alt Hacker NewsI’m surprised home many technically knowledgeable people on Internet forums still think IPv6 is some niche, unreliable thing.
In my direct experience, in the USA, at least Spectrum, AT&T, and Xfinity (Comcast) still run IPv4, of course, but they also have IPv6 working and on by default on their home internet offerings.
All mainstream computer and mobile OSes support it by default and will prefer to connect with it over IPv4.
‘Everyone’ in many areas is using it. For many of us, our parents are using Facebook and watching Netflix over it. Over 50% of Google’s American traffic is over it. It just works.
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Well, for some value of "just works".
For example, I recently attended the IETF meeting in Montreal, which offers a by default v6-only network. My Mac worked fine, but my son's school-issued Chromebook had glitchy behavior until I switched to the network that provided v4.
My problem with IPv6 is that my ISP (Xfinity) won't give me a static prefix, so every now and again it changes.
Unlike IPv4, my LAN addresses include the prefix, so every time they change it, all my LAN addresses change.
Combined with the lack of DHCP6 support in many devices, this means reverse DNS lookups from IP to hostname can't be done, making identifying devices by their IP essentially impossible.
Urgh I wish it were like that here in Australia! We have a fast, modern fiber internet connection in inner Melbourne. But my ISP still doesn't support IPv6 at all. I file a ticket about once a year, and I'm always met with more or less the same response - essentially that there's no demand for it.
I'd love to test all the internet services I host to make sure everything works over IPv6, but I can't. At least, not without using a 4to6 relay of some sort - but that adds latency to everything I do.
I just checked - apparently my ISP is "evaluating IPv6" because they're running out of IPv4 addresses and want to use CGNAT for everyone. I suppose its not the worst reason to switch to ipv6. But they've been making excuses for years. I really wish they'd get on with it.
> I’m surprised home many technically knowledgeable people on Internet forums still think IPv6 is some niche, unreliable thing.
The more technically knowledgable you happen to be on the subject, the more you realize IPv6 is some unreliable thing when compared to IPv4. Perhaps no longer niche though.
It's unfortunately still an afterthought for many backbones - and not just US-centric ones. There is a noticeable difference in performance metrics from clients served via IPv4 endpoints vs. IPv6 for web assets in the same locations from the same transit providers.
It is pretty much the opposite of "just works" depending on your definition of "just works". It results in more Traffic Engineering per bit served by a large factor compared to IPv4.
Myeah... I've had weird issues on my network that I could only resolve by disabling IPv6. Granted, it's probably my fault, but if everything still works fine with ipv4 that's fine to me. One day I will get into it and learn how it work and maybe I'll get it figured out... One day...
"I'm surprised home many technically knowledgeable people on Internet forums still think IPv6 is some niche, unreliable thing."
Where can we read some examples of this
I've read commentary about pros and cons of IPv6 over the years but never anything that suggested IPv6 was "niche" or "unreliable"
Corporate laptop won’t work (their version of windows seems to require an ipv4 adddess on an interface, not sure if that’s a windows thing or a them thing)
Doesn’t remove the need for nat - my wired IsP might be able to bgp with me, but my backup 5g won’t, and when I want to choose which to send my traffic through with PBR that means natting.
My router doesn’t support 64, so I have to use my isp’s which is speed constrained compared with native 4. Ok that’s on my setup. Haven’t tested my 5g provider and where 64 occurs, I’d hope in their network, but how do I configure my dns64.
Still need to provide v4 at the edge and thus 46 nat so I can reach internal v6 only servers from v4 only locations
Perhaps lost of that is because my router doesn’t do 64, but again that just shows that v4 is still essential. I haven’t found a single service that’s v6 only, so if I have to run a v4 network (even if only as far as a 64 natting device) why bother running two networks, double the opportunity for misconfiguration and thus security holes. Enabling dual v6 on my IoShit network would allow more escape routes for bad traffic, meaning another set of firewall rules to manage. Things like SLACC make it harder to work out what devices are on the network, many end user devices are user hostile now and keeping control of them on v4 alone is less work than in v4 and v6.
For consumer traffic, your probably right. In data centers, cloud computing, and various enterprise networking solutions, IPv4 is still king. I'm sure IPv6 would work fine in all these use cases, but as long as many large tech companies are not exhausting the CIDR ranges they own (or can opt for using private ranges) there is no impetus to rework existing network infrastructure.
I had working IPv6 in the past, but currently I seem to have no working IPv6. Using Xfinity. I have access to some servers at a friend's place in another city, pretty sure he also doesn't have IPv6. Maybe some phone calls would sort it out, but when "everything" still works (with IPv4), it's hard to care.
There so e obvious caveats that make ipv6 migration impossible for most users: 1. Ipv6 bridges are not practical at scale which means best case is dual use protocols for a decade (or more) which no one wants to support.
