On 12/19/2017 04:31 PM, Wols Lists wrote:
More and more internet services will move to v6, because they have no choice. I think it's a safe bet that a lot of Google servers, Amazon servers, Facebook servers are going v6-only because they can't get hold of v4 addresses to give them. And at some point, they are going to pull the plug on v4 because they find running dual-stack too much of a hassle.
Google, Cisco, Microsoft and others are actively promoting IPv6, because they see there's no alternative. Apple won't even let IPv4 only apps on the Apple store now. Windows HomeGroup networks run exclusively on IPv6.
v4 internet-grade routers are already fiendishly complex things, because the routing tables have got so complicated that a lot of compute power needs to be thrown at them just to keep up. A v6-only router is MUCH MUCH simpler, because to some extent the route is encoded in the address (that's the way it used to be with v4, but address exhaustion drove greater and greater hacks into the system).
It's easier for other reasons too. For example, routers use the link local (start with fe80) addresses for routing. That means you don't have to configure any addresses on an interface that connects to other routers. Just enable IPv6 and it works. Even devices on the local LAN use link local addresses to reach the router. There are many other reasons why IPv6 is better. You mentioned the routing. There was a crash a few years back, due to overloaded IPv4 routing tables in many routers.
Simply put, once the pain of maintaining a multiple-levels-of-NAT IPv4-only infrastructure reaches a certain point (typically, customers leaving because you have no routable public v4 addresses left), IPv6 becomes a necessity. Once you *are* running v6, then running dual-stack becomes a liability so your network will rapidly become all-v6 (for a suitable value of "rapidly", typically "as fast as we can replace our hardware, maybe 20 years" :-). All your v4 connectivity hassles are pushed to your interconnects with other ISPs, and the sooner you can communicate with them solely using v6 the better.
There is also the performance hit on routers running NAT.
In other words, your ISP may feel no need to move to v6. But the world is changing around it, and your ISP will soon be a dodo.
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