I'm running my home network IPv6-only since some time and it works fine thanks to DNS64/NAT64. I think once more ISPs start offering DNS64/NAT64 internally the transition will be quite unnoticeable for endusers.
Software that still does not work because it uses hardcoded ipv4 addresses or sockets: Steam, WoW (probably many other Games too), node/npm (before version 17), but for the most part it works! The offenders can also mostly be fixed using clatd.
WoW used to work. A bunch of people at my (IPv6 friendly) ISP used to play it and made a big deal about the fact that WoW was actually IPv6-enabled. At some point they broke it
[Edited to clarify: Blizzard broke it, not my ISP]
" It allows an IPv6-only host to have IPv4 connectivity that is translated to IPv6 before being routed to an upstream PLAT (which is typically a Stateful NAT64 operated by the ISP) and there translated back to IPv4 before being routed to the IPv4 internet. "
How did you get your ISP to give you a static IP block or prefix? I can get an IPv4 block, but despite the yelling of the IPv6 fanatics regarding how many IPv6 addresses are available, I can't get anyone to allocate me even 20 or so (much less a prefix!).
Is there something in the spec that makes this hard to do. It's been 20 years.
My old ISP have me a /64, using 6rd. Because of this, I changed ISP's (one of the main reasons I did so was because of the poor IPv6 support) and the new one gave me a /48. This was several years ago though, and hopefully even my old ISP can do proper IPv6 by now.
So apparently it depends very much on the ISP. Some are doing a better job than others.
I am asking, under IPv4 I can trivially get a static block of IPs.
I can then trivially
* put some devices on a VLAN (ie, a VOIP phone) and it will have a public IP, globally routable.
This works well in my experience, latency is super annoying on VoIP and for some reason behind a NAT sometimes it seems to route media through a third party server!
For a small business you can put a PBX on the VLAN and folks can remote register to it trivially (ie, phone.companyZ.com) - with COVID this is great.
You can VPN terminate more easily with a static ip block.
At home I can do a game server on the static IP block or I can host some of the simultaneous music composition stuff (trivially).
My question is simple - how do I get a static IPv6 block so I can do all this if I want to on IPv6.
I get IPv4 is outdated, but how do I do some of this stuff in the fancy IPv6?
You are telling me IPv6 means I don't need any public static IPs and can use some private IPv6 space (10.x was already plenty for that for me in ipv4) with a dynamic public IPv6.
Fine, how does this work. Seriously, what VPN endpoint am I configuring? How does my VOIP / SIP play with this? Do I need to go back to poking weird holes in a NAT? My OWN experience was this all doesn't play well together. Firewalls seem not to play well with dynamic prefixes - and that's just the start. Devices pick up the wrong IP's internally (SIP etc).
In short - 20 years into this, when I try to do something simple -> stick my VoIP phone on a static public IP and VLAN -> its a total pain.
At a small biz, if I try and put a PBX on a static public IPv6 - it's a total pain (and BTW - the SIP IPv6 support in most hardware and softphones is terrible).
This should be the winning use case. Phone calls / person to person audio would benefit TREMENDOUSLY from direct peering connections without any NAT!
But despite an insane number if IPv6 addresses at least in the US they won't assign you a block of even 20.
It's a great question for the thread but probably in response to the wrong comment chain. But since we're here: it'll depend on your provider, just like v4. Some won't offer it at all, some will charge, some will force you to buy the "business" connection instead, some will use a static WAN and route the rest to you, some will use a dynamic WAN and route the rest to you, some will require their modem be used (and some will even 802.1x auth it), some will let you directly put it to your own gear.
The story isn't any different, there is nothing about IPv6 that changes this dynamic other than you have the additional option to use PD. What may be different is what your ISP requires you to do/purchase - by the sounds of it likely trying to push you to a business account which is a revenue tactic not a technology limitation.
As far as NAT with a dynamic IP to private v4 it works the same as NAT with an IPv4 connection with RFC 1918 space internally.
As for your performance issues with NAT you shouldn't see any latency with NAT on a network device, if you're using software routing on a Linux box or something try a standard hardware network device for the edge NAT instead as the data path for hardware devices is the exact same for NAT in those as it is for normal routing, in fact normal routing is normally just implemented a special case of NAT where the inside and outside addresses of the NAT are set to the same value. If you're currently using such a device for your edge NAT and experiencing problems with it either the device is broken or something is misconfigured as like I said everything is always "NATed" through such a device so it doesn't make any sense it'd have higher latency with certain internal IP values.
But seriously for home use without NAT look at PD, for business use with static routing and statically configured devices behind that routing look at what your ISP wants to sell you and see if you can call them on their crap but to be honest if you're running VOIP the business service is probably worth it anyways as you can get them to honor voice QOS through the oversubscribed local node into their backbone. If you go this route the IP space itself is the same as v4, you can either get it from your ISP or you can get it assigned to your LLC or whatever via your local RIR - literally anyone can get a /48 block assigned to them this way, maintenance fees for the allocation are the same as v4 but the RIRs actually have the space itself for free unlike v4 where you have to buy addresses and pay the maintenance fee.
You can tunnel if you want but I really wouldn't recommend it for VOIP. The same options you have for IPv4 VPNs are available for IPv6 and the setup is no different beyond the address type. There is also the option of teredo or 6rd but again I wouldn't really bother with them at this point in the game, they were intended for deploying v6 prior to its availability in ISPs not for this use case.
But the general idea is there is nothing about IPv6 that changes the way static addresses, static routing, or static allocation works beyond the size of the address field. That doesn't mean your ISP is choosing to give them to you at a reasonable price but it's not because of IPv6.
