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whitey019

Regular Contributor
I've had a RT-AC86U installed and working great for about a week and just today notice that IPV6 is not enabled. I thought it was enable by default on my 68U and that is why it caught my attention. Is there any reason to disable/enable IPV6 on a home network?
 
I've had a RT-AC86U installed and working great for about a week and just today notice that IPV6 is not enabled. I thought it was enable by default on my 68U and that is why it caught my attention. Is there any reason to disable/enable IPV6 on a home network?
I was very pleased to see that ASUS did not enable IPv6 by default because not all ISP provided IPv6 plays well with others. Enabling is and should be a individual choice. If you don't know if you really need IPv6 for your home network, leave it disabled as it will add a little more traffic, not that you would notice. There can be benefits to using IPv6 but just enabling will not necessarily ensure that you would realize those benefits much less even notice.
 
I've had a RT-AC86U installed and working great for about a week and just today notice that IPV6 is not enabled. I thought it was enable by default on my 68U and that is why it caught my attention. Is there any reason to disable/enable IPV6 on a home network?

It's disabled by default because not every ISPs support it.
 
If my ISP (Verizon FIOS) supports it, are there advantages?
End to end response times may be faster but not that you would notice on most connections. The real advantage is that your home network devices will receive their own public address as opposed to a 192 network. Will those devices then be available for anyone on the internet to access? As long as you enable the IPv6 firewall, no. If you're like most people, internet use is via a web browser. With IPv6 most web browsers support IPv6 as the primary protocol to use. Apple Safari does not, yet. Since I am a Mac user of Safari, I kinda got around that by changing the DNS priority to that of an IPv6 server.

Because of the architecture of IPv6, the functionality potential is awesome. If you have heard of CoS (class of service) and understand the basics of how it works here is one example that some common carriers (Verizon for one, I know 'cause I used to work for them) have rolled out gold, silver, and bronze services though it was intended for private lines (businesses). For this, CoS was only at the edge router, not necessary the end to end connection. A client location router would determine what packets had priority over others based on the local network's device. Each class was given a maximum throughput rate, obviously there is a financial cost to each class. Should the data throughput exceed the assigned rate for any class, the packet was thrown away. Error recovery at the originating device would have to retransmit the packet(s). That is with IPv4. Now with IPv6 CoS is implemented end to end on the internet, not just private lines, thus each packet will have it's end to end path determined by CoS and your ISP will be in position to price your internet connection not just on speed but CoS as well.

As you can imagine, this IPv6 functionality cannot be turned on for the internet with the flick of a switch. So, it will be years before the functionality trickles down to every consumer. What about the IPv4 diehards? No worries, the edge router will just encapsulate the IPv4 packet into an IPv6 packet and the end user will never know.
 
If my ISP (Verizon FIOS) supports it, are there advantages?

Usually no. IPv6 is much more complex, and not everything is properly designed to deal with it yet. While eventually it might become a necessity, we aren't there yet.
 
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