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.

hard to be money hungry

[DrYak]

Finally a company thats not money hungry alone.

Given that SixXS has been free-as-in-beer regarding their services (and free-as-in-speech regarding some of their client side code), it's hard for them to be money hungry.

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.

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

[marka63]

Well get a VPN that supports IPv6. You have had 20+ years to plan for this.

IPv6 tunneling

[DrYak]

i will admittedly say i have no idea what sixxs is

SixXS was a free IPv6 tunneling service, so that people with only IPv4 provider can still get access to IPv6 addresses through a 3rd party.
(But more reliably than 6in4 which is dependent on the dynamic IPv4 address, and relies on volunteer servers reached though anycast).

The idea was to break the chicken-and-egg problem faced by IPv6 migration :
- content provider don't care about moving to IPv6 because nobody is using it and most people are still on IPv4
- and ISP not spending the effort to provide IPv6 to their clients, because there's no IPv6 content to justify the move.

SixXS provided a 3rd party with a very reliable way to get onto IPv6, so at least the "there are no users" excuse isn't valid anymore.

Now fast forward a decade and a half later and nowadays a lot of content providers *ARE* on IPv6 (e.g.: Google, most universities, etc.), but there are still ISP not providing IPv6 on their network (e.g.: using something like 6rd, which basically works like 6in4 but relies on official servers with fixed address that is owned and operated by the ISP),
Instead of that ISPs let the users go use SixXS, for the users who want IPv6. So rely on a free 3rd party service, instead of putting the efforts themselves to enable IPv6 for their own users as they should be doing.

So SixXS is shutting down to force ISPs to setup and listen to their users and provide IPv6, instead of deferring it to SixXS.

its sad to see them go since it was a free service, providing a service for people without means.

The thing is, SixXS was providing a service that should in theory be provided by the ISPs themselves, but some are too lazy to implement IPv6 even after almost 2 decades.

(and it's not for people without means. Technically, it's for people who have the means to pay an ISP for a connection, but said ISP is damn shit lazy and doesn't care to provide something more modern than last century's IPv4)

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

[BradMajors]

No business in its right mind would go IPv6 only if it had a choice

Facebook Moving To An IPv6-Only Internal Network

http://www.internetsociety.org...