130 lines
4.9 KiB
Markdown
130 lines
4.9 KiB
Markdown
title: The broken Internet
|
|
---
|
|
subtitle: And how to fix it
|
|
---
|
|
pub_date: 2020-09-02
|
|
---
|
|
author: Nico Schottelius
|
|
---
|
|
twitter_handle: NicoSchottelius
|
|
---
|
|
_hidden: no
|
|
---
|
|
_discoverable: no
|
|
---
|
|
abstract:
|
|
---
|
|
body:
|
|
|
|
## The Internet is broken
|
|
|
|
If you are working in IT or if you
|
|
computer scientist, you probably have mumbled this
|
|
sentence already before yourself: "the network is broken", or more
|
|
specific, "the Internet is broken".
|
|
|
|
But what is really wrong with the Internet?
|
|
|
|
## Computers are not reachable by default
|
|
|
|
One of the most bizarre and weird things in the Internet is that
|
|
computers cannot reach each other. You might have a question mark
|
|
reading this claim, so I'll try to elaborate a bit:
|
|
|
|
While you are reading this article, checkout your IP address on your
|
|
computer. Does it start with 192.168., 10. or 172.16.? It probably
|
|
does and that means your computer is configured to use a **private**, or
|
|
**degraded** IPv4 address. These addresses are being filtered on the
|
|
Internet and are used, because your provider does not have enough
|
|
**proper, public** IPv4 addresses.
|
|
|
|
## What is the problem with degraded IP addresses?
|
|
|
|
The first problem is that these IP addresses are used multiple
|
|
times. You, your neighbor, people in different cities - they all use
|
|
the same IP address. So if you want to reach their computer you need
|
|
to tell your computer "I want to reach that computer on 192.168.1.42",
|
|
but your computer is already on the same address! How can it send to
|
|
192.168.1.42? It can't!
|
|
|
|
The second problem with these degraded IP addresses is that you cannot use
|
|
them on the Internet. Because these IP addresses are private and not
|
|
supposed to be seen in the Internet, they are filtered by ISPs.
|
|
|
|
You might be puzzled reading this, because you are in the Internet
|
|
reading this article, aren't you?
|
|
|
|
## You are not in the Internet
|
|
|
|
Practically seen, having a private IP address, you are a second class
|
|
citizen of the Internet. You cannot tell anybody else "this is my IP
|
|
address, just download a file from my computer". If you want to
|
|
download a file from a friend, you will need to use an external
|
|
service, like cloud storage.
|
|
|
|
If you want to chat with someone, you again cannot just connect to the
|
|
computer or mobile phone of the person you want to connect to. Instead
|
|
you will need to use another intermediary party.
|
|
|
|
This is not the Internet. The Internet is a network of networks, which
|
|
allows anyone to connect anywhere.
|
|
|
|
You want to access your own NAS that is in your home? You'll again
|
|
need to connect it to someone else to be able to reach it.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
All those intermediate services introduce latency and cost into your
|
|
daily routine. For many of us above scenario sounds like a normal
|
|
thing to do. However, it is a very degraded version of the Internet
|
|
that we are using.
|
|
|
|
## No public IP addresses left
|
|
|
|
So why are using private IP addresses anyway? Basically your ISP, like
|
|
almost all ISPs in the world does not have enough
|
|
public IP addresses to give every of your device a public IP
|
|
address. So instead of connecting you directly to the Internet, you
|
|
are given a maximum of 1 public IPv4 address for all your devices.
|
|
|
|
However even 1 public IPv4 address per customer was too much for some
|
|
ISPs. So they started repeating the NAT process, making the network
|
|
more complex, slower and also putting you further away from other
|
|
participants of the Internet.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
## The new Internet
|
|
|
|
Some of you already can guess where this article is going to and you
|
|
are right: It's about IPv6. While there have been many articles written about
|
|
IPv6, I think it is important to remember that the old IPv4 does not
|
|
work like an **Internet** anymore. IPv6 with its huge amount of
|
|
addresses fixes this problem for many human lives ahead.
|
|
**IPv6 restores direct connectivity**.
|
|
|
|
If you think you don't need to care about IPv6 and you are fine with
|
|
the current status, think about it this way: the Internet usage is
|
|
growing. Without IPv6, the Internet is becoming slower every
|
|
day. Without IPv6 you get more depending on a small amount of big
|
|
companies. And this dependency is getting more and more difficult to
|
|
reverse in the future.
|
|
|
|
## Switching to IPv6 today
|
|
|
|
The good news is: you can switch to using IPv6 today. You can request
|
|
IPv6 from your current ISP and if your ISP does not support IPv6,
|
|
you can change your ISP. Even if there is no ISP with IPv6 around, you
|
|
can get IPv6 via anywhere using the
|
|
[VIIRB](/u/products/viirb-ipv6-box/) using the
|
|
[IPv6VPN](/u/products/ipv6-vpn/).
|
|
|
|
At the moment about 33% or one third of the Internet
|
|
[have already switched to IPv6, according to
|
|
Google](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html). [APNIC
|
|
even provides a nice map](https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6) showing
|
|
the IPv6 adoption on a per country and per ISP basis.
|
|
|
|
Besides making the Internet faster, more reliable and less complex
|
|
with IPv6, there is one more reason to switch today: IPv6 is fun!
|