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by oxplot·4y ago·view on hn ↗
IPv6 amounts to a firmware update which the current hardware is and any future hardware will be capable of. The major hurdle in scaling Starlink is fast and cheap deployment of 1000s of satellite hardware. At the moment, the sole focus of SpaceX in relation to Starlink is to get their V2 satellites to orbit in order to keep up with bandwidth demands. V2 requires the Starship system which is yet to make it to orbit.

TL;DR bigger fishes to fry ATM - yes you need IPv6 to scale, no you don't need it right now.

4 comments
It’s really too bad that ipv6 is only… checks notes… 26 years old now. I realize that may be an unreliable metric, so it’s roughly equivalent to 2.88 react.js lifetimes, or 3.25 vue.js lifetimes.

When the ipv6 spec was released, the latest python release did not yet support list comprehensions.

In other words, there is no reason to not support ipv6 out of the box in 2022.

> In other words, there is no reason to not support ipv6 out of the box in 2022.

i'd go even further and say that no ipv6 support means obsolescence.

> there is no reason to not support ipv6 out of the box in 2022

Use the age of a service as the metric, not the absolute year we're in. It's probably reasonable to say that there is little reason not to support IPv6 for an ISP with X years of operation. Starlink is young still.

An analogy is worldwide sales for a new laptop company. You can say that in the age of globalism, there is no reason not to ship to every continent right off the bat. But for a startup with limited cash that has lot of building blocks to lay out, it's a huge risk. They should plan for it, but only branch out when they've got a solid foundation.

A better analogy would be a new laptop company selling laptops with Windows XP.

"Our staff is more familiar with XP. We promise we're still working on the Windows 10 drivers, but in the meantime you can try to run it in VMWare."

A new ISP should implement IPv6 first and then run IPv4 on top of it like T-Mobile. They shouldn't "add" IPv6 because it should have been designed in from the beginning.
They already had IPv6 support while they were still using google cloud for connectivity (not sure why they went with google for their initial phase instead of a more traditional carrier) and when they moved to their own network they disabled IPv6 for some reason.
The funniest bit is that I'm not sure you can get normal v6 on GCP yet...
> no you don't need it right now.

Yes we do. IPv4 exhaustion is a thing.

That's what CGNAT provides a temporary solution for.
I doubt there's much overlap between the people working on IPv6 and those working on getting Starship off the ground.
It's not a function of overlap. If they've determined IPv6 isn't a priority and instead a risk, then it makes no sense to dedicate resources to it right now. It's not as if everything else about the firmware/software is wrapped up and the software team is sitting on their hands doing nothing.