What prevents my ISP from assigning me a dynamic IPv4 address and static IPv6 address(es)?

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Till now I never heard of an Internet Service Provider anywhere on the world, that assigns static IPv6 addresses besides the one dynamic IPv4 address, to private customers.

Is there a technical problem at the ISPs (like routing infrastructure that was not build for a huge amount of customers with a lot of IP addresses) or is is it just the usual greed for money, so that they can sell business contracts for many hundred dollars a month even to private individuals?

The possibilities with a second (or more) IP address, that is static, are immense and would let us gain pieces of our privacy back. Private small mail servers, XMPP servers (for text, voice and video chat), running on cheap 24/7 computers like the Raspberry Pi, are just a few among the incredible possibilities of a decentralized internet/hosting infrastructure.

Senkaku

Posted 2013-08-15T19:00:01.610

Reputation: 494

Question was closed 2013-08-20T12:43:06.170

Haven't worked for an ISP or anything like that, but I would guess it's just the latter. The way IP routing works, there shouldn't be a difference between assigning a single address, and assigning a single /64 or /56 subnet. (On the other hand, several separate one-address assignments might be harder.) – user1686 – 2013-08-15T19:06:15.837

Answers

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There's no address shortage or allocation rule keeping them from assigning you a static /64 subnet or even as much as a /48. That's 65,536 /64's and each /64 is 2^64 addresses, considered enough for a whole Ethernet LAN.

Hurricane Electric would be happy to give you a free /48 just for asking. SixXS is probably similar.

So if you don't mind the possible performance hit of a tunneled link, configure your router at the head of your network to make a tunnel to Hurricane Electric or SixXS or another static 6in4 (GIF) tunnel broker.

Spiff

Posted 2013-08-15T19:00:01.610

Reputation: 84 656

ISPs have limited IP address ranges - they get allocated these from a higher authority and usually have to jump through a lot of hoops to get more. So while they usually don't have a shortage, they don't like to hand out large piles of IPs to resi accounts without a very good reason, and usually "because I want them" doesn't fly. At the ISP I worked for, we still didn't hand out large blocks even to business customers unless they could furnish proof that they actually needed them. Also, most resi hardware that ISPs provide are not capable of handling routed blocks. – MaQleod – 2013-08-15T21:58:44.497

1SixXS is providing Heartbeat-Tunnelling for dynamic/changing IPv4 addresses, this should be the same as DynDNS but for IPv6 instead of IPv4 and therefore should have the same problem. If I want to set an email server up at home and I want to make it accessible to the internet, DynDNS and Heartbeat-Tunnelling suffer the same problem of short unavailability, when the ISP is assigning a new IPv4 address, that has to be broadcasted to SixXS or the DynDNS provider. For that short period of time, all e-mails would get lost. – Senkaku – 2013-08-15T22:11:03.343

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@MaQleod IPv6 is rather different: Your typical ISP is going to have more subnets to give out than exist IPv4 addresses! So everybody can have a /56 (and businesses can even have a /48) and nobody needs ever run out of addresses again. See RFC 6177 for the latest guidance on assigning IPv6 addresses.

– Michael Hampton – 2013-08-18T13:17:01.590

@th3m3s If you have a dynamic IPv4 address, use an AYIYA tunnel from SixXS and it will automatically follow any changes in your IPv4 address, maintaining your IPv6 tunnel connectivity. – Michael Hampton – 2013-08-18T13:20:01.897

Asked: 2013-08-15T19:00:01.610

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Active: 2013-08-15T19:43:32.300