RIPE our of IPv4

Sat Nov 30 04:26:04 UTC 2019

On 11/29/19 11:29 AM, Brian Knight wrote:
> 0% of my IPv4-only customers have opened tickets saying they cannot reach some service that is only IPv6 accessible. So if they do care about IPv6 connectivity, they haven’t communicated that to us.

I help admin a very small (<1k subs, but growing) municipal ISP.  We 
have had a couple requests from residential subscribers for IPv6 which 
is not yet enabled due to lack of support for a nice, but not strictly 
required, feature from one vendor in our stack (and they have opened a 
feature request and promised support in the next release - we'll see if 
they deliver).  If a SP with <1k subs has ANY registered interest, I'd 
say a non-trivial SP is going to have some even if it's not being 
communicated.

Certainly, to me, if I have a choice of service providers, and one 
offers native IPv6 (or even well-supported 6rd) while the other offers 
no IPv6 and has no plans or is even downright IPv6-hostile (e.g. mucking 
with protocol 41), that's certainly going to factor into my decision. 
This is a pre-sales issue which, on standard consumer services, is 
unlikely to ever be communicated to the provider.  However, I'll admit 
that I'm not a normal customer.

Interestingly, albeit somewhat unsurprisingly, interest from enterprises 
on DIA services (where the aforementioned feature is irrelevant) has 
been not just nonexistent but outright hostile.  Every one of them has 
asked to have it explicitly disabled when prompted.  Enterprise is 
definitely the lagging factor, here.  I suspect it's at least partially 
because high-ratio NAT44 has been the norm for enterprise deployments 
for some time, and, among those who might otherwise be willing to 
support first-class dual stack, many enterprise IT folks lack the 
education to recognize the nuance between public addressing and 
unfiltered public reachability of a given host.  I suspect many of them 
are already using IPv6 for LAN traffic without even realizing it given 
Windows' penchant for doing so since Vista.

-- 
Brandon Martin