Cloud giant AWS will start charging customers for public IPv4 addresses from next year, claiming it is forced to do this because of the increasing scarcity of these and to encourage the use of IPv6 instead.
The update will come into effect on February 1, 2024, when AWS customers will see a charge of $0.005 (half a cent) per IP address per hour for all public IPv4 addresses. … These charges will apply to all AWS services including EC2, Relational Database Service (RDS) database instances, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) nodes, and will apply across all AWS regions, the company said.
Hopefully this will push IPv6 adoption further. It is a clusterfuck how long IPv6 exists and how often one has to still fall back to IPv4.
It really is well past time to start viewing support of IPv4 as a type of “technical debt.”
AWS is just finally putting a price on the cost of that technical debt.
This is my thought. It’s about time greater adoption of IPv6 happens. As much as I don’t like corporations getting greedier, in this case however, Amazon is doing us a favor by spurring IPv6 adoption on.
IPv6 is already relatively widespread in the USA (and many other countries) on the client-side, especially on mobile networks.
- T-Mobile’s network is almost entirely IPv6-only, using 464XLAT for connectivity to legacy IPv4-only servers.
- The majority of traffic to Facebook (around 62%) is via IPv6. https://www.facebook.com/ipv6
- As of June 2022, 73% of Comcast and 72% of AT&T customers had IPv6 connectivity. https://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/
- People that play online games often try to use IPv6 to avoid NAT, as it reduces latency.
The main issue is that a lot of sites aren’t available over IPv6. Hopefully Amazon helps push that along.
I have IPv6 connectivity through Verizon FiOS. The trouble is that in my area it is poorly implemented and markedly slower than IPv4. I would much rather use 6 but not at a performance penalty.
Ahh, that sucks. Sorry to hear. A proper IPv6 network should be faster than IPv4, since there’s no NAT and no complex routing rules.
Agreed! Also smaller packet sizes.
In Sweden we have just one ISP for non-commercial customers providing native IPv6 adresses (Bahnhof) on fiber connections, and even then we can’t get a static prefix from them.
Not quite sure on the mobile ISPs though.
At least Tele2 supports IPv6 on mobile, not sure about others
I guess that means able to access services on the Internet over IPv6, not me being able to get a /64 and providing services myself to others.
Sort of ok for phones I guess, although not as great if someone doesn’t have access to fiber and have to use a mobile link in a residential environment.
Bahnhof actually just provides NAT:ed fiber connections as well as default, but will issue a public, unique IP if asked (at no additional cost).
It’s the same here in Finland. Only one provider (DNA) offers IPv6 for residential customers and others are “working on it” still.
I suspect greed is involved. But since the new allocation of ipv4 hasn’t been possible for quite some time in US and Europe. I think the price of those IPs that are assigned to providers is going to gradually rise.
And to think, I remember when I got a business ISDN account for my old office. They pretty much just gave you a free (well included in the price) /24 without even asking.
Different times.
I mean, I see it being a little bit greedy, but honestly?
My entire life I’ve seen nothing but rent-seeking from giant corporations in most things except this.
IPv4 is essentially super limited in terms of “available land” (read: IPs) on which to develop. In the real world, when land is scarce, the cost of the land goes up dramatically. I mean, really, that goes for any resource that is limited. The more limited the resource, the higher price it demands.
Only in internet-land has a limited resource that is widely used has not been attached to rent-seeking behavior. Honestly, the current price seems (to me, personal opinion) to be very reasonable, considering the low number of IPv4 IP addresses available.
So, considering it took so long to charge for them, unlikely just driven by greed, imho.
Especially bad for GitHub, which hosts so much software that is really useful on servers. E.g. NixOS has its complete repository there.
I’m going on professional year 24 of clients requiring that IPv6 be deactivated on every device in their network. Whee.
My current ISP still does not offer IPv6 🤦 🤦 🤦
Verizon, my ISP, offers IPv6 in my area but the implementation is broken and it ends up being an order of magnitude slower than simply using IPv4 and HE as an IPv6 tunnel broker.
AT&T is the same. And the last time I looked they don’t give you enough address space to host your own subnet. You get a /64 instead of a /56. And it’s slower than ipv4.
Every few months I try it out, complain and then switch it off.
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Interesting. In NC here. Not sure if there’s a difference regionally. I was seeing that kind of RTT on ipv4, but ipv6 was slower. I’ll need to give it another try. The last time I did was at my last place where I had the BGW210. I have the BGW320 now and haven’t tried on that. Maybe that, or changes in their routing since then will make a difference.
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You’d think IPv4 would be the one that requires CGNAT not IPV6… Bizarre…
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Yeah, my company totally blocks ipv6 when the VPN is on. Not sure why they’re so backward for a tech company.
