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[AnthonyG]

I was just thinking to myself. My future ISP offers IPv4 over CGNAT and IPv6.

I was just thinking therefore. If someone was to (try and) go entirely IPv6 only. What would be the potential drawbacks with them doing this? And are there any work arounds for it if they exist.

As in just disabling IPv4 entirely in the router (if that is possible) and just having IPv6 so I don't have to bother with CGNAT at all.

If I was to try and do this my only uses would be regular browsing the internet, streaming on the likes of Youtube, Amazon Prime TV and Netflix and playing Call of Duty on Xbox Live on the SeriesX.

Would this be possible through IPv6 only and if not are there any work arounds to get the above to work?

It just seems if the future is IPv6 I may as well try and be the first on board.

[Alex Atkin UK]

You could totally go IPv6 only, but without a 6to4 translation at some point a LOT of websites plain wouldn't work any more.

[dee.jay]

It just seems if the future is IPv6 I may as well try and be the first on board.

This is the exact problem with IPv6 - support is still poor overall hence being first gets you (literally) nowhere

[Alex Atkin UK]

My friend in Texas, AT&T relatively recently "upgraded" his connection to dual-stack.  After the 5000th engineer visit, they disabled IPv6 in his router as their platform had been super flaky.

So if even an ISP is choosing to selectively roll it back for individual customers, we have no hope of it ever becoming the default.

[Weaver]

[craigski]

Some interesting data here on IPv6 growth vs IPv4

https://blog.apnic.net/2023/01/06/bgp-in-2022-the-routing-table/

There are a number of distinct phases in the growth trends that are visible in the history of the IPv6 routing table. The period between 2004 and mid-2018 could be modelled by an exponential growth function with a doubling interval of three years. The period from mid-2019 to mid-2021 saw an increase in the growth function, where the doubling interval fell slightly under two years. However, from mid-2021 the growth pattern has changed again and is now best modelled by a linear growth model with a growth rate of some 25,000 additional route entries per year, or an average of 68 new routing entries per day. This is still lower than the IPv4 routing table growth of some 35,000 IPv4 routes per year.

The IPv6 linear growth since 2021 is also seen here:

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6-adoption

[Chrysalis]

I am about to ditch a load of IP's on one of my servers as the cost is becoming extortionate, the crisis is real.  (to give an idea, if I keep them, I will be paying more to lease the IP's than the server, power and bandwidth combined).  Am moving to NAT on the server.

But yeah to answer the question, you can only make IPV6 single stack viable if you have a translation mechanism working like the mobile providers do.  Most content on the internet sadly is still single stacked IPv4.

[Chrysalis]

My friend in Texas, AT&T relatively recently "upgraded" his connection to dual-stack.  After the 5000th engineer visit, they disabled IPv6 in his router as their platform had been super flaky.

So if even an ISP is choosing to selectively roll it back for individual customers, we have no hope of it ever becoming the default.

Yep at this point its clear its not happening, its either going to take regulation to force it, or a big content provider to move to single stack IPv6 to kick start everyone.  Both which seem very unlikely.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Given big content providers can do clever load balancing tricks with just a single public-facing IPv4 address, it seems unlikely they would be the ones to push the transition.  After all, they will want to have a box in the middle anyway for DDoS protection so I doubt its a big overhead for them to be doing this.

[Weaver]

[XGS_Is_On]

The amount of CPE that have issues with IPv6 even after all this time is extraordinary. This is of course under the control of ISPs: they can do acceptance testing.

Does IPv6 have performance advantages over v4? Seems you need HTTP/3 and to be roaming to see a performance advantage.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Which explains why Mobile IPv6 is even more dead in the water as I believe it requires participation from the CPE?  Not 100% sure as none of the documentation explains clearly what acts as the home agent, but I'd think that would be the home router as your ISP presumably sends all traffic for your IP range to your home router?

This would also be a bottleneck if you are using the default method that does not require Mobile IPv6 support on the network you are roaming on, as all traffic is relaying via your home network and your likely limited upstream bandwidth.  I can't imagine that going down well when people at home are wondering why the broadband is overloaded because some member of household is using their mobile elsewhere.  Also a nightmare for stingy ISPs like in the US where they have data caps so people routinely use their mobile contracts to reduce reliance on their home broadband.

I think inherently IPv6 has performance disadvantages sadly, due to the smaller MTU and slightly higher latency.  Though maybe that is due to nothing being optimised for it?

[XGS_Is_On]

The overheads mean v6 is never going to be as performant as v4 in regular usage.

[craigski]

Section (9) here suggests some performance gains with IPv6 from several companies:

https://www.akamai.com/blog/trends/10-years-since-world-ipv6-launch

Could it be the the IPv6 hardware infrastructure in these companies is newer and/or less utilized hardware vs IPv4 infrastructure?

[Alex Atkin UK]

Section (9) here suggests some performance gains with IPv6 from several companies:

https://www.akamai.com/blog/trends/10-years-since-world-ipv6-launch

Could it be the the IPv6 hardware infrastructure in these companies is newer and/or less utilized hardware vs IPv4 infrastructure?

If you read further that seems to be down to sub-optimal IPv4 usage rather than IPv6 being inherently better:

The reasons for better performance with IPv6 vary widely but may include:

    ISPs that network address translate (NAT) IPv4 traffic but natively route IPv6 traffic, especially in cases where the NATs experience congestion or runs out of IPs/ports

    IPv6-centric ISPs that deploy IPv4aaS over IPv6, especially when IPv4 traffic is routed through more central egress services while IPv6 can break out at the edge

    Emerging cases where limited availability of IPv4 addresses mean that IPv6 services can be deployed with a broader global footprint

So CG-NAT is bad, yeah kinda to be expected but does not apply to anyone using pure IPv4.

IPv6 centric ISPs seems like it would be a pretty niche case, though perhaps relevant for alt-nets.

The latter seems kinda niche too given the big CDNs will use a few IPv4 addresses that are router different depending on your region, hitting local cache servers.

I'd imagine also bad ISP routers struggling to do NAT effectively could also be a reason, their job is much easier on IPv6, though quite where these mystical routers with good IPv6 support are I do not know. 

Plus like you said, if the IPv6 network is less loaded then things like Happy Eyeballs on Chrome, trying both and preferring the first protocol to respond, will likely load quicker over IPv6.