6 came into being. It allows for 2^128 possible addresses, compared to IPv4’s 2^32.
Musing that "little pockets of IPv4" and some government services hosted on IPv4 are two of the things holding the world back, Hogewoning told The Register :
"It's impossible for me to file my taxes over IPv6. As much as I want, I can't get rid of IPv4 in the end because I need to file my taxes. That's a dialogue we try to have with the governments … It's an important step to go to, enabling IPv6 [instead of] IPv4 to make sure we don't force people to have that backwards compatibility."
He continued, gently extolling the virtues of IPv6: "There's a lot of techies who say, 'In terms of standardisation it's really mature, it's an internet standard.' We know it's proven technology; we still have discussions with people who say 'Are you sure it's going to work?' It's tech. It's over 25 years old at heart!"
The Internet Society's Mat Ford agreed, telling The Register : "We now have a situation where about a third of the traffic that reaches google is over IPv6, some of the major mobile networks in the US for example; almost all of their traffic is carried over IPv6. It is a mature protocol and it works for very large network operators to deliver content."
It's not as simple as a mere technical challenge, however. As we reported in 2018, [5]there is a complex and arcane set of arrangements underpinning the global internet traffic peering system. Not all players in that system are equal; by virtue of whatever contracts and agreements are in force at a given time, some peers hold far more clout in certain regions than others.
In turn, that means if a certain network at a bottleneck switches to IPv6 – or sticks with IPv4, or continues with network address translation provision so non-IPv6 traffic can continue to flow – that is a powerful incentive for its peering neighbours to do the same. The entire world is only going to switch to IPv6 when there's enough of an economic incentive to do so. At the moment large parts of the internet work well enough and don't appear, as far as some are concerned, to need fixing just yet.
Making the case for a move...
Hogewoning told El Reg that moves to withdraw IPv4 have been discussed plenty of times, but cautioned: "This is all looking into the future and I'm not expecting any massive drastic steps in the next decade. But you expect people in industry [to ask]: Will there be a threshold? Will it be worth having that IPv4 – what I refer to as legacy interfaces – available compared to all my users already coming into IPv6? That's kind of the opposite of the dialogue we've been in over the last five years."
The Internet Society's Ford added: "IPv4 still works. For many small operators and enterprise networks, the incentives are to start there, to invest the money to migrate to ipv6. In many cases those aren’t particularly great but until there's a real cost associated with maintaining the status quo with IPv4, there isn't a strong business incentive to move to IPv6 for some networks."
In fairness to IoT suppliers, they're not the only culprits for the rapid explosion in required IP addresses; Ford pointed out that many smart TVs and set-top boxes, for example, are still IPv4-only even in this day and age: "Provided the network these devices are deployed in supports it, there's no strong business incentive for them to support IPv6 either."
Until the economics shift decisively in favour of dumping IPv4 support, it looks like the venerable old technology will be with us for a long time to come. ®
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2012/06/05/ipv6_launch_day/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/03/us_government_ipv6/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/25/ipv4_addresses_gone/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2013/01/15/ipv4_nat/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2018/08/28/ipv6_peering_squabbles/
IPv6 isn't a very good solution?
One reason why IPv6 hasn't exactly taken the world by storm is its not a very good solution to the problem of extending the address range of the Internet. It certainly is a solution, it gives everyone a huge address space to work with, but the baggage that comes with this version of the IP protocol makes it messy to implement compared to the rather thin, almost elegant, IPv4 original.
We're told that we absolutely have to move to IPv6 because of the Internet of Things -- billions of device that all have to communicate with each other. There may be a rationale for this but I suspect its more to do with marketing strategies than sound engineering practice.
Re: IPv6 isn't a very good solution?
"We're told that we absolutely have to move to IPv6 because of the Internet of Things -- billions of device that all have to communicate with each other."
Explain to me again why I would want my garbage disposal to be able to talk to a garage door opener in Bangkok. Or to anybody else for that matter. I'm a bit hazy on that point.
Come to that, I'm pretty sure I don't want the electronic junk around here talking to or being talked to by ANYONE without adult supervision. And I sure as hell don't want it loading "improved" software or firmware on its own recognizance.
What has it got in its pocketses?
"little pockets of IPv4"
...
"about a third of the traffic that reaches google is over IPv6"
So, erm gosh, that's tough: 1 - 1/3 = 2/3. Phew! No wonder the poor guy didn't realize what big pockets some people have.
Truly, the price of IPv4 addresses is so astronomical because so is the demand. It will not disappear until a protocol compatible with both v4 and v6 supercedes them both. We could call it The One Ring.*
* Remember the Cambridge Ring, anybody?
In 1995, when IPv6 came out, almost nobody used the internet. That changed in 1998-2000, and when everyone started using the internet, they used IPv4.
That would have been the time to roll out IPv6, so I'm afraid that ship sailed about 20 years ago. It's not going to happen.
Maybe ...