The latency comes because it seems services fall back to a server reroute for a media stream for example if you have a double nat situation they can't get through to route directly. It's not the NAT, its the approaches used to work around the NAT. This hits particularly hard with IPv6 (ie, the fallback will be a server that does next leg IPv4 if needed).
We hear that IPv6 has more IPs than people. Great. It should be easier, not harder, to get a block of these IPs.
ISPs don't want to hand out static blocks.
Static RIR allocations also poor and in some ways harder than it was to get IPv4 allocations early on (Have 13 end sites (offices, data centers, etc.) within one year or 2000 devices etc) or go to IPv6 multi-homing.
The limiting factor in some of this is not IP address quantity but routing complexity - I understand why they may want to limit things from that side, but it limits the utility of the space.
And all of it is harder to configure and operate for most folks. Sure, Google was maybe all in on IPv6 for google cloud from the start, but they have crazy money - and even for them I'm sure it was a pain and a big lift to offer that as a service to their GCP customers 15 years ago.
For the average person -> it's still not that good.
Note: I'm kidding about google and their rockstars delivering IPv6 early on. It was as painful for them with all their experts as everyone else - which tells you something.
One clear pain point, ISPs not giving out static IP's (v6). So what's point of huge space?
The routing path is the same regardless if you do NAT on your internet edge or not and there is no double mat in the case of IPv6, perhaps v4 if your carrier was doing cgnat due to address exhaustion.
The benefit and aim of the large space is that all devices can get unique public IPs not that all devices can get static public IPs. This prevents the need for cgnat on the carrier side which creates all sorts of problems and even prevents the need for complex NAT punching for user p2p such as games or real time communications. It also prevents the need for paying millions of dollars just to have IPs to serve one town due to scarcity from a small numeric field.
I'm not sure what is more difficult about getting a /48 from your RIR today than was getting a /16 in the early 90s, in each case you just register and say "I've got a business using IP" and are approved. I've never been denied, even for my personal LLC. I even had 0 pushback getting a /32 assigned for a large org I worked for 2 years ago - that's an entire IPv4 worth of /64 prefixes assigned without question or selling a kidney like on IPv4. I've also never had trouble registering dozens of businesses for static IPv6 blocks from their carriers for when they didn't want to manage the internet handoff.
For the average person they don't know what a vlan is or a static address or what IPv6 is for that matter, and they don't need to, which is what is so great about IPv6. For those that do know what VLANs are PD is great and comes out of the box on every ISP for $0 instead of paying them for more public addresses like in v4. For businesses static handoffs really are 0 difference to arrange from the old.
Google was amazing with the V6 efforts early on but GCP was God awful. In fact to this day it still requires dual stacking GCP VMs on the internal side otherwise everything breaks and you can't access GCP APIs via v6. Both Azure and AWS have been light years and decades ahead of GCP on the V6 front.
As for AT&T being a general money sucking PITA to deal with yes, they are generally recognized as the worst large ISP to deal with and will make you want to pull your hair out. They won't do it with U-verse they'll push you to ATT business fiber, charge an arm and a leg, and take 6 months to do it. Again though your beef is with ATT's business offerings not anything to do with IPv6, there is nothing stopping them from doing the same thing they do on consumer IPv4 connections they just choose not to.
I want to do this, but Comcast's prefix isn't stable, I get a different one every time my lease renews, which means it is impossible to have a static IP for all my network devices, since neither pfSense nor OPNsense support NPTv6 to a dynamic prefix.
It would be really bad for business if Comcast started assigning static addresses for all their customers. The doxxing villains would surely take advantage of a world in which same address == same person.
If some dodgy site gets a visitor from a Comcast netblock they would know that, should they ever de-anonymise the address, the John at the other end has zero plausible deniability to fall back on.
That being said, there’s no excuse for Comcast to at least give you the option of a static /48. I see that they themselves have a /20. That alone is enough for a /48 for each of 268 million customers (8x their current userbase) who would each be able to route 65k broadcast domains (/64 subjects.)
I've been using IPv6 on Comcast for years now, and my prefix has been stable during that entire time. Double check that your DHCP client is not sending a new UUID for each lease request. The UUID should be stable so that the DHCP server knows to give you the same prefix each time.
I've got a /60 with multiple VLAN's running without issues.
That is pretty dreadful. You may be able to use RFC 4193 (ULA) addresses to get some stability but then what you get is a sort of buggered up IPv4 experience with really long addresses.
It would make a worthy challenge, the struggle would be legendary etc 8)
What network equipment do you use inside your home? Ubiquity has driven me nuts with the poor IPv6 support. I expect the US consumer home network gear is in just as bad of shape. Trying to upgrade my Comcast modem to IPv6 gave me a device that hard crashed every 6 days to 1 month, that had to be replaced 6 times until they finally would give me the next model up to fix the problem properly.
Edit: This is for a business modem owned by Comcast, needed because of a static IP config.
> Trying to upgrade my Comcast modem to IPv6 gave me a device that hard crashed every 6 days to 1 month,
Could be worse. The CenturyLink CPE I had would crash and reboot if a fragmented ipv6 packet touched it. The replacement didn't do that, but had some trigger that ended up with massive extra latency.
Residential AT&T Fiber with their own equipment seems to work pretty flawlessly for me - stable v4 IP and v6 prefix even across hours-long disconnects.
Software that still does not work because it uses hardcoded ipv4 addresses or sockets: Steam, WoW (probably many other Games too), node/npm (before version 17), but for the most part it works! The offenders can also mostly be fixed using clatd.