In America I've never had a non-mobile ISP offer IPv6. At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration. IPv6 will never reach the 100% needed to turn off IPv4.
In America I've never had a non-mobile ISP offer IPv6. At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration. IPv6 will never reach the 100% needed to turn off IPv4.
> IPv6 will never reach the 100% needed to turn off IPv4.
As was predicted in 1994:
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726#section-5.5It was also predicted that the address exhaustion problem would be averted, in fact that was the purpose of v6. It failed to deliver.
> It was also predicted that the address exhaustion problem would be averted, in fact that was the purpose of v6. It failed to deliver.
It was averted: how do you think we got several billion smartphones connected to the Internet? Do you think that would have been practicable without IPv6?
Comcast—not even mobile—had to move to IPv6 on their landline ISP business because they ran out of IPv4 addresses for TR-069: they were using multiple 10/8 networks in different regions NATed to hide them from each other. IPv4 became untenable.
NAT / CGNAT has been doing the heavy lifting extending the life of the Internet; ipv6 has done jack shit. If v6 was useful and actually averted v4 exhaustion we'd all be accessing v6 sites/addresses at this point.
Put another way, we can drop v6 completely and the Internet will still work. Obviously wouldn't work the other way around.
As for telco addressing handsets, they could use any addressing scheme to be honest. When people talk about averting address exhaustion, they're not talking about internal addressing of networks, different problem altogether.
> NAT / CGNAT has been doing the heavy lifting extending the life of the Internet; ipv6 has done jack shit. If v6 was useful and actually averted v4 exhausted we'd all be accessing v6 sites/addresses at this point.
This is factually difficult to support. (Sent from my iPad which doesn’t have an ipv4 address… to hacker news which has an ipv6 address)
You've put yourself in a position where you can't access a lot of websites, including things like GitHub. That might be fine for you personally but isn't what most people do.
> but isn't what most people do.
Most people run dual stack and as $favoriteHost gets AAAA, their traffic moves over.
My broader point was that your use of overstatement and a false dichotomy isn't _helping_ us get to a world where IPv6 is dominant.
> how do you think we got several billion smartphones connected to the Internet
Only because of NAT. Those cellular CGNATs are v6 on the inside but v4 on the outside (well also v6 but customers need the v4 more).
Comcast does IPv6 (in most areas, at least), AT&T does IPv6 (was 6rd when I was a customer), CenturyLink (or whatever they're called today) had 6rd on DSL when I was a customer... and it made their CPE do terrible things so it needed to be disabled, but it was offered. My muni fiber ISP offers IPv6.
> At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration. IPv6 will never reach the 100% needed to turn off IPv4.
That was probably a reasonable take 15 years ago. But we're at 50% v6 globally, and the ISPs that are doing v6 + cgnat would not want to move all that v6 traffic to cgnat. v6 traffic is managed with stateless routing; cgnat is stateful and costly.
There are many lessons that can be learned, but v4 only is not the future. v6 only might never happen... people are going to keep running old software in emulation that will never support v6... But global routability of v4 will likely end one day. And I'd suspect the tail of the migration will be much shorter than the head was.
And I've only ever had v6, both on DOCSIS and fiber. Both observations are pretty useless in the grand scheme of things; actual adoption rates are what matter.
> At this point it would be best to recognize the sunk cost and give up on the migration.
That's a pretty wild thing to say in the comment section of an article about v6 reaching 50% eyeballs-side deployment.
After 30 years, with 99% of servers and devices having been designed decades after ip6 was created, half of traffic is still ip4.
If that’s not a failure I hate to see what is.
> If that’s not a failure I hate to see what is.
How would several billion smartphones be able to connect to the Internet without IPv6?
There isn't enough RFC 1918 (or 100.64.0.0/10) space for IPv4-only to be practical: Comcast—not even mobile—went to IPv6 because running their TR-069 management over multiple 10/8 became untenable.
IPv6 is making all sorts of things possible without most people realizing it.
Those phones are reaching half the internet via 64 gateways, no difference to reaching via 44 gateways.
> Those phones are reaching half the internet via 64 gateways, no difference to reaching via 44 gateways.
And how would they have gotten first-hop connectivity without IPv6?
Comcast added IPv6 many years ago on their wired ISP side because they ran out of IPv4 for TR-069 management, and they had way fewer subscribers (at least at the time) than many mobile telcos.
And that half of the Internet is also some of the most bandwidth intensive stuff: Youtube, Netflix, Instagram. The CG-NAT hardware costs of streaming would be huge.
The network isn't just the open internet. There's also the part inside the network. You can view Comcast as a black box that magically gets packets from one side to the other, but Comcast engineers can't.
If you want to run a single massive scale network sure. One of the costs of scaling that the majority don’t see
No reason you can’t carry IPv4 over any protocol you want. Multi tennant vxlans can carry whatever you want over your base network. Maybe an IPv6 underlay makes sense there, doesn’t really matter
Thugs are slowly moving. Another 5 years and most windows machines will support clat. Another 20 and most machines will hopefully support it. I wish it was embedded in the Linux kernel though as that increases the chance of your device working transparently on an IPv6 only subnet using slaac and the application creator doesn’t need to know anything other than their internal dhcp gets a 10.x address and everything works using 464.
I think the future is bright and most problems will be solved by 2040, and almost all by 2050.
I've had IPv6 addresses on Comcast, Spectrum, and Verizon FIOS.
If we have to give up on things that haven't reached 100%, shouldn't we give up on IPv4 first since that's even further away from 100%?