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Comment by kjellsbells | Hacker News Reader

I still can't get away from this sensation that no matter how good IPv6 is, the ship has sailed. The inferior but indisputably cheaper technology won out over the technically superior one. VHS vs Betamax. Ethernet over Token Ring.

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Yet, while people keep saying that, ipv6 adoption only goes up every month. I'm having a hard time accepting "the ship has sailed" while my home outbound connections use ipv6 for more and more endpoints.

Yeah, definitely. I made a mistake a while back, and swapped one of my testing networks to v6 only, and I was surprised I only noticed things were broken after a few days (looking at you github).

I think it has a lot to do with people being put behind cloudflare etc, and getting v6 basically for free

I think businesses are holding up wider V6 deployment. In a lot of them that I've worked with, you don't talk about v6 as it's either a thing no one wants to learn or has no value worth implementing.

meanwhile in the SP world, most core networks can support IPV6 quite trivially because it is either just another payload that is labelled and put into an MPLS environment, or when we need connectivity for our own nodes, it is quite trivial to achieve. (especially if you run BGP or IS-IS as an IGP).

IPV6's address space starts to make a hell of a lot of sense when you look at microsegmentation. And by that I mean you don't need to deploy carrier-grade NAT behind your firewall to mask reuse of one of IPV4 class A networks.

All the cloud provider VPCs seem inextriciably linked to IP4 config, which seems to work great. Maybe the low level infrastructure is IP6, but we dont operate at that level.

I'm starting to think the cloud providers are hoarding IPv4 addresses and see them as an asset, and don't want to "rock the boat".

starting? :) - definitely are. It is also a chicken and an egg problem - until people start shouting they won't implement v6, and people won't want it until there is a reason too (like not getting v4 addresses - which cloud providers solve by just NATing the world)

AWS supports IPv6 on non-default VPCs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/get-started...

I have a hobby project on AWS using it today, with multiple EC2 instances having IPv6 addresses. It works beautifully.

You're talking about displacing an incumbent, not competing technologies.

IPv6 will win, once people stop sitting on their hands. Companies now are being effectively forced to adopt it due to exhaustion of the range.. CGNAT is bigger than ever and is causing real issues so most phones are dual homed with IPv6 behind a v4 CGNAT.

Like climate change, its a "future problem" until its practically staring you in the face, at which point its too late or very painful to solve..

Nihlism isnt helping.

All cheap stuff will support IPv6 due to China mandating full IPv6 support. I suspect China will eventually drag the kicking and screaming west to IPv6-land.

When China mandates shutting off IPv4 internally is when we'll see a flurry of activity, but that's probably still years away.

The original RFC came out in 1995, the modern RFC used today in 1998 - almost 25 years ago. When I was in college in 2012 (going through the Cisco NetAcad) they were preaching that our IPv6 future was "just around the corner". I am going on 10 years in network and security now, and I still don't see it. At least in the US, IPv4 is, and will remain, the dominant force.

There are many reasons for this, but one of the biggest is - from a practical standpoint, the only thing wrong with it is the lack of addresses. Even the perceived shortage is hardly felt though - what is the going rate of an Elastic IP not associated with an EC2 instance these days, $0.005 per hour?

Came to make a similar comment, except that my "IPV6 is just around the corner" in college moment came in 2000.

I personally don't understand the holdup... I've seen so many forced upgrades as a consumer, and even more as a technology developer, that it seems like by now some group should be able to pick a cut-over date. (Examples: the 3G shutdown, TurboTax told me that my computer won't be supported next year, VHS tapes no longer being made, ect.)

As of I'm writing this google sees 50.03% of its traffic on v6. According to https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

Maybe dominant is the wrong word, large might be better.

It says 36.89% here. Weird.

That was badly worded by me, I was only talking about the USA numbers, not the global ones.

The 50.03% is specifically US traffic; for global traffic, it's 36.89%.

The US has a disproportionate chunk of IP addresses due to the original allocation. Where I live the lack is definitely being felt.

To have some data : https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

While progress is slow, it is constant and we're reaching 40% of IPv6 availability in 2022, from pretty much 0% in 2010.

I'm confident we'll get there.

> While progress is slow, it is constant and we're reaching 40% of IPv6 availability in 2022, from pretty much 0% in 2010.

I always find it amusing that IPv6 usage peaks on weekends. Seems home and mobile users have better IPv6 connectivity than corporate users.

I have been using IPv6 for years on my mobile plan, so anecdata supports your hypothesis.

But it's not only corporate. IPv6 only lit up at home (Verizon Fios) for me maybe 1 month ago. There are also likely very few people with RA enabled, even if their infrastructure supports it.

It's mostly phones though, that talk to IPV4 backends via gateways. So there's not much pressure on backend services to adopt IPV6.

Since ~2017, the highwater mark of IPv6 availability is growing at about 10 percentage points every 2½ years. At that rate it will hit 100% in 15 years, although I expect the penetration will tick up a bit in ~5 years.

No, it’s just happening without much fanfare in the background. Most mobile networks are ipv6 first, for example. And since mobile is where most of the new deployments and growth are, that’s why they’re getting ipv6 first.

IPv6 adoption isn't a matter of preference or price, it's an inevitability. We can do tricks like NAT all we want, fact of the matter is: Every day, more and more devices that require a public address, connect to The Internet.

Once the address space is exhausted, the only choices are: IPv6 or no new devices. Since the latter isn't an option, IPv6 is inevitable.

IPv6 is core infrastructure, not a silicon valley startup. Just like renewables, the switching of infrastruvture is londlger than 3x of average startup life expectancy

You’re talking like ipv6 isn’t already here. On my large (~100k clients) dual stack wide area network, 75% of internet traffic is ipv6.

I get that feeling sometimes too. I think though it's not going to be so clear a winner as with your examples. We'll be living with both probably forever.

Maybe an example for comparison is iPhone vs Android, or Windows vs Mac? We'll be living with both for a long time too.

More like BD vs. DVD - 'living with both for a long time' as you say, but also one is a clear successor.

Agree.

IPv6 adoption continues to rise. It just takes absolutely forever to shift the fundamental protocols of something as big as the Internet. The time required for the transition was vastly underestimated.

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