[GTALUG] IPv6 only WiFi hotspot

[Val Kulkov]

I found myself connected to an IPv6-only WiFi hotspot a couple of weeks
ago. In a small town in Greece.

At first, I could not understand why I was getting DNS errors for so many
sites. Then it occurred to me to check my connection with ifconfig, and
voila: I had an IPv6 address, but no IPv4.

In short:
- Google, Wikipedia, Facebook worked fine
- Expedia, Travelocity, Hotels.com, Flighthub, TripAdvisor, Travelzoo were
not accessible
- many sites found through Google were not accessible

I am guessing that some Internet providers in Greece probably charge less
for a service that does not involve allocating an IPv4 address for a
downstream link. Still, considering that setting up an IPv6-to-IPv4 tunnel
is relatively easy, I do not understand what stops these providers from
setting up such a tunnel and using it for all of their downstream links who
would be assigned an IPv4 address from a private address space.

I also fail to understand why major travel sites such as Expedia are not
yet IPv6-enabled. This makes no sense to me, especially considering that
travelers are more likely than other categories of people to find
themselves in an unusual hotspot with no access to public IPv4 address
space.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20190925/cf3475ad/attachment.html>