2. Actual implementation MUST be ubiquitous (it never will be) some examples - glo fiber in Virginia, and while I can get pfsense assigned a ipv6 address, there is usually no upstream gateway (meaning that if I disable IPv4, I will not have internet). I say usually because of four times I've checked, once I did get assigned a gateway which was unresponsive even to icmp.
Starlink roam - assigns ipv6 but no bridge so if you disable v4 you lose access to most internet.
Frontier FiOS in Florida - does not support ipv6 at all on my node. I have seen business nodes in Orlando/Tampa assign addresses with bridging but again, without browser or dns translation it's not a practical solution.
3. 'Everyone' is not using ipv6, everyone plugs in or logs into a device that has whatever network stack it has. Those users are not suddenly going to jump through hoops simply to avoid CGNAT and get a unique network address
4. Infrastructure; I have two modest half racks on the east coast at decent sized datacenters (esolutions and peak10), neither of those hosts offer ipv6 routing blocks by default. No provider I have gotten quotes for offers ipv6 by default
CenturyLink, an ILEC, only offers IPv6 using 6rd gateways. The IPv6 throughput is a fraction of IPv4 and has much higher latency. During peak times, the 6rd gateway saturates, forcing me to stop advertising the prefix to restore internet access. It has been this way for years.
It is also impossible to report IPv6-specific outages. CenturyLink technical support is the worst of the worst, with agents utterly incapable of doing more than pushing a "check ONT" button on their end and scheduling a technician visit with a multiday window. If you ask them for the 6rd configuration information, they act like you're speaking an alien language.
Even among their technicians, IPv6 knowledge is rare. Imagine the guy installing hundreds of dollars of gigabit fibre equipment at your demarc staring you like an idiot because you spoke two extra syllables between "IP" and "address". I'd think the term "IPv6" is chatbot poison if it weren't for the fact it's a human physically in front of me.
The result is their service is effectively IPv4-only.
I'm in Europe. My country ISPs have actually too many ipv4 addresses so zero ipv6 support at any of them.
It’s still a pain to manage ipv6 AWS infrastructure via Terraform.
Well, for some value of "just works".
For example, I recently attended the IETF meeting in Montreal--practically the epicenter of v6 thinking--which offers a by default v6-only network. My Mac worked fine, but my son's school-issued Chromebook had glitchy behavior until I switched to the network that provided v4.
I'm "niche" - but i had issues with Wireguard being able to connect me through ipv6 to a v4 - other than that i spent most of my time on v6 and as you said it just works
I use ipv4 on my internal lan, and turn off ipv6
It is well supported, easy to configure, private, secure.
...and I don't have to configure and secure ipv6 in parallel
Yes the largest companies have the most resources. Makes sense.
Most do not.
There are far more single person, small, and mid sized companies that do not.
This includes b2b, regional ISPs, etc.
Not all of the skepticism is "does IPv6 work", some of it is "why should I want it as an end user who values privacy and minimal attack surface?"
From my perspective:
• CGNAT is a feature, not a bug. I'm already deliberately behind a commercial VPN exit node shared with thousands of others. Anonymity-by-crowd is the point. IPv6 giving me a globally unique, stable-ish address is a regression.
• NAT + default-deny inbound is simple, effective security. Yes, "NAT isn't a firewall", but a NAT gateway with no port forwards means unsolicited inbound packets don't reach my devices. That's a concrete property I get for free.
• IPv6 adds configuration surface I don't want. Privacy extensions, temporary addresses, RA flags, NDP, DHCPv6 vs SLAAC — these are problems I don't have with IPv4. More features means more things to audit, understand, and misconfigure.
• I already solved "reaching my own stuff" without global addressing. Tailscale/Headscale gives me authenticated, encrypted, NAT-traversing connectivity. It's better than being globally routable.
So yes, my parents are using IPv6 to watch Netflix. They're also not thinking about their threat model. I am, and IPv4-only behind CGNAT + overlay networking serves it well.
"It just works" isn't the bar for me to adopt IPv6. "It serves my goals better than IPv4" is the bar, and IPv6 doesn't meet it. Never has, never will.
IPv6 wasn't designed as "IPv4 with more bits." It was designed as a reimagining of how networks should work: global addressability as a first-class property, stateless autoconfiguration, the assumption that endpoints should be reachable. That philosophy is baked in. For someone like me, whose threat model treats obscurity, indirection, and minimal feature surface as assets, IPv6 isn't just unnecessary, it's ideologically opposed to what I want.
Want me to adopt a new addressing scheme? Give me a new addressing scheme, don't impose an opinionated routing philosophy on me.
T-Mobile, a major phone provider, runs an ISP which is IPv6 only. That is, your phone never gets an IPv4, unless connected to WiFi. They offer home access points with a 5G modem and a router; the external address is also IPv6 only.
It works plenty well. I access everything accessible via IPv6, and the rest through their 464XLAT, transparently.
My LAN still has IPv4, because some ancient network printers don't know IPv6. OpenWRT on my router supports IPv6 just fine. Of course I do not expose any of my home devices to the public internet, except via Wireguard.