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That's a silly argument - any site which uses a non-trivial number of backend servers will have an internal network using RFC1918 v4 addresses, and there's no shortage of those (djb covers this).

As someone who runs such a site, I'd only think about upgrading the internal networks to v6 long after the public internet has gone to v6.

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I've heard that for very large service providers, it is possible to run out of 1918's. IIRC Comcast did a presentation where they figured they needed 100 million IP addresses for a nation wide rollout of their triple play service. They appear to be highly motivated to use 6, as the alternative - partitioned 1918's would be a nightmare.

I agree, though, that exposing your services to the Internet via both 6 and 4 and leaving the backend internal data center at 4 is probably the way to go for the next decade or so. Heck - we are still running DecNet on production servers.

Suppose you are using a cloud hosting service, or multiple such services, and don't have the luxury of an internal network? Then your network IS the public internet.

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