[v6ops] Re: WiFi without IPv4, no longer a rare experience.

[Antonis Chariton <[e-mail]>]

> On 28 Jun 2026, at 23:14, Warren Kumari <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> How sure are you that this isn't just IPv6-Mostly (https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-link-v6ops-6mops-00.html)
> 
> The IPv4 exhaustion argument doesn't really sound right to me - 10/8 is free, and coffee shops, hotels, etc generally just NAT everyone to a single or very small number of addresses. This is often just whatever their ISP provided.

Most places use the ISP provided CPE which is designed for home use. They change the SSID / Password to the store’s name, and leave everything as is. This means 192.168.1.0/24 and 86400 lease time. Given e.g. 10-20-30 devices for equipment (PoS, PCs, …) and staff, if the place sees more than 200 devices (each customer could be 2-3+ with watches) in a day, the aren’t any addresses by noon / afternoon, and everyone else is IPv6-only by then as an IPv6 /64 runs out after an IPv4 /24.

I’ve personally seen this, at least in Europe, in tens of places (I don’t want to say hundreds). I’ve also been asked by friends who own cafes and restaurants why after some point people can use Instagram / facebook but when they click the links to the websites they don’t always work. Switching from 192.168.1.0/24 to 192.168.0.0/20 and reducing the lease time to 3600 immediately makes the problem go away.

> Your experience also differs from mine - I much much more often get a v4 address and no v6 address…


This is unfortunately the reality for everyone else who used a “custom” / “enterprise” / “advanced” solution for hotspots. Almost anything with a captive portal. The companies that make these don’t always bother, the people who set them up don’t bother / know, and of course there’s always the case of ISPs not supporting v6 too.

Antonis