While I can't see any benefit whatsoever for most users in transitioning to IPv6, I'm told that IPv6 has much better routing algorithms. So if my ISP wants to somehow bridge my IPv4 traffic to IPV6 in the outside world for their own convenience, I guess that's sort of OK. But how do they keep from breaking ICMP(and thus Path MTU Discovery), traceroute, et. al.? I don't know. I don't care. As long as they don't make it my problem.
Ahem:
C:\Users\Andrue>ping theregister.com
Pinging theregister.com [104.18.5.22] with 32 bytes of data:
...
C:\Users\Andrue>ping google.com
Pinging google.com [2a00:1450:4009:814::200e] with 32 bytes of data:
...
C:\Users\Andrue>ping forums.thinkbroadband.com
Pinging forums.thinkbroadband.com.cdn.cloudflare.net [2606:4700:10::6814:349] with 32 bytes of data:
Spot the odd one out.
ElReg ain't Google? Did I miss something?
My ISP is EE, a 4G provider. They cannot provide me any IPv6 connectivity, even if I wanted it. I don't have any other providers available due to my location.
Spot the problem.
I am on a wireless ipv4 rural isp as well. But with a Digital Ocean droplet, an OpenVPN tunnel, and a he.net tunnel from the droplet I’m back in the 21st century. It’s not for everybody but for those interested in ipv6, not very hard to setup.
Strange. My phone is with EE and I get full IPv6 connectivity. Perhaps it's a limitation of their backend mobile broadband system?
Doomed to eternal limbo
It feels like every time there is a tectonic shift in how people use tech, IPv6 misses the boat. I think it's doomed to live in perpetual limbo.
- It missed the explosion in cloud. Even today, AWS and Azure etc have good support for IPv6, but not great. Your first contact is probably something like an EC2 instance, and IPv4 just works, out of the gate. For most people, that's it, game over, never look at IPv6 again. Imagine what might have happened if AWS had said, "any new service is going to have an IPv6 endpoint, and you must pay extra if you want IPv4"
- It missed the explosion in home devices. Netgear, Belkin etc were never going to make the DHCP on their home routers dole out IPv6 by default when all the home TVs and lightbulbs dont support it. At best you end up with dual-stack, and then you have a support nightmare on your hands (given that we are talking about consumers). Ugh.
I do think it will live on for some (large) niches, like mobile internet, where operators have been doing Ipv6 for years, but as a world-changing tech, I dont see it.
Re: Doomed to eternal limbo
- It missed the explosion in home devices. Netgear, Belkin etc were never going to make the DHCP on their home routers dole out IPv6 by default when all the home TVs and lightbulbs dont support it. At best you end up with dual-stack, and then you have a support nightmare on your hands (given that we are talking about consumers). Ugh.
Not wishing to pick a fight but my ISP (IDNet) has been providing dual-stack IPv6 for over a decade and I've been a customer for nearly that long. I run a mail server from my spare bedroom and it communicates happily using both protocols. If a device only supports IPv4 it works on my LAN just fine. If it supports IPv6 it works just fine.
What problems have you experienced, and why?
Oh and why would a router need to dole out IPv6 addresses using DHCP? All my routers had that disabled by default and everything uses SLAAC.
Re: Doomed to eternal limbo
Not wanting to pick a fight either. But I reckon that I -- and probably others -- had always assumed that IPV6 devices come with a built in unique address and that the unique address would be propagated (hopefully fully transparently) to everything in my network which would then just work. I might (probably would) have to conjure up some new firewall rules and maybe replace an old box or two. But aside from configuration being a PITA and needing a bit of budget, nothing much would change.
So when I saw your post, I said to myself SLAAC. Self, that must be how they make it all play together. So I Googled SLAAC and found a lot of stuff like this. https://www.hpc.mil/program-areas/networking-overview/2013-10-03-17-24-38/ipv6-knowledge-base-infrastructure/dhcp-on-ipv6-networks
My initial take. I'm nowhere near smart enough to make that work on anything but a trivial network. And neither are most other folks. No damn wonder folks aren't embracing IPV6, the damn thing looks like a booby trapped porcupine. You'd have to be both arrogant and crazy to try to grab hold of it. Especially in a typical non-gold plated working environment with diverse legacy equipment, limited budget, and folks wandering in with all sorts of stuff that needs to connect temporarily or permanently to the network.
What are the mitigating factors? What am I missing?
Re: Doomed to eternal limbo
SLAAC was most of a great idea but it leaks. That was/is fixed/fixable, but here in the real the bog standard gear most people are stuck with can't be relied on to have implemented it properly, or ever fix the firmware. DHCP v6 is slightly more annoying to set up, bit fixes some other problems can helps provisioning, but some devices don't play nice with it(same also true other way round).
4to6 address translation using a border router and BGP sounds like a simple way any grandmother could get set up in a hour right? And she'll hack together firmware for the WiFi router and the old baby monitor right?
