[dboreham]

Unfortunately my perception is that IPv6 deployment is stalled (due to inaction by ISPs). In my company we have recently dismantled some of our IPv6 infrastructure because it became apparent that ubiquitous v6 connectivity was not coming any time soon (e.g. we have locations served by Charter/Spectrum, and they have no IPv6 and no plan to deploy it). We've instead deployed a private IPv4 overlay network between our sites and assets using GRE tunnels.

Also somewhat exasperating that the "running out of IPv4 addresses" saga has played out across almost my entire career. I remember attending the CIDR meetings at the IETF in around 1992, for example. So one of the first technical problems I encountered in my career remains unsolved nearly 30 years later.

[bpodgursky]

I don't think that perception is accurate. Google's IPv6 tracker shows continual progress: https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html (with the expected bumps around weekends and holidays)

It's not a fast process, but I don't see any evidence it is stalled.

[stouset]

I don't think it really matters what percent of clients are IPv6-capable. Nobody is incentivized to actually deploy servers to IPv6 while there exist zero IPv6-only clients.

[zkms]

> Nobody is incentivized to actually deploy servers to IPv6 while there exist zero IPv6-only clients.

Facebook is a counterexample.

> Over the past few years, Facebook has been transitioning its data center infrastructure from IPv4 to IPv6. We began by dual-stacking our internal network — adding IPv6 to all IPv4 infrastructure — and decided that all new data center clusters would be brought online as IPv6-only. We then worked on moving all applications and services running in our data centers to use and support IPv6. Today, 99 percent of our internal traffic is IPv6 and half of our clusters are IPv6-only. We anticipate moving our entire fleet to IPv6 and retiring the remaining IPv4 clusters over the next few years.

https://code.facebook.com/posts/635645183305089/legacy-suppo...

[stouset]

They might have actually done it, but my point is that the incentives for companies to do so generally aren't there. And as long as there exist some large sites that believe the costs to adopting IPv6 exceed the benefits, ISPs will continue to give IPv4 addresses to their clients.

[Symbiote]

My phone's IP is in the private 10 range. A request to Facebook must go through the provider's expensive NAT router.

If they assigned my phone an IPV6 address in addition, that traffic could go directly to Facebook through cheaper switches, which is faster for me, and cheaper for them.

[zrm]

The main benefit of IPv6 is that it allows all endpoints to have a real IPv6 address, including the ones that don't have a real IPv4 address.

It serves its purpose if it allows end user devices to directly communicate with each other even if cloud servers with real IPv4 addresses continue to use IPv4 until the end of time.

[MichaelGG]

Wouldn't it be expected to have a firewall with "NAT" type rules anyways? Inbound blocked until an outbound flow is made?

And UPnP seems to get around this right now anyways. At least, every NAT'd connection I'm on, when I run a Bittorrent client, I have no trouble getting inbound connections.

[zrm]

> Wouldn't it be expected to have a firewall with "NAT" type rules anyways? Inbound blocked until an outbound flow is made?

There are known solutions for this.

For host firewalls, the application can open a port for itself during installation.

For network firewalls, the firewall can implement Port Control Protocol (RFC6887), which supports opening even IPv6 ports.

> And UPnP seems to get around this right now anyways. At least, every NAT'd connection I'm on, when I run a Bittorrent client, I have no trouble getting inbound connections.

UPnP is a rubbish fire. The protocol itself is badly designed and unnecessarily complicated and many of the implementations are broken. Section 9 of RFC6886 is informative.

One of the common failure modes is that a client will create a port mapping with a random UPnP device that isn't the real gateway. Many applications will then falsely indicate that incoming connections are working but none ever come through.

And it's still sharing an IP address. Only one device can have the ssh port, or the SMTP port, or any other port.

IPv6 + Port Control Protocol fixes all of that.

[votepaunchy]

How much progress is simply due to mobile? Not a bad thing, but legacy ISPs seem to be updating at a glacial pace.

[tomschlick]

Comcast is one of the leaders in this space in the US. They are nearing 100% deployment and their X1 platform is supposed to run IPv6 only internally (SetTop Boxes to their content source).

Verizon on the other hand hasn't done shit.

[otterley]

My Verizon Wireless iPhone has a v6 address. Maybe you mean FIOS?

[zkms]

It's not, alas, a flip-a-switch upgrade, given how many CPEs and other equipment have shoddy or non-existent IPv6 support.

Forward-thinking network operators (like Verizon Wireless or Comcast or T-Mobile USA) have taken advantage of the LTE and DOCSIS 3 transitions (which inherently involve installing and provisioning new hardware on a massive scale) to properly provision and deploy IPv6 to their customers.

There's plenty of large eyeball networks (https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/about/our-thinking/state-of-the... , click on "Networks" to sort by traffic volume, the second column is the percentage of requests from that network via IPv6) that have working IPv6 deployed and used to a significant percentage of their subscribers -- some around 80%.

[flyinghamster]

The CPE problem is a bit of an elephant in the room. Just from my own experience, setting up IPv6 on my Comcast connection took quite a bit of fumbling around before I managed to hit on the right settings - and my router's GUI hardly even acknowledges the existence of IPv6 at all.

On the upside, I have a /60 to play with...

[phil21]

This is really hit or miss (the configuration part of it) and it won't become really ubiquitous until it gets enabled on all consumer CPE by default. That said, I set up a recent Asus for a friend and it was nearly single-click easy on Comcast. Much improved since even 18 months ago.

This is also why ISP's prefer to rent you CPE and (preferably) manage it remotely.

This would in turn cause more content networks to support ipv6 - once even 1% of eyeballs can't hit revenue producing websites those customers will demand v6 or move IaaS/SaaS/etc. providers.

[zkms]

The CPE problem is why mobile has such good IPv6 deployment (along with the LTE people having their act together about IPv6) -- it's the only sector where people will eagerly upgrade their CPEs en masse :)

[bogomipz]

I know that for many years the eyeball networks in the US were dragging their feet in their IPV6 rollouts but I believe this has changed dramatically. Spectrum(Time Warner) states 90% of residential[1] is now on IPV6 and Comcast was at 30% 4 years ago[2]:

[1] https://www.timewarnercable.com/en/support/internet/topics/i...

[2] http://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/comcast-reaches-...

[apearson]

Charter/Spectrum is actively rolling out IPv6 to customers now: http://www.spectrum.net/support/internet/ipv6-faq/