back to article We've found another problem with IPv6: It's sparked a punch-up between top networks

We've discovered another reason why IPv6 is, right now, a poor substitute to IPv4: fisticuffs have broken out over the protocol on the internet's trunk roads, causing traffic jams. In a report this month by Qrator Labs, researchers dug into what they are calling national internet reliability: the ability of a country's …

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    1. Hans 1
      Happy

      Answer:

      What has this to do with IPv6? Well, it appears that IPv6 may have given some companies an opening to the big leagues, with some trying to become tier-one providers for IPv6 and hence the future of the internet. And not everyone is excited about welcoming newcomers to the club.

      You are very welcome!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      > The article makes the point that this peering problem is nothing to do

      > with the IPv6 protocol, so why doesn't this happen with IPv4, in that case?

      Whilst the tier-1 ipv4 companies had a hold on the ipv4 market, they were slow to provide ipv6.

      Newcomers, who wanted to get into the top tier, took this as an opportunity to create large ipv6 peering networks.

      When the ip4 guys came late to the party, the ip6 newbies were like "hey, we're here, we're big, we're tier 1 ipv6, peer with us"

      the ip4 guys, not wanting to share their tier-1 hold with others are making it difficult - they expect to squeeze the newcomers out by establishing the same tier1 cartel with ipv6 as they have with ipv4.

      It stinks. It's anti-competative, and should be looked at under competition rules.

      Three cheers for Hurricane Electric - who for the last 4 years have provided me with a faster transatlantic ip6 connection that any ip4 has ever achieved.

  1. Vanir

    How does the peering agreements

    affect the net neutrality issue?

    Surely one big cable's network can throttle another's packets? Be it IPv4 or IPv6.

    I'm not really up on all this.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not a flaw in IPv6 - the same traffic issue is with IPv4.

    This is a flaw in BGP peering and the AS network but as an admin you can adjust your own ratings for AS routing if the costs are problematic. Issue is trying to convince traffic to go down a certain route.

  3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    ""These telecoms may have different reasons for their conflicts"

    This sounds like the root of the problem. The existing IPV4 arrangements have tied their hands. Anything new gives them a basis for resumption of hostilities.

  4. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
      Happy

      Re: "As you probably know, the internet is a network of networks. "

      I believe you'll find it's neither tubes nor truck. It's clearly a superhighway with many smaller highways branching off it. Though nobody ever explained how the service station toilets fit into that metaphor...

      1. onefang

        Re: "As you probably know, the internet is a network of networks. "

        "It's clearly a superhighway with many smaller highways branching off it. Though nobody ever explained how the service station toilets fit into that metaphor..."

        Have you not seen social media sites?

        1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

          Re: "As you probably know, the internet is a network of networks. "

          I was more thinking 4chan, or the Mail Online site. But then, where you have toilets, you also have sewers. Oh, and Ginsters pasties [shudder].

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: "As you probably know, the internet is a network of networks. "

            'I was more thinking 4chan'

            Nah, 4chan is the parking area at Charnock Richard Services, northbound side, caught in an eternal Friday night/Saturday morning sometime in the mid-late 90's..

  5. katrinab Silver badge

    IPv6 was released 22 years ago

    and if it hasn't hit big-time yet, it probably never will.

    Maybe we should consider working on an IPv4.1 that is backwards-compatible with IPv4 rather than continue to flog this dead horse?

    1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
      Devil

      Re: IPv6 was released 22 years ago

      Be more ambitious! IPv1000 for the win! Bonus points for calling it IPvMillennium.

      It's 250 times better than IPv4, whereas IPv6 isn't even twice as good! I propose that we replace IP addresses with types of insect. Then the more research we do on rainforests, the more IP addresses we'll have available. There are tens of thousands of types of beetle alone, and we're still discovering a couple a day.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: IPv6 was released 22 years ago

        IPv1000?

        Too ambition - we should just call it IPX for all of us that remember Novell *cough*

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: IPv6 was released 22 years ago

      IPv6 is complex enough compared to IPv4 it needs far better support from software and devices to be deployed in SOHO and even SMB environments.

      When I tried to setup IPv6 in my home network, for example I found that:

      1) You don't have simple reserved addresses for local LANs. You have to generate a random one from the specified block (of course, if you don't have an ISP assigned one, as in my case).

      2) Many examples correctly use the reserved "example" address space, but forget to tell you.

      3) You can't hope to remember the addresses and use them, so you need software to generate (or at least handle) them and match them to host names, unless you want to manage manually your host files (you still have to write somewhere the important addresses if name resolution for any reason doesn't work,a nd you need to fix it).

      4) isc-dhcp-server requires you to launch a separate instance to manage IPv6 addresses (you can use radvd but may not then send all DHCP options).

      5) Of course, you have also to configure it to talk to Bind for proper name resolution as well

      6) VLANs and subnetting in IPv4 are easier, as you often assign a subnet to a VLAN for easier management. In IPv6 everything becomes blurred and more complex, especially in the beginning.

      7) Using hexadecimal notation could be easy for IT pros, not so much for those who are not.

