SixXS

» see sixxs.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The internet ran out of addresses on paper years before it ran out of them in practice. The fix was IPv6, and the problem with the fix was that nobody's internet provider supported it. A tunnel broker was the workaround. You asked for an IPv6 address, the broker gave you one that was really IPv6 packets wrapped inside IPv4 packets and sent to a server that unwrapped them, and as far as the rest of the world could tell you were on the new internet.

SixXS was the one run by two people for free. Pim van Pelt and Jeroen Massar started it in 1999 out of an earlier project called the IPng tunnel broker, and it took the SixXS name around 2001. Nobody was ever charged for a tunnel in eighteen years. The points of presence were donated by ISPs and hosting companies, 65 different ones over its life, and in 2017 there were 46 of them live in 29 countries.

What distinguished it from the commercial brokers was that it would route you a subnet. Not just a single address for one machine: a /48 or a /64 you could number an entire house or office out of. That is the thing you actually need if you want to learn how IPv6 behaves, instead of just proving you can reach an IPv6 host. By March 2017 it had handed out 12,632 of those.

~ the dossier ~

~ how you earned a tunnel ~

SixXS had a reputation among network people for being the strict one, and it earned it with a credit system. You signed up, and your tunnel accrued credits for every day it stayed up and lost them when it went down or sat idle. Credits were what you spent to request a subnet or a second tunnel, so the way to get more out of SixXS was to run what you already had properly for a few months first.

Plenty of people found this irritating and said so in public. It was also the mechanism that let two unpaid volunteers carry forty thousand tunnels without the whole thing silting up with abandoned configurations, and the client they wrote to hold the tunnel open, AICCU, is still sitting in the dependency list of a lot of old documentation. The stricter design is the reason the service lasted long enough to be worth an obituary.

~ the reason they wrote down ~

The sunset page does the thing shutdown notices almost never do and gives the real reasons. Most of it is the comfortable half. The content side of the web had largely gone dual-stack and the access networks were beginning to follow, which put a free tunnel service at the point of diminishing returns: the people who wanted IPv6 were starting to get it from their own provider instead. Attrition was doing the work.

Then there is the other reason, stated plainly in the founders' own words: some providers had started quoting SixXS as a reason they did not have to show an interest in deploying IPv6 themselves. A free workaround for a missing feature becomes an argument for continuing not to ship the feature. The volunteers had built a crutch good enough that the people who should have been fixing the leg were pointing at it in planning meetings, so they took it away.

That reasoning held where the founders were sitting and did not hold everywhere the service was being used. Turkey is one of the places it did not. The RIPE NCC's country report on Türkiye, published in November 2023, puts national IPv6 reachability at roughly 2.5 to 3.6 percent against a world figure in the thirties, and says in as many words that Türk Telekom shows no sign of IPv6 deployment in the TTNET network. That is the line almost every household here is on, mine included, six years after a tunnel broker closed on the grounds that native IPv6 had arrived. The ones with any IPv6 capability at all were TurkNet and the Turkcell networks, in the single digits and low teens.

~ the award ~

On 23 May 2017, two weeks before the shutdown, the IPv6 Taskforce gave van Pelt and Massar the Jim Bound Award for their work on SixXS. The news item announcing it sat directly above the news item announcing the sunset on the front page, where both of them remain today, because sixxs.net is still up and still frozen, with the three last headlines in order and a copyright line that stops at 2017.

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