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by throw0101a 3 hours ago
> In my experience not true in practice cause I have experienced way more issues with the IPv6 endpoints of sites than their IPv4 counterparts.

If you've ever visited a website from your smartphone (over 4G/5G), your first hop has in all likelihood been over IPv6. If you have visited a website from your phone that only had an A record then you probably went through a CG-NAT box, which added latency.

If you streamed a Youtube video to your phone, or checked Gmail, or Instagram or Facebook, then it was over IPv6.

People (including probably you) use IPv6 everyday, multiple times, without knowing it.

1 comments

Without disputing the added latency of CGNAT, the v6-only peering fights (not just the infamous Cogent-HE dispute but smaller regional ISPs peering only on v4) means that there are indeed cases where v6 is worse than v4 in practice. Again, nothing inherently wrong with v6 itself, but peering disputes means bad latency on v6, which means that protocols relying on TCP (like plain FTP, SFTP and rsync) really takes a hit in transfer speeds.

Also there are cases where the ISP didn't bother even optimizing their routing in v6. I understand that some ISPs in Asia (and especially in Japan, where it shows up on ordinary customers in terms like MAP-E and VNEs) have separate backplanes for v4 and v6 (some are legacy reasons, some are business reasons). Guess which one is being devoted more in practice (hint: not the one being devoted more by IETF).

Edit: I thought this was just in Asia, but apparently this is also the case in an ISP in UK (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618403)