      All this issues can have an "easy" software answer - devices should have UIs good enough to let user select the desired configuration and then generate whatever is needed to make IPv6 work, instead of asking users to configure most options from scratch.

      Simple SOHO setup with a single all-in.one router/AP/etc, device and everything connected to it may have little issues as soon as the ISP assign a block, but as soon as your setup is just a little more complex, everything becomes quickly less easy to plan and manage.

      You see it was designed when there was a relatively few large networks managed by professionals, and others had a single machine connected via a POTS modem only.... they really couldn't envision small LANs managed by average users.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: IPv6 was released 22 years ago

        @LDS:

        Quite a litany of things you don't know there. Which is to be expected for a self-proclaimed beginner working with a home LAN environment. Just don't go blaming the protocol or software for your own lack of knowledge.

        1) fe80::/16 and fc00::/7

        2) forget to tell you that examples are examples? introducing 192.0.2.0/24. ie. this is not a v6 problem.

        3) 10.1.1.1 is harder than fc00::1, *::2, *::3 etc.

        4) so use a DHCP server that doesn't impose those problems?

        5) ah DNS, that newfangled 1980's invention. Such a chore to get that working.

        6) er, no. just no. for v6 ... assign different subnets. then discover that you don't need VLAN at all, the job was done when subnet assignment happened.

        7) same can be said for dot notation. Turn your SOHO device over and look at the "MAC" address it has been labeled with. There is the IPv4 layers hex notation. v6 is just copycat of the v4 worlds MAC notation.

        BTW that device will be auto-assigned fe80::$mac as its address.

        > as soon as your setup is just a little more complex, everything becomes quickly less easy to plan and manage.

        In other words. You made up a network design that in v4 is "quite complicated" and have yet to figure out that v6 is so much simpler that most of the things you are thinking you need can actually be thrown away. The v4 world is a twisted maze of delicate layers all affecting each other - the v6 world is a flat open field with only the subnet, routing and firewall rules you choose to impose. Time to re-think your network design in light of the features v6 provides.

        > You see it was designed when

        So wrong. v6 is constantly being updated by admin with a very good knowledge of modern networking - a handful of updates are in review even today. That 22 year history is littered with attempts to add "critical missing features" someone just like you thought was super important to keep their v4 designs working as-is ... which routinely get abandoned and deprecated when they discover that v6 had better (but different) capabilities all along. Some turned out to be useful, most do not.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: IPv6 was released 22 years ago

          Well answered, 'anon'. I was just going to reply "So in summary, LDS doesn't understand it, so it must be crap"

      2. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: IPv6 was released 22 years ago

        "6) VLANs and subnetting in IPv4 are easier, as you often assign a subnet to a VLAN for easier management. In IPv6 everything becomes blurred and more complex, especially in the beginning."

        Running too many machines in a single segment doesn't work terribly well. If you start approaching the same numbers as the limiits of a /24 at gigabit speeds then you're going to have trouble coping with broadcast and multicast traffic, despite IPv6 being somewhat better than IPv4 on that score.

    3. AbeChen

      Re: IPv6 was released 22 years ago

      Hi, katrinab:

      On this article, I introduced a separate thread entitled "IPv4 Address Pool Has Been Expanded Significantly" reporting a purely IPv4 based solution called EzIP that can expand each IPv4 address by 256M (Million) fold.

      https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-chen-ati-adaptive-ipv4-address-space-03

      You may want to have a look at it:

      Abe (2018-08-29 17:46)

  6. AJ MacLeod

    The cake

    ...might have worked, if only they'd written "please" correctly.

    1. Joel 1

      Re: The cake

      Now that was a heartfelt plea...

  7. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    When Small is Niche and Markets Cornering is it Large and Overwhelming and Worth Buying ...

    ... at Any Price and All Costs in Order to Simply Lead Remotely

    Imagine small provider C runs a lot of internet traffic through large provider D, and D routes significantly less through network C.

    It could equally well be argued that D is penalising C because of a dearth of suitable traffic via their networks of interest to C Clients and Advanced Intellectual Property Providers Attending to Raw Rare Source Suppliers.

    Thus does D pay C for that lack of intelligence flow. Who/What else are you to blame and apportion responsibility for the Problem Searching Solutions failing to Deliver Lasting Resolutions with Immaculate Answering Machines in Serially IntelAIgent Networks.

    Surely you are not going to deny your daily and future intelligence is provided by all manner of machine? Such would be patently false ... and easily quite popularly revolutionary.

  8. Stevie

    Bah!

    From my reading of the article this seems like a rare IT case where the situation needs less git to improve.

    Ahahahahaha.

  9. AbeChen

    Making Use of IPv4 240/4 Netblock

    Dear Colleagues:

    1) Please have a look at the following discussion thread on the "state of IPv6". The cause may be within.

    http://www.circleid.com/posts/20190529_digging_into_ipv6_traffic_to_google_is_28_percent_deployment_limit/

    2) Then, you may like to have a look at the feasibility demonstration report below about our proposal for expanding IPv4 address pool, etc.:

    https://www.avinta.com/phoenix-1/home/RegionalAreaNetworkArchitecture.pdf

    These should provide some material for furthering the dialog.

    Abe (2020-08-29 23:12 EDT)

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