It's 2021, what is the real experience of IPv6? A programmer tells his personal experience

[[428843]]

Since the issuance of the "Action Plan for Promoting Large-Scale Deployment of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)" in 2018, the large-scale deployment of IPv6 in my country has been rapidly promoted. As of October 2021, the number of IP6 addresses owned by mainland China reached 59,032 blocks/32, ranking first in the world.

The support rate for website applications of IPv6 has also been greatly improved.

Data source: National IPv6 Development and Testing Platform

It can be said that IPv6 has been around us for a long time, but what is the real experience of IPv6? Is it almost the same as IPv4?

A software development engineer shared his experience of using IPv6.

Due to the company's business relationship, the users this software development engineer faces happen to be the first batch of people in China to experience home IPv6 broadband.

Most of these users know how to operate a computer. Half of them are computer network players who are proficient in operation. About one-third of them are software developers, and about one-third of them use the Linux operating system.

Based on his own experience and the problems users encounter when using IPv6, the software development engineer summarized some of the current problems encountered when using IPv6, as well as his own and his users' experience.

IPv6 full coverage

First, he talked about the coverage of IPv6. Nowadays, most fiber-optic broadband in the core urban areas of municipalities, provincial capitals, and large and medium-sized cities have opened IPv6 networks, and there are almost no cases where 4G and 5G networks cannot support IPv6.

However, IPv6 has not been supported in economically underdeveloped areas or marginal cities. The main reason is that operators do not have enough funds and can only support IPv6 networks in backbones and hubs.

Customer Support

The customer service staff of China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom have not received any training on the IPv6 system. In many cases, the software development engineer asked users to call the operator to activate IPv6.

However, the customer service staff of the three major operators have a serious lack of knowledge about IPv6. Not only do they not know how to activate IPv6, they don’t even know what IPv6 is.

[[428844]]

Many times, when users call to activate IPv6, they are told that IPv6 is not available. It is not until they call back in a more firm tone that they are told that IPv6 is supported.

He said that other regions of the three major operators have seriously insufficient training on IPv6. Only the customer service training of China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile in Shanghai is relatively complete and can basically be activated in one go.

Optical modem problem

Some very old 100M customized optical modems are difficult to support IPv6. The operator cannot enable IPv6 by sending data remotely, and can only ask staff to visit the site and use administrator privileges to enter the management page to manually turn on the IPv6 switch. However, even so, many problems will still be encountered during use.

The best solution is to replace the Gigabit optical modem or router dial-up, but it is very troublesome. Replacing these old devices also requires a certain amount of time and financial support, which is relatively difficult.

Fake IPv6 Problem

The development engineer also said that in the process of communicating with users, he also found the problem of fake IPv6. This problem is mainly concentrated in small cities with underdeveloped economy and weak strength.

In order to complete the IPv6 tasks assigned by superiors, operators do not use IPv6 PD prefix allocation, but instead allocate one IPv6 address to each broadband like IPv4.

Firewall settings are messy

Operators in some areas directly copied the IPv4 settings, resulting in IPv6 being able to only go out but not in, turning it into an intranet...

operating system

The Linux system has good compatibility with IPv6, but Android has some problems. This problem may be caused by the Android system's point-saving strategy.

The specific problem is that if an Android device always maintains a connection to the same WiFi intranet, when the intranet gateway redials, the IPv6 address will change. At this time, the IPv6 address will not be updated immediately and the old address will still be used. When the user goes online, IPv4 is actually used instead of IPv6.

The engineer listed the IPv6 problems he found in his work. He also said that although there are still many problems with IPv6, with the vigorous promotion of IPv6, the problems caused by IPv6 are also decreasing year by year. If the problem incidence rate in 2019 is 60%, then the problem incidence rate in 2020 may be around 25%, and by 2021 it will be less than 10%, which is a very obvious improvement.

Although the user experience of IPv6 is still not as good as that of IPv4, we can see that IPv6 is constantly being improved, and the day when it will completely replace IPv4 and become the mainstream is coming soon.