What happens when a customer tries to connect to a ipv6 only resource?
I routinely hear the argument that “we have plenty of v4 space left”,
but what about the folks at the other end?
If you wait until then, you’ll either start loosing customers or have to
scramble to accommodate v6 then. Much better to do it slowly on your
terms.
Adam
Adam
------ Original Message ------
From "Forrest Christian (List Account) via NANOG"
<[email protected]>
To "North American Network Operators Group" <[email protected]>
Cc "Forrest Christian (List Account)" <[email protected]>
Date 6/19/2025 6:05:12 PM
Subject Re: IPv6 native percentage (end user perspective)
Just to provide some perspective from my viewpoint:
I can run dual-stack. But I don't want to, at least for a specific
customer. I want a particular customer to be IPv4 or IPv6, with an
eventual transition to 100% IPv6.
I don't want to restart the recurring argument, but I'll just put this out
there: Why bother adding the cost of supporting a dual-stack network when
there is precisely zero cost for me to stick with IPv4? From a cost
perspective, if I have to assign everyone an IPv4 address and an IPv6
address to deploy IPv6, why would I bother assigning the IPv6 address? I
have plenty of addresses to continue handing out IPv4 addresses directly to
customers for at least several years, so there is no benefit to me in
adding the overhead of dealing with both IPv6 and IPv4 on a per-customer
basis simultaneously.
However, I'm willing to migrate (over several years) to an IPv6-only
network and run a CGNAT box to access IPv4, but only once the cost of
running the CGNAT box becomes negligible. Once that occurs, I want to start
getting ahead of the curve and set up a CGNAT box, then begin offering only
IPv6 to new customers.
Of course, the size and cost of the CGNAT device are directly related to
the flows and/or bandwidth, which is why I was curious about the
percentages. If it's 10% IPv6, then I'm not close to where I need to be.
If it's 95%, then I can (and should) start moving to IPv6. Somewhere in
the middle is the threshold, not quite sure where that number is.
On Thu, Jun 19, 2025 at 3:24 PM Mark Andrews via NANOG <
[email protected]> wrote:
You are asking the wrong question.
Switching on IPv6 doesn’t require you to switch off IPv4. You can but you
don’t have to. I find it sad that ISPs still think IPv4 and IPv6 are
mutually exclusive. Nobody is asking for people to switch off IPv4. They
are only asking that you enable IPv6 so they can reach you without having
to run the traffic though a CGN 44 or 64.
For most eyeball networks the majority of your traffic will be IPv6 the
moment you turn IPv6 on as most of the large content providers offer IPv6
and implementations prefer IPv6.
Mark
--
Mark Andrews
> On 20 Jun 2025, at 06:13, Forrest Christian (List Account) via NANOG <
[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I see numerous statistics from Google and similar sources that indicate
the
> percentage of end users who are IPv6 native. What I'm missing are
> statistics going the other way - what percentage of sites (or endpoints
> that customers regularly connect to) are IPv6-native, from a total
traffic
> perspective?
>
> That is, if I switch to IPv6 on my eyeball network, how much of my
existing
> traffic will I have to CGNAT in some way to reach the IPv4-only network?
>
> We have sufficient IPv4 address resources to stick with IPv4 for the
> foreseeable future. However, at some point, the percentage of traffic
> using IPv6 becomes so high that the reasons not to move become less
> significant. For example, the CGNAT box becomes significantly smaller,
as
> most of the traffic should flow around it on IPv6.
>
> --
> - Forrest
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- Forrest
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