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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m going on professional year 24 of clients requiring that IPv6 be deactivated on every device in their network. Whee.
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.
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.
Thank goodness. Death to IPv4.
About 3.70/month. Not great, not terrible
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.
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?
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!
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!
