SixXS IPv6 Tunnel Provider Is Shutting Down (sixxs.net)

yakatz writes: SixXS started providing IPv6 tunnels in 1999 to try to break the "chicken-and-egg" problem of IPv6 adoption. After 18 years, the service is shutting down. The cited reasons are:

1) growth has been stagnant
2) many ISPs offer IPv6
3) some ISPs have told customers that they don't need to provide IPv6 connectivity because the customer can just use a tunnel from SixXS

This last reason in particular made the SixXS team think they are doing more harm than good in the fight for native IPv6, so they will be shutting down on June 6.

Comments

Wow.

[Highdude702]

Shutting down for the good of the internet. Thats a first but I commend them for it! Finally a company thats not money hungry alone.

IP tunnels

[ledow]

Not at all sure that any kind of tunnel is appropriate in this day and age, anyway.

Hell, just push all your traffic through us! It's fine! All that unencrypted email and DNS lookup? Don't worry, we're just converting to IPv4 for you!

My home router has every IPv6 option known to man, including all kinds of tunnel and DHCPv6 etc. kind of connectivity.

My ISP supports none of them. The problem is not that I couldn't get on the IPv6 net. It's that my ISP has zero interest in helping me do so. Until that's fixed, it's pointless worrying about another way to get to the same sites/services as I already do.

Re:People don't care because ipv4 works for them

[squiggleslash]

Almost all mobile phone providers in the US are switching over. They never really offered full IPv4 in the first place, with their networks fully NATed. But they're introducing real, routable, IPv6.

From personal experience, on T-Mobile if your device supports it, you can even use IPv6 only (that is, your device only gets an IPv6 address, not even a NAT'd IPv4.) If you try to access an IPv4 only site, T-Mobile's DNS provides a virtual IPv6 address that can be used to route outgoing TCP connections to that address via a proxy.

Now, some people would be unhappy with that situation if, say, Comcast were to do the same thing. But I must admit, I suspect 99% of the population would never notice, and over time, the few that do would find, say, their employers scrambling to have IPv6 gateways etc so they can use normal VPNs (the gateways to office networks, not the proxies for bypassing Netflix nation blocks I mean), and other applications that require full two way communication.

IPv6 is very nice. It really is a shame there's so much inertia.