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.
It really is well past time to start viewing support of IPv4 as a type of “technical debt.”
AWS is just finally putting a price on the cost of that technical debt.
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.
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.
Ahh, that sucks. Sorry to hear. A proper IPv6 network should be faster than IPv4, since there’s no NAT and no complex routing rules.
Agreed! Also smaller packet sizes.
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.
At least Tele2 supports IPv6 on mobile, not sure about others
I guess that means able to access services on the Internet over IPv6, not me being able to get a /64 and providing services myself to others.
Sort of ok for phones I guess, although not as great if someone doesn’t have access to fiber and have to use a mobile link in a residential environment.
Bahnhof actually just provides NAT:ed fiber connections as well as default, but will issue a public, unique IP if asked (at no additional cost).
It’s the same here in Finland. Only one provider (DNA) offers IPv6 for residential customers and others are “working on it” still.
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.
Especially bad for GitHub, which hosts so much software that is really useful on servers. E.g. NixOS has its complete repository there.