In reply to a post by Oliver341:

It wouldn't be viable for me to join an IPv4-only ISP anymore.

It wouldn't be viable or you just choose not to?

IPV6 plays a small factor in my choice of provider, but I can't think of anything I can do now that I couldn't do with an IPV4 only provider.

I think you would get more issues with IPV6 only or even IPV6 with CGNAT than you would with an IPV4 only connection.

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

I have a server for personal usage on Azure, for instance, that is IPv6 only. Admittedly the IPv4 charge would only be about 7p per day, but I'm happier not to be paying it.

If you're not using any of the other services, just using a VM on Azure (EC2 on AWS) then you can get this for MUCH cheaper from OVH, and their VPSes are all dual v4 and v6 and you don't pay for IP addresses.
https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/vps/

In some IT industry opinions the "cloud bubble" is starting to burst, due to the ever increasing usage costs. Ultimate flexibility is great, but it is not cheap. The (now) legacy providers that can do services for monthly fixed rate often works out cheaper --- depending on workload!

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

I think you would get more issues with IPV6 only or even IPV6 with CGNAT than you would with an IPV4 only connection.

The alt-net FTTP in my road is v6 with CGNATv4 - and there are a lot of these newer networks. I'm more worried about an ISP offering CGNATv4 and no v6 at all... that's crazy.

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

It wouldn't be viable or you just choose not to?

It's not viable for me to connect to an IPv6 only server without IPv6.

In reply to a post by j0hn83:

I think you would get more issues with IPV6 only or even IPV6 with CGNAT than you would with an IPV4 only connection.

Obviously I have IPv4 as well as IPv6, even though many internet services are IPv6-enabled. IPV6 with CGNAT is pointless, CGNAT is designed to preserve IPv4 addresses.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

If you're not using any of the other services, just using a VM on Azure (EC2 on AWS) then you can get this for MUCH cheaper from OVH, and their VPSes are all dual v4 and v6 and you don't pay for IP addresses.

Yeah, decent prices, but I don't find AWS extortionate. Around £7 a month for a 1core 1GB VM. IPv4 is surplus to my requirements so I don't mind not having it included.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

The (now) legacy providers that can do services for monthly fixed rate often works out cheaper --- depending on workload!

Fair point. Corps have spent huge amounts of time integrating their systems with a myriad of different services within each cloud provider, which feels essentially like self lock-in due to the complexity of reorganising it all during a migration.

In reply to a post by naylor2006:

Surely if you have an IPV4 external IP and wider subnet this does not prevent you from connecting to an internet host at an IPV6 address?

Yes it does.

* If you have only an IPv4 address, you cannot connect to IPv6 destinations.
* If you have only an IPv6 address, you cannot connect to IPv4 destinations.
* This is why you need dual stack (both IPv4+IPv6)

However in practice all content on the Internet is reachable on IPv4, and will be for the foreseeable future, and yet most isn't available on IPv6. This means that an IPv4-only connection lets you reach everything, whilst an IPv6-only connection is not very useful.

If you have IPv6 only it is possible to reach IPv4 via a NAT64 gateway - but the NAT64 still needs its own IPv4 address on the outside.

I guess I meant more from an operational point of view rather than network fundamentals.

ISP’s and providers in general are going to need to offer some kind of hybrid setup utilising a gateway to facilitate the eventual move to ipv6.

As a ‘normal’ internet user (who with respect to myself is no expert on networking) it would be a strange Internet where suddenly there are two WANs isolated from each other, if hosts are choosing not to pay to have an IPV4 address along with the free IPV6.

In reply to a post by naylor2006:

ISP’s and providers in general are going to need to offer some kind of hybrid setup utilising a gateway to facilitate the eventual move to ipv6.

If that was going to happen it would be a thing by now. There is no point in spending resources on implementing IPv4 to IPv6 gateways when implementing native dual-stack is the obvious solution.

The cost to businesses of maintaining all those legacy IPv4 addresses will be passed on to us, the consumer, and we will happily pay it of course.

In reply to a post by naylor2006:

As a ‘normal’ internet user (who with respect to myself is no expert on networking) it would be a strange Internet where suddenly there are two WANs isolated from each other, if hosts are choosing not to pay to have an IPV4 address along with the free IPV6.

Two WANs is effectively what you do get with dual stack. The protocols are ships that pass in the night.

However, "hosts are choosing not to pay to have an IPV4 address along with the free IPV6" is never going to happen (where "never" means "not in the next 20 years", which is forever in Internet terms)

Content is about money, and money is about selling things, whether that be products or advert impressions. If you cut off a proportion of your customer base or your advert eyeballs, you cut off a proportion of your money. It simply won't happen.

More importantly, there is no shortage of IPv4 addresses at the content provider side. They have been sharing IPv4 addresses for years.

Sure: if you run an AWS virtual machine you now have to pay (a tiny amount) extra for an IPv4 address. But it's nothing compared to what companies pay for a recognizable domain name, or even for the VM hosting itself.

In any case, most websites these days run behind a CDN like Cloudflare or Cloudfront or Akamai, and just share their IP addresses.

That is: you could run your VM in Amazon on an IPv6-only address, and stick a CDN in front of it, and then your content is visible to both IPv4 and IPv6 users. Job done.

The reason for running dual-stack at the consumer side (i.e. home ISPs) is partly to be "ready" for some unspecified date in the future when IPv4 might be turned off. It also avoids the overhead of NAT (which is small for consumer users), and enables some applications like gaming and server hosting which work better when not behind NAT.

But if you don't do any of these things, you won't notice any difference.

In reply to a post by naylor2006:

As a ‘normal’ internet user (who with respect to myself is no expert on networking) it would be a strange Internet where suddenly there are two WANs isolated from each other, if hosts are choosing not to pay to have an IPV4 address along with the free IPV6.

The owner of the AWS account that doesn't pay for v4 is the one whom will lose out. Nobody else.

And EE mobile (different to fixed line) is trying to run a v6 only network, with translation to v4 at the gateway, it has its own issues. This from 8 years ago....
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2016/11/ee-mak...