The cheap crap that is IoT in the real world is usually designed to only use out of date 2.4 wifi standards, and IPv6 support is a train wreck. Most of it works fine behind NAT though, because that's what the people who built it were working on, crap wifi, IPv4, and NAT.
But the IPv6 doomsday cult still talks of pushing other people onto something the have been happily ignoring for 20 years, blithely ignoring the fact they will be causing a bigger breakdown in the internet then they will be fixing.
Re: Doomed to eternal limbo
"Oh and why would a router need to dole out IPv6 addresses using DHCP? All my routers had that disabled by default and everything uses SLAAC."
Well, that's a choice, but not one I'd make. For those who are not aware, SLAAC is basically the globally-unique address which gets attached to the router's address range automatically, meaning you neither have to attach static IPs nor run a DHCP server. And it means that every device becomes publicly addressable.
I do not want random devices to be publicly addressable, and therefore I use DHCP to local address ranges. Yes, I know what a firewall is. I have one configured. But I find that NAT is a good method of not letting a device receive commands from nobody knows where. If someone connects to my home network and I don't set the firewall rules properly, they either become a potential target for attacks or cannot be found by bots. I prefer the latter. For the same reason, my home network doesn't support UPNP. If I do want to have a device accessed from the open internet, I have to take manual steps to enable that. For my small network, I think this is preferable configuration.
In addition, unique addresses per device make it easier to track traffic coming from them. Using one address to route all my outbound traffic, a potential tracker cannot easily tell my phone from my laptop from a guest's laptop purely from the packet headers. Fingerprinting can still occur, but only by the sites I connect to. The ISP would not be able to track individual devices as easily. If I used individual addresses, not only would they be easier to track, but a tracker would also know extra information. The default SLAAC implementation includes MAC address data in the created unique address. This allows them to know the manufacturer of the device or network chipset and to identify that device if it is moved to another network without changing the SLAAC settings or MAC address. I view those things as negatives, and blocking direct addressing is one of my ways of combatting it.
Re: Doomed to eternal limbo
"Imagine what might have happened if AWS had said, "any new service is going to have an IPv6 endpoint, and you must pay extra if you want IPv4"
They would have to pay the extra for IPv4, or most people wouldn't be able to access it.
I don't know about Amazon's pricing, but a lot of cloud providers do charge for IPv4 addresses already, and people pay for them, so actually this wouldn't be particularly unexpected.
Re: Doomed to eternal limbo
Right, but the default is that you get a private IPv4 bound to the interface for your instance and a public IPv4 that binds to your instance for as long as the instance is up. Or you can pay for an Elastic IP that sticks around regardless. I'm suggesting that the default could have been a private IPv4 and a public IPv6, or offer Elastic IP with IPv6 the default and an upcharge if you want IPv4. As it is, IPv4 IPs are very cheap (0.5cents/hr) so there is no commercial pressure to move off of IPv4 and onto IPv6. And in any case, Elastic IP doesn't even support IPv6 (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-ip-addresses-eip.html). So there's not really any means or motivation to get on the IPv6 train.
Every 10 or 20 years....
We are told that commercial fusion reactors, flying cars, living in orbit and IPv6 adoption are only 10 or 20 years away!
(Did anyone else think the "cat in front of laptop" clip art accompanying this article had to do with IPv4's nine lives? However, the principal use of both IP address protocols as conduits for cat videos works too.)
Re: Every 10 or 20 years....
If you have $400,000 or so laying around and a REALLY long driveway, these folks MIGHT be able to sell you a flying car of sorts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrafugia_Transition
... Or not ... They've been a few months away from delivering a product for a decade or so. Their concept seems doable and their prototype actually worked. OTOH, they still aren't shipping product.
Re: Every 10 or 20 years....
Pah! You are forgetting the Moller SkyCar!
"After the last decade of dolts connecting fridges, lightbulbs and other junk to the internet, each one of those devices needing access to an IP address, humanity ran out of unallocated IPv4 addresses in November 2019."
I worked at intragovernmental organisation (about 500 people) over a decade ago they had been using an allocation of /19. They assigned a registered IP address to every system at their premses, inculding all the desktop PCs. Their needs could have been entirely satisfied with a /24. They had agreed the /19 with a Belgian company that had the rest of the /16. The Belgian company had since been bought up and the /16 was forgotten - it remains allocated to the defunct company.
Bottom line: There is a /16 allocated of which only /24 is actually needed.
I bet there are plenty more allocations like this.
Most individuals and organisations won't expend the effort and resources needed to switch to IPv6 because it (still) doesn't provide them anything that they need and don't already have with IPv4 and NAT.
Won't happen in 10 years, IPv6 has already been around over 20 years and shows little sign of mass adoption.
I'd actually be surprised if it happens in my lifetime.
They would be better off designing IPv8 (or whatever) which is backwards compatible with IPv4, which doesn't require throwing away the protocol that powers the internet and is embedded in trillions of devices, many of which can never be updated.
It'll happen two years after
The year of Linux on the desktop