Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[psychopomp1]

I'm just waiting for my FTTPoD service to be installed through Fluidone, however in the meantime i'm wondering once my service goes live is it worth asking them to give me an ipv6 address? (they support both static ipv4 & static ipv6). Up until now I've always had an ipv4 static ip address with TalkTalk Business & Residential and never used an ipv6 address with any ISP. Can anyone give me any major advantages of using ipv6 over ipv4? Obviously I know that ipv4 has a limited supply of addresses whilst ipv6 is almost unlimited. Perhaps one major advantage of ipv6 is that the address i will be given will truly be unique whereas the ipv4 address may have been used by someone else and could be banned/blacklisted on a forum or website? On the other hand i read somewhere that some websites are not ipv6 compatible, is this a major issue?

Cheers

[licquorice]

Its not a question of advantage of one over the other. As time passes, more and more sites will become IPv6 only and will only be reachable via IPv6. If you have both IPv4 and IPv6, your devices will first attempt to connect via IPv6, if the site you are trying to reach is IPv4 only you will drop back to IPv4 connectivity.

[jelv]

IPv6 over IPv4 goes through a gateway and will give increased latency accessing IPv6 sites. It's a fudge that should only be used when your ISP doesn't offer proper IPv6.

[Weaver]

> some websites are not ipv6 compatible, is this a major issue?

Yes and no. yes - Most websites don't speak IPv6 but all web browsers automatically do the right thing and use IPv4 for IPv4-only sites. So no, it isn't an issue at all.

IPv6 allows the use of new kinds of apps free from the necessity of the evil that is NAT caused by the address famine. Every box has its own IPv6 address which is how the internet is meant to be.

The advantages of IPv6 are greater reliability in config / setup and subtle improvements from the fresh start that has been made possible by the elimination of bad practices which have crept in and out-of-date software that has to be accounted for but these things are more of interest to o/s designers than the user.

Another advantage of IPv6 is that it is errm slower because of greater overheads caused by the longer headers. Shurely shome mishtake, ed?

I use IPv6 in order to gain experience with the protocol - in other words to learn. All my boxes have proper global IPv4 addresses anyway so IPv6 offers me only a very few advantages and a performance disadvantage.

[psychopomp1]

Thanks, in that case I will stick with an ipv4 static address whilst they are still available.

[Weaver]

If you have any apps that could benefit from getting rid of the horrible limitations caused by NAT, then review it again, but I think you're making the right decision. If you could get hold of a range of static IPv4 addresses then that would be the best of all. But nowadays that requires cash and a minor miracle. I was just really lucky in that I asked for my address block at the last minute, just before it was too late.