The same goes for my place of work. It’s going to be shit loads of fun when we are forcibly transitioned. I hope before that time I will be doing web development work and kissing my professional career in infrastructure good bye.
What’s their rationale? Is there one?
Their network admins are old and don’t want to learn new stuff, or their networking equipment is old and they don’t want to replace it.
IPv6 existed when I was a kid. It is not even remotely new.
I know, but it wasn’t commonly used until IPv4 depletion became a more serious issue.
I must’ve said this at least 10 years ago: the more people move to IPv6, the more IPv4 are left free, so the less reason for moving to IPv6.
The “migration” could easily take several more decades.
We were talking about it when I was in undergrad.
Yeah, but for all we know you went to college thousands of years in the future, Time Lord.
That is why I think IPv6 is a non-starter. ;)
Compliance.
“Compliance with regulations.”
Is there really any problem with that on the internal though?
Thank goodness. Death to IPv4.
About 3.70/month. Not great, not terrible
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Other providers will start charging more, the US and Europe have ALL ipv4 allocated now. So, yes the cost of a scarce resource goes… Up
Most of the big websites are on ipv6. Twitter isn’t (but is that anyone’s loss?). I think the only way we can all make sure the stragglers move to ipv6 is if we all leave an ISP that doesn’t offer it.
After all these years it really should be the dominant stack.
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That’s a really stupid thing for that ISP to do. It doesn’t make sense. IPv6 costs them virtually nothing, yes the real IP costs them. But they’re stretching out the time they need to provide it by putting conditions behind the ipv6 allocation.
Look up in this thread and just get an ipv6 tunnel, I used tunnels for 5 years between 2011 and 2015, until my ISP provided IPv6. While bigger businesses aren’t going to go ipv6 only any time soon, I think smaller server operators might just do that to save money. When the cost of the IP becomes a larger part of the cost of the service.
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It will add tens of dollars to enterprise infrastructure costs!
Yeah. I pay like 3.50 for my lightsail instance that I host my pihole on. Are they really going to double that for my public ipv4?
I’m running the smallest linux instance in US West 2, I believe. 512mb RAM, 1 core processor. More than enough for pihole+wiregurd
which package are you on? i’ve been wanting something like that
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But that’s as high as the meter……
“We want more money so fuck you”
That’s not the Amazon approach. Amazon tries to make money on the volume, not on the margins.
IPv4 is starting to actually cost. To everyone.
My ISP is still incapable of resolving IPv6 addresses at all. Same goes for several other ISPs in my country that I have tried before that. As of now I need to rent a separate VPS just to have my home server be visible online on a public IPv4 address, and that is with a heavy bandwidth penalization. Can’t wait for IPv6 to be generally available in my country at least!
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Well, that’s where my scenario dies - I’m behind CGNAT (not even a dynamic IP with direct access to the Internet), and the only providers that do have a fixed IP available only provide the service to commercial clients - which is to say, I’m expected to pay hundreds of dollars a month for the privilege. Guess I’ll keep needing a VPS for the time being!
If my ISP doesn’t support IPv6, would I need a proxy or something to access an AWS instance with only an IPv6 address?
A tunnel. I’ve used these before https://tunnelbroker.net/ and https://www.sixxs.net/main/ probably 10 years ago now. They were pretty good. But of course you need something to act as a router on your network for it to set it up for the whole network. A raspberry pi would be enough or anything running linux. Of course you can probably just set it up on one machine too. I’ve never done that though.
You could use an IPv6 tunnel broker service. I know Hurricane Electric offers a service free of charge. I use it and it’s not bad. Hurricane Electric also has an IPv6 tutorial. See (https://www.he.net)
I’ve tried using Hurricane Electric’s tunnels on pfsense but it just kills my internet connection and the only solution is to reboot
It is very area dependent and what path your data takes. It just so happens that the pathway that my data takes to reach Hurricane Electric’s server in NYC is really optimal. I have latency comparable to a native IPv6 network. It’s certainly better than my ISP, Verizon’s, native IPv6 in my area where my data goes to Virginia and then back to NYC.
If they reduced the cost of their internet gateways, I wouldn’t use more than 1 IP… I feel their own pricing leads people to use more IPs than they need.
Good.
Can anyone explain why migration to IPv6 has been so slow? Just too cheap/lazy to migrate or does it break things or what?
There’s a lot of layers of equipment and software that all have to support it, and some companies just aren’t willing to replace it all. I’m sure it’s exacerbated by how much harder some old code is to work with, because we didn’t have the same body of documentation and design concepts that we have today (yes, companies still skimp now, but a lot has changed.
At this point those are all excuses, though. You should have migrated by now.
