Subj : Re: Housekeeping
To   : vorlon
From : tassiebob
Date : Sat Jul 09 2022 17:34:30

 vo> What the *(&%$ rolling out CGN. IPv6 is supported on so many things now.
 vo> What brain dead moron made that choice....

I agree with you.  Our network has supported dual-stack since forever, but in the residential space having half decent IPv6 support in CPE hardware is only a relatively recent thing - and even today it's not "great".

Of course there are CPE devices that do IPv6 just fine - lower end Cisco, Mikrotik, and roll-your-own routers/firewalls - but the average oldies expect to buy a $50 device and have it just work (I'd suggest most people using BBS's are well above the "average oldie" skill level).

It's also very true that increasing the take-up of native IPv6 amongst residential users reduces the scale of the CGNAT deployment required to support those who are IPv4 only for some reason.

 vo> I had a run in with a web developer a few weeks ago that said "IPv4 is
 vo> enough", until pointing out that for example, Telstra mobiles default to
 vo> IPv6 and only fall back to IPv4 if they really have to.

I'm not sure Telstra even do that any more - didn't they go fully IPv6 only on the handsets, and do some sort of translation/proxying for IPv4 endpoints?  I wasn't paying a lot of attention to be honest, but pretty sure they did that 6-12 months back.

Similar discussions to what you had with your web developer can be had with helpdesk managers too - "Why should we upskill the agents to understand IPv6 when IPv4 works?  We have enough to do already!".  Well, at some point you'll have to either upskill them on either CGNAT or IPv6, so you may as well do it right the first time.

 vo> There is really no reason to not use IPv6, with dual-stack.

In the residential space there's resistance due to the support overhead of CPE devices that don't work quite right.  Heck, some very popular CPE devices struggle to get IPv4 right (we've found some BNG bugs caused by misbehaving CPE that despite being current models are still running versions of code 10+ years old).

I do wish providers (the one I work for included) would select a preferred CPE vendor and force them to straighten out their IPv6 where needed and then enable it by default.  An ISP we recently acquired does IPv6 by default for residential, and I'm hoping our own brand follows their lead.

For our wholesale & enterprise customers we do dual-stack by default, and have done for years.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: TassieBob BBS, Hobart, Tasmania (21:3/169)

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